Meek’s Cutoff (2010) dir. Kelly Reichardt
Starring: Michelle Williams, Bruce Greenwood, Will Patton, and Shirley Henderson

****

By Blair Stewart

It was around the lengthy shot of Shirley Henderson running across the waste of Oregon's Empty Quarter that I had an inkling I was watching a good film. A pack of emigrants in the awkward stage of the American westward migration follow wilderness trekker Stephen Meek (Bruce Greenwood) on his uncharted hunch towards points unknown. As this film is a bastardized true story, you can assume the settlers’ decision made for a historically unwise shortcut.

A survivalist Western or a cautionary tale from the female perspective, Meek's Cutoff depicts the struggles of human endeavour from the micro-level of three covered wagons at the buffoonish mercy of Meek, all tan buffalo hides and cowboy-shirted bluster, onwards to green grasses that might just be over another hill, thataway. Michelle Williams is Emily, one of the wagoners' wives, cannier than Henderson's brittle missionary, braver than young Zoe Kazan of the fickle gold-seeking couple. Emily and her husband Solomon (Will Patton) stand across the divide of gumption from Greenwood's Meek, and as the wheels croak along dry beds, the campfire whispers grow louder as the water becomes scarcer.

Beyond the dehydration, mountain fever, and Meek's unreliable drunkard shtick that could kill all of them, the tension is further ratcheted up for the travellers with the capture of a lone Indian (Rod Rodneaux), who could be hostile but will also suffice as their saviour if they correctly understand his foreign gestures for water.

Meek's becomes a parable for our age at the fault lines of race and global cohabitation, with the dilemma of the Indian's presence depicted honestly. He thankfully doesn't speak in honourable platitudes, with his strange nature and pagan tongue matching the unease of the dire surroundings. So the wagons stumble down deeper into the valley.

It's rare to view an overlooked perspective on an old-hat film genre such as the lonesome Western, but Meek's succeeds in depicting the quiet dread of the women folk going about their chores while the men folk, out of earshot, discuss the facts of their survival and whether anyone needed to be lynched or throttled that day. Emily and the wives are off-stage extras eavesdropping on a sloppy performance concerning the slim chances of their existence. The mere act of loading gunpowder into a rifle becomes as leaden with portent as the hypothermia killing Jack London's protagonist's in To Build a Fire.

The cast is mostly sterling aside from my indifference for Paul Dano's mannered work, with Greenwood as enjoyably broad as his beard is manky, seeming to arrive straight from the same off-beat travelling Wild West act as Jeff Bridges recent take on Rooster Cogburn. Michelle Williams, in her second lead role for a Reichardt film, plays a fairly modern protagonist (and a mildly unbelievable one based on the time period) with aplomb and admirable cunning when needed. As the director of the praised indies Old Joy and Wendy and Lucy, Kelly Reichardt climbs above the modest ambition of her past work into the forefront of American filmmakers making essential stories, as the ending of Meek's Cutoff itself arrived with the surety of buckshot over the plains. So far, it's the best film of 2011 I've seen.

Meek’s Cutoff (2010) dir. Kelly Reichardt
Starring: Michelle Williams, Bruce Greenwood, Will Patton, Paul Dano, Rod Rondeau

***

By Alan Bacchus

Arguably the North American Premiere of Meek’s Cutoff is one of the hotly anticipated films, at least for Toronto audiences. For those unfamiliar it’s the next feature film from Kelly Reichardt after her breakout success Wendy and Lucy, which Toronto Film Critics anointed as the best of the film a couple year’s back. This time Reichardt's working in the western genre yet applies the same observational style, a unique slow burning type of realism which historically has divided audience between brilliance and boredom.

This one is no exception. From these eyes while it's just too detached to completely satisfy me in the way Wendy & Lucy did, Meek's Cutoff makes up for its narrative deficiencies with its aesthetic voracity.

It’s exciting to see such a staunch independent auteur female filmmaker venture into a typically male genre. Kelly Reichardt has created real western (I can't recall another western directed by a female?). It’s Oregon in the mid 19th century, three families are on a convoy across the Midwestern desert plains away from the dangers of Indian war parties for greener pastures west. Leading the group is a gruff pack leader, Meek (Greenwood) contracted to guide them across the treacherous land.

In the opening the convoy is already at wits end, lost and disillusioned that Meek actually knows where he’s going. A quiet power struggle results between Meek and the other men, specifically Solomon Tetherow (Patton) who differ which the direction to go. When an indian is captured by the group they take him in, bartering food and shelter in exchange for a safe route to water. Can the indian be trusted? Emily Tetherow (Michelle Williams) thinks so, a humanistic attitude which comes into conflict with Meek and the other men.

Meek’s Cutoff sits somewhere in between the extremes of brilliance and boredom. At once it’s an often stunning exercise in sustained quiet tension, on the other we wait patiently for the tension to build toward an event, action or conflict of some kind which never emerges. At the very least, Reichardt and her writer Jonathan Raymond, have crafted a completely unique western, the characters and setting are familiar, but with a stripped down dramatic core emphasizing the innate humanism in all of us. Not much happens, but there's enough value in the conviction Reichardt's hero and moral centre for us to feel the gravitas of the endeavour.