Portland, Ore.-based filmmaker Kelly Reichardt is taking an ambitious journey through her movie career: She’s very American in certain ways, including her choice of subjects, but her methods tend toward the European, if not the experimental.
I’m saying this by way of giving a warning about “M
eek’s Cutoff,” Reichardt’s fascinating follow-up to the award-winning “Wendy and Lucy.” Because this engrossing film, written by Jonathan Raymond, deliberately means to challenge the moviegoer.
The subject is a cross-country wagon-train trek, circa 1845. Three wagons seem to have veered off from the larger caravan and are crossing the parched desert of southeastern Oregon in search of the new Eden.
The group is being led, apparently ineffectively, by a scout named Meek (Bruce Greenwood), a bearded blowhard who belongs more in a Wild West show than in life-and-death circumstances. The modest people traveling with him are arguing among themselves about Meek’s worth as a tracker.
Our point-of-view is mostly with Emily (Michelle Williams, from “Wendy and Lucy”), who’s come west with her older husband (Will Patton, as plain and durable as hardtack). She’s a great observer, although the movie makes a point of noting how the women in the film are excluded from any decision-making process.
There’s also a young couple (Paul Dano and Zoe Kazan) and a set of parents (Shirley Henderson and Neal Huff) with a son. And, at a certain point, a Cayuse Indian (Rod Rondeaux), whose presence creates a moral dilemma for these God-fearing folk.
On the one hand, Reichardt proves that if she wanted to make a traditional western, she could knock it out clean: “Meek’s Cutoff” has suspense, and ideas, and an eye for the stark scrubland of Oregon’s desert. (Its boxlike frame makes it look like a 1940s western, which unfortunately means that many people will watch this movie on home video in the wrong aspect ratio, when their player stretches it out from side to side to fill up the wide screen.)
But Reichardt doesn’t want to make a traditional western, she wants to collapse one. And that’s why you may begin to realize, with all the talk about which direction to go and which trail to take, that the movie might just never solve that problem or provide an answer. This journey has become metaphysical, not geographical.
Why deny the movie audience the expected solution? Maybe Reichardt believes that kind of “closure” is part of the problem; she’s part of a generation of filmmakers wary of the pleasant A-B-C of old-school storytelling.
This approach isn’t for everybody, although, in the era of “Lost,” maybe there’s an audience for it. But “Meek’s Cutoff” (the title itself is a pun on the film’s structure) is a little like a late-1960s head-trip movie; hang with it, and it just might keep expanding in your mind for weeks afterward.
“Meek’s Cutoff” (3½ stars)
An unusual project from “Wendy and Lucy” director Kelly Reichardt that straddles the line between traditional western and late-1960s experimental film. A group of Oregon Trail pioneers has gotten lost in the desert, and their arguments have them thoroughly lost. Michelle Williams stars.
Rated: PG, for violence
Showing: Harvard Exit
Talk to us
> Give us your news tips.
> Send us a letter to the editor.
> More Herald contact information.
