Meek's Cutoff
Welcome to the Kelly Reichardt time machine. Meek's Cutoff, Reichardt's third feature and a true masterpiece, takes us back in time to 1845 Oregon with such determined detail and fascinating force that the cinematic experience feels damn near revolutionary. Following a wagon train that consists of three couples, one with a child, and a potentially useless guide named Stephen Meek (Bruce Greenwood in a brilliant performance), Meek's Cutoff allows us to feel every painful, life-threatening step forward across a barren landscape. Whether that step is to a new home or to certain doom is a question that hangs over the entire movie with an ominous ambiguity.
What lies at the end of the journey may be a source of confusion and conflict, but it's not really what this Meek's Cutoff is all about. Reichardt wants us to witness the human struggle for survival and the shifting patterns of power that occur when a handful of people are stranded in the wilderness and have no one to rely on but each other. Reichardt achieves this goal in exquisite fashion by immersing us in nearly every detail of the group's regular routine. And she makes a point to hold shots for long stretches of time, insisting that we become like a bystander or even an additional member of the wagon train party.
We watch as the group wanders across wide expanses of arid land, then settle with them around their individual campfires at night, and then we awake to blinding sunlight so we can repeat this process. It's exhausting, but in a finely tuned manner that pulls us ever closer to the characters. When the water shortage reaches critical levels later in the narrative, the danger is palpable and considerably frightening. It's a potential disaster that is felt, deeply, because we haven't merely been watching these people from afar. We've been spending the days and nights with them, becoming a part of their group, caring completely about their plight and potential survival.
One of the many astonishing things about Meek's Cutoff is that the monotony doesn't actually feel monotonous. We keep watching each character do the same thing over and over again, if it's walking or gathering firewood or walking some more. And the landscape rarely ever changes. But this doesn't feel unnecessarily repetitive or pointlessly tiresome. It feels absolutely imperative to the story and the experience is endlessly engaging. This detailed depiction of the wagon train journey oozes authenticity and the consuming sense of realism allows every action, no matter how many times it seems we've seen it, to feel fresh and honestly spontaneous.
The stunningly stark imagery also plays a specific role in the ongoing journey. Reichardt teams with cinematographer Chris Blauvelt and the result is a crisp visual style that wisely communicates the vast open spaces the characters must travel across, while simultaneously acknowledging the static landscape and making it look impressively, invitingly new. Even with the limited colour palette (the ground is a dry mixture of browns and yellows, while the blue sky is constantly in danger of being whited out by clouds), Blauvelt achieves great beauty and still manages to remind us that this land remains a thinly veiled deathtrap.
At the centre of this foreboding tale exists the calmly committed cast that is responsible for a wide array of excellent performances. Leading the pack is Michelle Williams, who has worked with Reichardt before on the very good Wendy and Lucy and will hopefully continue to do so (fingers crossed). Williams plays Emily, a tough, no-nonsense member of the wagon train party who can hold her own against anyone. She portrays the character as quietly collected, with a fiery streak that manifests itself at just the right times. Throughout the movie, Emily begins to assert a larger role in the group and Williams makes this demand for power both thrilling and seemingly natural.
Emily represents a new vessel, often viewed as a minority in this time and genre, to which control can be transferred from Meek, the alpha male who is losing his grip on power and will soon have to fully relinquish it. Another vessel prepared to accept this power transference arrives in the form of an unnamed aboriginal man (played by Rod Rondeaux in what is probably best described as a flawless performance), who begins as a prisoner and eventually claims more responsibility. This shift is what Reichardt really wants to explore and she does so with grace and humility. She never reduces any of the characters to caricatures to force our opinion of one person over another. All nine characters in the movie (that's right, there are only nine) are believable individuals and the social complexities of the group are handled with patient intelligence throughout.
The rest of the cast is comprised of Paul Dano, Will Patton, Zoe Kazan, Shirley Henderson, Neal Huff, and Tommy Nelson. And that's it. There's not a single other soul to be viewed anywhere in the frame. This group may not have roles that are quite as meaty as those that belong to the aforementioned actors, but each and every one of them brings something wonderful to the movie and their contribution is invaluable. Even when an actor wears the same facial expression on multiple occasions, it doesn't feel like a one-note performance, but rather a careful depiction of the unending hell they continually find themselves in.
By crafting a masterful portrait of frontier life gone awry, Kelly Reichardt succeeds in taking a piece of history (there really was a Stephen Meek who guided potential settlers through an Oregon trail) and transforming it into something uniquely original. Unrivalled as the best movie I've seen in quite some time, Meek's Cutoff is a triumph on so many levels that Reichardt's achievement is truly staggering. Welcome to 1845. The ride ahead is long and bumpy and dangerous, but at the end of the journey, there awaits a movie masterpiece so unforgettably accomplished, so excitingly exquisite that its bold and brilliant effect is utterly timeless.
