Westerns as diverse as High Plains Drifter and Johnny Guitar have portrayed the Old West as a great conflagration—a hell of scorched land and inhospitable, forgotten souls. Meek’s Cutoff, on the other hand, presents the West as purgatory—a bleached-out void where the unjudged must drift in silent isolation until some force delivers them to either paradise or perdition. Set in the Pacific Northwest instead of the usual Monument Valley locales, the film is coated in the washed-out grays common to the region, lending a ghostly pall to the procession of doomed creatures who pass through it.
From a certain point of view, the film could be read as a macabre joke on men’s inability to ask for directions. Stephen Meek (Bruce Greenwood) leads a wagon trail across the Oregon territory and refuses to betray his worry when he clearly begins leading the settlers in circles. Looking the part with his long, unkempt hair and dirt-worn clothes, Meek gives an initial impression of being familiar with the land, but soon his stentorian proclamations about the nature of everything, from their sparse surroundings to the wildlife that spells danger, give away the emptiness of his bluster.
Director Kelly Reichardt brutally drains the genre of its romanticism. The creaks and squeals of wagon wheels wobbling over stony plains and churning through desert sand provide the soundtrack to slow dehydration, as if the laborious movement of the wagons’ own joints were those of the weary humans. Too weak to revolt against their leader, the civilians can only mutter their distrust through chapped lips; one man carves “lost” into a log in a feeble sign of protest—both against Meek and God. Soon, the lack of water curbs the already pitiable displays of unrest as people save their strength for the desperate search for provisions.
The settlers’ only hope comes from a Native American (Ron Rondeaux), whom the whites promptly capture. Here, the film takes a geopolitical shift and the depiction of frontier racism is at once piercing and far more ambiguous than typically shaded in progressive westerns. Afraid of the Cayuse, the whites nonetheless would rather throw their lot in with the devil they don’t know versus Meek. In turn, their deference to a supposed savage piques their resentment, which entropically manifests as self-loathing. This drives the men mad, but the women are already accustomed to being manipulated and made to feel inferior, and they walk toward a death their husbands prepared for them with nothing more expressive than muted anger, as if they all realized it would come to this some day or other anyway.
Not since Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man, which ironically foregrounded the genre’s ties to romanticism with its William Blake-inspired protagonist, has a western so thoroughly eclipsed the farthest reaches of revisionism and become an all-out attack on both the genre and the troubled reality from which it derives. Reichardt films everything with emotionless remove, but when the settlers come across a tree growing in the desert, or a lake that turns out to be saltwater, the initial joy and eventual despair that these scenes emit is palpable. Even its non-ending is a surprisingly effective gut punch, not merely as a denial of closure but as a poignant expression of nihilistic, heat-crazed terror. No amount of shootouts or makeshift patriarchal families will save these fools, and the film leaves them in their last moment of sanity, glad to slip out from the company before the civilized, God-fearing folk show just how primitive they can be.
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