When I saw Meek’s Cutoff at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2011, I could hardly believe what I was witnessing. It was the last night of the festival, and I found myself attending the screening of an independent Western with an audience that was angry and impatient. They hated the film. It bored them. I could see people walking out in the middle of the movie, whining that they had wasted their money. Then the movie abruptly ended, and a horrible groan filled the theater.
To be fair, I could understand the reaction. I admired the film, but I knew it was the type of film that could only appeal to a cinematically-literate minority. The movie Kelly Reichardt had made was maddeningly ambiguous: I must confess that even I was taken aback by the last scene of the film, which felt deliberately anticlimactic. I remember turning to a friend in the audience and telling him that the ending could have been better. His response: "What ending?"
My biggest disappointment was that neither director Kelly Reichardt nor actress Michelle Williams were available to host a Q & A screening after the show. Reichardt and Williams, who previously made the celebrated Wendy and Lucy (2008) together, were obviously getting at something with Meek’s Cutoff that a mass audience wouldn’t possess the ability to pick up. There were a number of questions I would have liked to have asked Reichardt: what attracted you to this story? Which Western films did you draw inspiration from? And what makes the open-ended ending so necessary?
The film, after all, is based on the true story of the ill-fated Stephen Meek party of 1845, so it probably won’t be a spoiler (though consider this a spoiler warning nevertheless, dear readers) if it is revealed here that the party got lost somewhere on the Oregon Trail, never found help, and perished in the desert. The film stars Michelle Williams as the skeptical Emily Tetherow, who grows increasingly distrustful of Meek, portrayed in the film by Bruce Greenwood as a hammy, bigoted figure who has no idea where he’s leading his party. None of the other characters are given as much time for development: the film’s real focus is on the setting, not the characters.
There’s been a running narrative amongst some of the film’s recent fans that Meek’s Cutoff might actually be an allegory about the Bush administration blindly leading America into a Middle Eastern quagmire. Reichardt herself has denied this theory, and it certainly never occurred to me in the theater on that night at Sundance; it strikes me as an interesting but narrow perspective. Some of the film’s other fans have better arguments. Fellow blogger Jake Cole has called it "the quintessential view of the West as a place of perpetual displacement and transition." Another fellow blogger, Carson Lund, praises it as "a great piece of art" despite the negative reactions of his accompanying audience. Clearly, the film has been speaking more to individuals than to large crowds.
My own opinion is similar to that of colleague Kenji Fujishima, who writes, "For all its aesthetic boldness and tantalizing gestures toward historical revisionism, Meek’s Cutoff ultimately stays resolutely, and disappointingly, safe and comfortable." The thing is, if I can’t quite bring myself to recognize Meek’s Cutoff as a full-fledged masterwork, it’s because the film feels unhappily static: every scene feels like the next, right down to the dubious final scene. There is tragedy at the end, but arguably not significant enough of tragedy to make the film feel any different than it did when it began.
Make no mistake, however: Meek’s Cutoff is too unusual, too unconventional to be dismissed. In some ways it can be viewed as a litmus test for those who can handle art films, and those who cannot. It is one of the quietest, eeriest Westerns ever made, and I can only think of a couple of other films (Robert Mulligan’s The Stalking Moon; Sam Peckinpah’s Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid) with a similar ambience. The most disturbing achievement of Meek’s Cutoff is how effectively it captures that feeling of being so utterly lost, as we are thrown out with settlers who are hungry, thirsty, abandoned by God and left in the wilderness to die.
Runtime: 104 minutes. Rated PG (for some mild violent content, brief language and smoking).
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