As we consider the third film from
an awesome new talent: the feminist influenced, seemingly queer friendly Kelly Reichardt,
her deliberately paced “pre-Western” Meek’s Cutoff is not only a piece
of grade “A” Sundance approved revisionist American history, but it also
contains some oddly old fashioned movie/TV
tropes.
Chewing this one over prior to its
Bay Area debut at The San Francisco International Film Festival, I suddenly was
struck by the discomforting thought that this sex free wagon train saga, with
women who could handle a long rifle and maintain a safe distance behind
an moody ox, and men who ranged from passive to an incipient lynch mob, might
just have been a film that my old Lawrence Welk, Gunsmoke loving, Nero
Wolf detective pulp novel addicted British dad might have gobbled down like
Gummy Bears at a kids’ Saturday morning matinee.
As a child of the Fifties I was
part of a bold experiment in mass brainwashing called “the Adult Western.”
Remember the scene in Billy Wilder’s The Apartment where Jack Lemmon’s
C.C. Baxter finally gets access to his pad after his superiors at Consolidated
Life have finished bonking members of the secretarial pool? In a brilliant
example of Wilder’s black humor take on American pop culture, Baxter --
carrying his Coke and fresh out of the oven TV dinner -- plops down in front of
the “idiot tube” to catch Grand Hotel. In a crisply directed montage
that says everything about TV’s lobotomizing of the American mind, Baxter’s
expression perks up as the announcer intones, “And now Grand Hotel, starring
Greta Garbo, John Barrymore, Joan Crawford, Wallace Beery, Lionel Barrymore,
but first a word from our alternate sponsor. Friends, do you suffer from wobbly
dentures?” Baxter’s face registers the weird combination of disgust and ennui
that TV breeds in the still functioning adult mind and he reaches for the
remote, only to discover that every other channel is running a Western: the
best moment occurs when a tough old pool hall broad socks a cowboy on the jaw.
In his four star rave of Grand
Hotel Leonard Maltin shrewdly calls this 1932 Best Picture Oscar winner a
deceptively clever early talky where “nothing ever happens.” For Fifties’ TV
marketers – desperate to catch the eyeballs that would buy Coke, cars and, yes,
even the cure for wobbly dentures – the secret to keeping the whole family
glued to the tube was pseudo smart programming that would pacify the kids
and not bore the adults: ergo the Adult Western where much could be implied but
very little need actually happen.
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Kelly Reichardt has spent a
profitable decade exploding myths about male friendship (Old Joy),
homeless drifters (Wendy and Lucy) and now in her third feature she
gives us a female driven, pre-Civil War, dare we say it “Adult Western.”
Inspired by the diaries of women traveling in wagons along the Oregon Trail,
circa 1845, Reichardt plants us down among disoriented settler families who
suspect their guide has gotten them dangerously lost. Executed by a top flight indie
cast: Michelle Williams, Bruce Greenwood and Paul Dano, the film – framed in
the classic square box aspect ratio of pre-WWII Westerns – focuses on the
unceasing monotony of the journey. Reichardt sets up one powerful scene where
William’s skeptical pioneer woman expresses her disdain for Meek’s lecherous
braggadocio.
“We’re not lost we’re just finding
our way.
“You don’t need to patronize me,
Mr. Meek”
“Now I think you’re flirting with
me.”
“You don’t know much about women,
do you Stephen Meek?”
“Women are created on the principle
of chaos – the chaos of creation, disorder bringing new things into the world.
Men are created on the principle of destruction: chaos and destruction, two
genders’ always at it.”
We should mention that Reichardt’s
deck of stylistic, thematic and plot moving cards include a night time, natural
lighting cinematography that makes it pretty hard to put faces to the muttering
voices of mutiny against the nasty Meek. The veteran Canadian actor Bruce
Greenwood invokes a kind Black influenced dialect for his insidious guide, plus
he’s grown a bushy, face obscuring beard that might induce a tip of the cap
from Giants’ “fear the beard” closer Brian Wilson.
Otherwise Michelle Williams draws
on her early TV training (Dawson’s Creek) to ratchet up the
tension as a possible guns a blazing shootout seems to develop between her
Emily and Meek. The ever reliable Paul Dano is employed subtly in the role of
youngish aspiring settler whose underlining timidity makes him a great
candidate to lead a sudden eruption of mob justice.
The trickiest and most enigmatic
part of Reichardt’s revisionist moral fable involves the piece’s sole Native
American character, simply called “The Indian,” and played with skill by
veteran stuntman Rod Rondeoux. The Indian becomes a prisoner of the settlers,
many of whom are fearful that Meek’s incompetence as a guide, or perhaps
treachery has led them into a possibly massacre situation. Reichardt expertly
invokes the mob psychology while neatly undercutting it with the sight of The
Indian possibly helping the group find a desperately needed water hole or maybe
luring them to a parched desert debacle.
Conjuring up the bleak beats of
Peter Weir’s early Aussie masterwork, Picnic At Hanging Rock, and
providing a sort of feminist rejoinder to such John Ford classics as The
Searchers, Reichardt has also, perhaps unintentionally, evoked what was
best about so called adult oaters like Gunsmoke and Wagon Train. Here,
of course, there is no resolute white guy with a gun to sort things out: as the
Indian wanders out of the frame in the inconclusive but stirring finale we are
left with the disorienting vertigo of what can happen when old myths are
debunked but nothing persuasive is erected in their place. Everything old is
new again.