{"id":327,"date":"2013-01-07T12:04:16","date_gmt":"2013-01-07T17:04:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/smugfilm.com\/?p=327"},"modified":"2013-03-01T22:52:20","modified_gmt":"2013-03-02T03:52:20","slug":"meeks-cutoff","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/smugfilm.com\/oldsite\/meeks-cutoff\/","title":{"rendered":"Meek’s Cutoff is a Tedious Nightmare"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"meeks\"The second most interesting thing that happens in Meek\u2019s Cutoff.<\/em><\/p>\n

Meek\u2019s Cutoff (2010)<\/strong>
\nDirected by Kelly Reichardt
\nWritten by Jonathan Raymond
\n104 min.<\/p>\n

Warning: Mild spoilers ahead.<\/em><\/p>\n

One review I read of Meek\u2019s Cutoff called it an \u201canti-Western\u201d, and that title is apt. Director Kelly Reichardt does approach the genre from a unique perspective. She shows the earliest journeys made by settlers to the American far West as they really were: really fucking tedious most of the time.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a wagon train of eight people lost and thirsty in the Oregon desert. They think their guide\u2014the asshole racist Stephen Meek\u2014is responsible, either from negligence or malice. A lone Native American shows up and Meek captures him. They think the Native American might know how to find water, so they take him along. They get into an argument when one of their wagons crashes. Then they see a living tree. I guess that means they find water, but I don\u2019t know because the movie ends before anything else happens. That\u2019s not a synopsis, that\u2019s literally<\/em> every significant plot point in the whole thing.<\/em>
\n
\nIf it sounds like that\u2019s not enough content to drive a nearly two-hour movie, it\u2019s because it isn\u2019t. Minutia rules each day. There are countless flat, boring shots of people walking, people sitting, people looking into the distance, and people yawning (or maybe that was just me). At one point, a man fixes a wagon wheel; at another point, a woman kneads some dough; and at yet another point, a different man reads from the Bible a bit. There are roughly sixteen audible exchanges of dialogue in the movie that last longer than a second or two (I counted) and only a few of them are engaging in any way at all.<\/p>\n

Movies like these force me to wonder whether the label of \u201cminimalist\u201d is merely a term used to cover up a lack of ideas. I\u2019m not talking about the original Minimalists, as in the actual movement. (I don\u2019t know anything about them.) What I mean is artists in general who spread meaningful information out so thin that it can only be made sense of retrospectively. The thing is, movies can avoid needless contrivances and embellishments and still be engaging, provocative, and powerful. I just call that efficiency. Trimming fat can free up runtime, but for the love of my sanity, fill that runtime with something, anything, that I can experience or contemplate. Or else, just make the runtime shorter. Don\u2019t pad it out by making every lull a pregnant lull. Don\u2019t turn me into a vegetable from your shallow artiness.<\/p>\n

Meek\u2019s Cutoff also goes for a minimally engaging visual presentation. While Westerns helped build the character of widescreen cinematography, Reichardt inexplicably opts for a 4:3 aspect ratio. It also appears to be shot at a faster frame rate than the film standard of 24p, and though it was indeed shot on film, the image is so washed that it might as well be raw miniDV footage. I\u2019m being harsh here, but honestly it feels like a History Channel reenactment. There are a couple neat shots here and there, but by and large, it never justifies the reversion to 4:3, and generally it\u2019s full of claustrophobic angles that elicit no sense of place nor frame anything in illuminating ways. This is a huge missed opportunity, too, since the movie could have been saved by better visuals.<\/p>\n

If we\u2019re meant to be following these desperate people through the desert, then let us experience the desert with them. Show the dust caking on their clothes. Show the desiccation of the landscape up close. Show us sun bleached bones. Show us anything.<\/em> Add some ambiance. Add some contrast. Use the camera to make the desert itself<\/em> a character. There\u2019s a century\u2019s worth of tools available to directors and DPs today, but no\u2014Reichardt apparently thinks being a serious artist means settling almost exclusively on wide, flat, static shots, as if the conventions of cinematographic storytelling lack artistry. I\u2019ve been to the desert, and it\u2019s a vast, primal, mysterious, wretched, beautiful place. But you\u2019d never get that impression from watching Meek\u2019s Cutoff. You don\u2019t get any impression at all except that it\u2019s a boring place to be in, and you only get that impression because the movie itself is boring to look at. Again, minimalism oughtn\u2019t mean lack of visual content\u2014it oughta mean smartly terse use of visual content.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m hatin\u2019 hard, but honestly, I don\u2019t completely<\/em> hate Meek\u2019s Cutoff. Michelle Williams, as the \u2018lead\u2019, gives a fine performance, just as she did in Wendy and Lucy* (even if she only ever does a couple things). She carries her role as Nondescript Frontier Woman #2 with a good degree of subtlety, which is fortunate, considering she\u2019s the only character you might call a protagonist (even though she completely lacks definition for the first 45 minutes of the movie). Rod Rondeaux, as the Cayuse Native American, is great as well\u2014even if he is an enigma (or, because<\/em> he is an enigma). Bruce Greenwood\u2019s Meek is occasionally fun to listen to because he talks like a crazy fur trapper survivalist man, but he\u2019s too one-note to care about. And it\u2019s impossible to really experience the personalities of any other characters because they\u2019re given too few lines.<\/p>\n

What thinly developed story there is here isn\u2019t actually too bad. There\u2019s an inherent tension in the premise of people being led around by dubiously intentioned guides in a deadly environment, and a couple moments of decently effective drama do inevitably come about. Unfortunately, there\u2019s no beginning nor end to that single narrative thread, so ultimately what you have is an awful looking, atonal, flavorless movie about a group of boring people on their way somewhere from somewhere else. I dunno if they got there, and I don\u2019t care.<\/p>\n

2 out of 5 salt porks.<\/em><\/p>\n

*Wendy and Lucy<\/a> is the feature Reichardt and Raymond helmed prior to Meek\u2019s Cutoff. It\u2019s another minimalist tale of lone desperation in foreign circumstances starring Michelle Williams, but it\u2019s actually got a great story with great dialogue, and characterization, and things of meaning happen in it. It\u2019s almost right up there with social realist classics like Loach\u2019s Kes<\/a> and De Sica\u2019s Umberto D<\/a> (from which it borrows general story elements and themes). Go watch that and not Meek\u2019s Cutoff<\/a>.<\/p>\n