Through a Glass Darkly

Meek's Cutoff (2011): A rare instance of that endangered 21st-century species, the Western. Kelly Reichardt did not naively try to dip into the same river twice by reviving the outdated classical Western (Costner), nor did she throw the baby out with the bath water through nihilistic postmodern pastiche (Coens). Her film largely forgoes Western myth, in fact, and aims to plunge directly into history itself, with earthy, intensely naturalistic images to bring out the 'soul' of 19th-century frontier existence long before the cinema was even a speck on the horizon. In this sense, the first comparison that came to mind while watching was the grim historical dioramas of Robert Eggers, although the much more flattering precedent would be Herzog's Aguirre, Der Zorn Gottes (1972), which also happens to be a film about a doomed journey into the wilderness of the Americas. 

The story is thread-bare even for Westerns: in 1845, a small wagon train of three men and their wives (and one child) is being led by a guide on a supposed shortcut – a cutoff – forking from the Oregon Trail to the settlement of Willamette Valley, where "Civilization is taking hold" in an otherwise barren wilderness. Problem is, the blustery, Native-hating mountain man leading this journey, Meek, seems to have no clue where he's going, yet he won't admit it. Halfway through the film, Meek's archetypal inverse, a Native American, appears and is permitted by the frustrated party to take over from Meek as their guide. However, the language barrier renders his destination ambiguous to the travellers, and they still don't know if they're lost. 

This vague narrative framework gives way to a "slice of life" audio-visual experience of a past fraught with primordial terror at the unknown. The film's two formal motifs that are most criticized in reviews – a tendency to shoot conversations from afar, with the confused travellers' words slightly dissipating in volume across the frontier space to reach us; and the almost illegibly dark nighttime camp scenes, where they pray and worry about their survival – are supposed to manifest these unsophisticated people's anxiety in the face of an endless, enveloping outdoors, with 19th-century Christian anxieties of demons and murderous Indians and starvation swimming around their heads. It is a dirty, unromantic existence, filmed not in 'scope, usually a given for every post-1950s Western, but in a cloistered academy aspect ratio, emulating the parochial headspace of Reichardt's wanderers. In an early scene, one of them is reading the Book of Genesis aloud, comforting themselves by earnestly equating their new start to Adam and Eve. You get this thrilling sense of the curiosity, dread, and excitement these God-fearing people must have felt on the precipice of this "new" world, this new Eden – a profoundly religious way of experiencing the world that we no longer possess.

The film hampers itself a bit in the final third, with its rather boring resolutions of tensions built up prior. The climactic scene depicted on the poster, of Michelle Williams' character pointing a rifle at Meek to protect their Native American prisoner from execution, is too politically correct to convincingly possess the historic gravity of crossing the line that it's trying to. What this frontier woman in 1845 feels in that moment – anger at Meek's racist machismo and sympathy for the oppressed figure of the Native American – is the same as what the 21st-century liberal spectator feels; there are no contradictions between character and audience to make this moment of proto-feminist/proto-anti-racist conflict interesting and authentic. It is a betrayal of what Reichardt tries to do for most of the film: challenge you to imagine a worldview that doesn't exist anymore. Also tired is the film's ambiguous arboreal final symbol, a double-whammy of feeling like both a cliché and a cop-out. What one remembers about Reichardt's film days later is the visceral impact of its images and sounds from another time, not this stuff.

Score: 3/5