Western Women
Meek’s Cutoff
Directed by Kelly
Reichardt
Runtime: 104 min.
Director Kelly
Reichardt must be in a reign-of-terror state of mind. Her new film, Meek’s Cutoff, goes back in history—following
a small wagon train in 1845 Oregon—to punish the man who led the small band of
settlers to a dry, uninhabitable desert. Obviously another Iraq War allegory, Meek’s Cutoff implies political
punishment: a beheading, or at the very least, castration.
Just as Reichardt’s Wendy and Lucy tried poeticizing the
solitude felt by a female sexual outcast, Meek’s
Cutoff highlights the same actress, Michelle Williams, responding with
perplexity, frustration and then anger to the bearded, arrogant, chauvinist,
racist alpha-male scout Stephen Meek (Bruce Greenwood, doing a mean Brad Dourif
impersonation). Meek, the decider, is responsible for getting the wagon train
lost in a barren wilderness. It’s a Western allegory in the most obvious
sense.
Westerns replay
American history to learn from it. Indie directors rarely essay the genre due
to the expense in making a period film. Reichardt practices the square aspect
ratio of classic Westerns like Duel in
the Sun, Wagonmaster and Westward the Women, but, unfortunately,
her aesthetic attitude is all too modern. Meek’s
Cutoff repeats the bleakness of Van Sant’s desert-set Gerry. There’s no awe for nature or the timeless environment in
which “realism” is splendid or beauteous—just Michelle Williams’ white woman’s
burden pouting as she indexes Renée Zellweger, Carey Mulligan and then Isabelle
Huppert’s anti-colonialist misery in White
Material. Reichardt’s Western pities how Americans follow without moral (or
geographical) compass. It challenges patriarchy and racism, but it never risks
questioning received political ideas.