Meek's Cutoff (2011)
Directed by Kelly Reichardt
A group of settlers traveling through the Oregon High Desert in 1845 find themselves stranded in harsh conditions.
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What critics compared Meek's Cutoff to
Though one could glimpse The Searchers (1956) in its lunar landscapes, or Days of Heaven (1978) in its detached mood and often eerie beauty, the film's small, inward-looking narrative and headily large themes make it a piece of considerable originality.
Meek’s Cutoff is most definitely a niche programmer – sparse and understated dialogue, the barest of mood music and a bleached, dusty palette brings to mind such revered but commercially-barren westerns as Terence Malick’s Days of Heaven (1978), Robert Benton’s Bad Company (1972) and Andrew Dominik’s The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007).
Notwithstanding exquisite images that evoke Terrence Malick's "Days of Heaven," city-slicker audiences may find themselves getting saddle sore.
Epic in scope, and featuring a powerful lead performance by Williams, Reichardt does justice to the myth of the wagon train settlers and makes a Western every bit as beautiful and poetic as Terrence Malick's Days of Heaven, and thankfully a bit more energetic.
He captures the vast wilderness in condensed form and has a "Days of Heaven" kind of appreciation for the golden hues of the landscape.
To go further, in addition to the black-and-white, which is more constraining and sinister than it is beautiful, Eggers has employed a narrow aspect ratio, closer to a square than a rectangle, similar to the shape used in Andrea Arnold's Wuthering Heights, Kelly Reichardt's Meek's Cutoff, and David Lowery's A Ghost Story, and to movies made in the earliest days of cinema.
The crew filmed in New Mexico, but no matter the U.S. state, the terrain looks and feels like the bleak Eastern Oregon desert in “Meek’s Cutoff” (2010).
With New Mexico filling in suitably for a pre-metroplex North Texas and the Hill Country before urban sprawl, it would be easy to imagine the Captain and Johanna crossing wagon trails with the pioneering women of Kelly Reichardt's Meek's Cutoff, or sharing quiet communion with Ethan Hawke's PTSD-riddled gunslinger in Ti West's lamentably underseeen In a Valley of Violence.
Much of Good One plays like a cross between Kelly Reichardt and Noah Baumbach – with further crisscrossing between multiple modes of each filmmaker. There’s the modest, verdant-scenery male bonding of Reichardt’s Old Joy, plus the seething, stranded dynamic of Michelle Williams’ character in Meek’s Cutoff; similarly, the banter of a Baumbach comedy – the dialogue between Chris and Matt is often very funny – intersects with a lower-key version of Marriage Story tensions.
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“The Gal Who Got Rattled” is one of the longer segments in which some of the characters are more developed, particularly Alice Longabaugh (a possible reference to the name Harry Longabaugh, better known as “The Sundance Kid”) played by Zoe Kazan, who was also in another wagon train movie, “Meek's Cutoff.”
A range of emotions, and a character that echoes the role she played in Meek’s Cutoff, help turn Kazan’s episode into a thing of wonder – yet not so much that death spares its players.
There’s Tom Waits as a diligent gold prospector and Zoe Kazan as a young woman embarking upon the Oregon Trail ( Meek’s Cutoff shout-out!).
The best of the stories may also be the longest and most humane: “The Gal Who Got Rattled,” which puts Meek’s Cutoff traveler Zoe Kazan back on the Oregon Trail, casting her as a lonely spinster who finds potential romance with the rugged guide (Bill Heck) of a covered-wagon expedition.
Starring Zoe Kazan - making her second trip on the Oregon Trail following Kelly Reichardt’s Meek’s Cutoff - as a shy bride-to-be who finds herself romanced by a charming cowboy.
Needless to say, “Meek’s Cutoff” this is not: Rather than complicating the relationship between American settlers and various tribes, “The Revenant” presents the latter group as fearsome, one-note companions wielding vicious tools and beastly tempers.