Kelly Reichardt’s Meek’s Cutoff deftly walks the line between methodical and downright plodding in its pace and plot. A Western that strips away many of the genre’s populist conventions, Meek’s Cutoff loosely adapts the story of Stephen Meek and the wagon trail he led into the Oregon High Desert that resulted in 23 deaths (he judged it “wholly successful”). Reichardt draws heavily on women’s diaries from the period, and part of the film’s success lies in its careful re-casting and rendering of history from a domestic point of view. But the film is not narrowly feminist, considering sweeping questions of Manifest Destiny, individuality and community and leadership.
The film opens on three women forging a river, carrying symbols of domesticity on their heads, dutifully protecting the vestiges of civilization: a songbird, a clock, a child. The scene’s focus remains on these women’s passage through the moving waters, neglecting the wagons and livestock led by their husbands. Characters’ faces are blocked by the bonnets and hats that protect them from the sun and heat. Theirs is a necessarily and materially limited scope of vision; Reichardt punctuates it by shooting in a square, 1.33:1 aspect ratio that replicates the limited perspective and heightens the narrow focus.
Meek’s Cutoff tackles many aspects of the Western’s myth, cinematic and otherwise. Gone are the action-packed showdowns filled with men conquering the wild (either land or outlaw) and women tending the hearth or entertaining at the saloon. Instead, we get a more realistic, naturalistic even, depiction of a seemingly endless trek West, sustained by laborious chores, monotonous landscape, and halting movement. The women’s routine duties are boring but key to survival—building a fire, cooking and cleaning, packing and unpacking; the men’s leadership is limited to nightly confabs to which the women have little access.
The film resists traditional momentum; there is no showdown, no resolution, only ceaseless trudging through the desert, the settlers by now looking for much less than the promised land or a frontier to conquer, wanting only water and food, wanting life rather than the death that faces the small party. Thematically, then, Meeks Cutoff lends itself to comparisons to Herzog’s Aguirre Wrath of God, Jarmusch’s Dead Man, or even Monte Hellman’s The Shooting, absurdist films featuring enigmatic leaders spearheading journeys to increasingly uncertain destinations. Only a lot less exciting.
Meek (Bruce Greenwood) is the film’s most familiar character, his tall tales the stuff of American myth. His leadership is already seriously suspect when the film begins, and the party’s food and water supplies have run dangerously low. Clearly, they have all grown to distrust Meek, but the group no longer has any choice but to follow him; they need to believe that he can lead them out of the wilderness. Emily Tetherow (Michelle Williams) voices the gravest concern to her husband, Soloman (Will Patton): “Is he ignorant? Or is he just plain evil? That’s my quandary” (If you hear direct parallels to George Bush, they are neither accidental nor subtle; one of the film’s more significant points is that the group has made decisions based on too little information, has trusted a leader who turned out to be selling snake oil.)
Division grows when The Indian (Ron Rondeaux) is captured. Meek wants to kill him immediately, sure that his savagery will see them all dead in their sleep. But Soloman argues that he must be familiar with the area, able to lead them to water, and so should be kept alive. The men grudgingly agree with Soloman, but anxiety increases the longer The Indian is held captive. Offered minimal comforts, The Indian has no means of communicating; there is no shared language, nothing between them save a need for food and water.
The Indian—what he symbolizes rather than what he is (for they know nothing of what he is at all), functions as an outlet for their frustrations and fears, a stand in not only for Meek but for the wilderness itself. But he is also completely apart from the unknowingly intruders, he has nothing to do with them, their language, civilization, or destination.
The Indian also embodies the potential for violence not only in the wilderness but also within the settlers themselves, sparking their heretofore repressed tendencies. Emily, disregarding Meek’s warnings, offers The Indian water and mends his torn moccasin, explaining “I want him to owe me something.” She becomes his defender, though her motivations remain unclear. Whether out of empathy or will to survive, Emily protects him. So when Meek pulls his rifle on The Indian, Emily’s rifle zeroes in on Meek (the closest the film comes to a shootout). Neither viewers nor the settlers have enough information to make reasoned decisions: motivations—The Indian’s, Meek’s, Emily’s—remain obfuscated.
As the film draws to its close, it remains far from an ending, opting for unknowing, incompletion over setting a clear course. Meek’s power curtailed, his role cannot be filled by another—not The Indian, not Soloman, not Emily. There is no watering hole, no civilization—hell, not even a sunset at this film’s end. Only The Indian walking into the horizon, the settlers unsure of whether to follow. The Indian is, however, inexorably contaminated by his encounter. As they have discarded their once-cherished objects as “weight,” he has gathered their leavings, carrying a blanket, a covered basket, a frying pan in his arms. Western civilization has come to stay, even if its first carriers do not survive the journey.
“We all just playing our parts now,” Meek declares just before the movie ends. “This was written long before we got here.” This may be the case, but the script remains unclear.
