Follow
the leader
Kelly
Reichardt's Meek's Cutoff isn't your usual genre Western; it may have
covered wagons, women in bonnets and gingham skirts, men with
flintlock rifles and even the odd half-naked indian, but no--this
isn't a Western so much as it is Ms. Reichardt's inimitably
strange foray into the genre.
Strangest
of all is that the story is based on actual events. Stephen Meek did
guide a thousand settlers, among them a group led by one Solomon Tetherow, away from the main trail
into the Oregon desert, where they promptly got lost (there was talk
of possible Indian attacks); Tetherow's followers did meet a Native
American, and they did offer him a blanket in exchange for water.
For
Reichardt's purposes the thousand settlers were whittled drastically
down to nine, the two hundred covered wagons to a mere three. The
pacing is more than a little leisurely; the incidents--the capture of
the Native American, a dangerous wagon descent, arguments and
confrontations, a case of severe dehydration, and finally a showdown
involving rifles and pistols--don't seem as important as the
opportunity afforded to Reichardt to pose her nine dusty, despairing
travelers against the vast Oregon wasteland. This isn't Larry
McMurtry territory, where Southern melodrama plays out against the
ironic, implacable forces of history; the film's focus isn't so much
on the historical as it is on the existential.
Solomon
Tetherow (Will Patton) is the party's ostensible leader, but they
follow Stephen Meek (Bob Greenwood, resplendent in his mane of
mountain-man hair); Meek in turn chatters away, telling of one
near-death adventure after another, promising that water is “just
over those hills.” We meet his followers just about the time
they're ready to lose faith in him; early in the picture one settler
takes the time to scratch out the word 'Lost' on a rock before
turning to unenthusiastically continue their seemingly endless slog;
later Tetherow's wife Emily (Michelle Williams) asks her husband “is
he ignorant, or just plain evil?”
Reichardt
leaves the question hanging over the settlers while they continue
their journey (she leaves a lot of questions hanging throughout). You
watch this unlikely band trailing behind their unlikelier leader and
you wonder: are they going to survive? More pressing yet: are they
going to keep following this chattering nut of a guide, who seems to
make up landmarks as he goes along? When an alternative's presented,
it's hardly much better: a Native American (veteran stuntman Ron
Rondeaux) is brought to camp, and offered a blanket if he would lead
them to water. Meek scoffs at his trustworthiness and suggests he's
leading them to his fellow tribesmen to be massacred. The man does
have a point--if Meek seems unable to lead them out of the desert, he
at least speaks to them in words that they understand; the Native
American chatters away almost as much as Meek does but in an
untranslated, unsubtitled language (the native's solemn deadpan
demeanor does make him seem more authoritative). He's as inscrutable
as Meek is unhelpful.
The
allegorical meanings pile up as the settlers' options run out;
tensions rise, fingers stray toward rifle and pistol triggers.
Michelle Williams who plays Emily Tetherow is easily the most
recognizable face in the cast (Greenwood's is obscured by all the
hair), but her character doesn't really stand out, at least not at
first; everyone, even the Hollywood celebrity, is lost in the
thousands of miles of Oregonian sand and stone, the thousands of
miles of empty silence. It takes Reichardt some minutes to even come
to a medium shot--for the film's first ten or so minutes we are
treated to endless long shots of the actors struggling across the
sparse landscape. For a true closeup we have to wait until the near
end, when the film plays out to its enigmatic conclusion--then the
camera is focused on Williams' alert but unenlightened face, trying
to puzzle out the meaning of what she's looking at. Meek at one point
declares ominously that this “was all written out long before we
got here;” one suspects that he's talking not so much of the
script as of a scenario--of a briefly sketched situation where the
nine characters (plus one Native American) are released to roam
randomly, and resolve their various destinies.
The
image is highly theatrical--one thinks of a chamber
drama--but the film is the exact opposite: instead of a confined
space that intensifies the claustrophobia and builds psychological
tension to the bursting point, we have a stage on which tension and
drama dissipates, blows away (don't think Jean-Paul Sartre's No
Exit so much as Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot). Instead
of men and women confronting the possibility that fellow
humans represent the worst possible threat, they confront the possibility
that there is no threat, no hope, no relief, no resolution, no end to
their bleak circumstance. If there's another, worst definition of hell...I'm
hard pressed to think what that might be.
First published in Businessworld, 1.5.12
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