Unorthodox Film About Pioneers Lost in Oregon in 1845
Kelly Reichardt (Old Joy, Wendy and Lucy) directed Meek's Cutoff (2010), and familiar names in the cast include Michelle Williams, Bruce Greenwood, Will Patton, Zoe Kazan and Paul Dano. This is an unconventional movie that will enthrall some viewers, while others will have difficulty tolerating its slow pace and be frustrated by its ambiguous ending.
Set in 1845, the story is about three married couples trying to get to northwestern Oregon's Willamette Valley, which was still a wilderness. (Today the Willamette Valley contains the cities of Portland, Salem, Corvallis and Eugene.) The three couples hire a mountain man to guide them to their destination, but in eastern Oregon he leads them into a desert where they can find no drinking water and their situation becomes desperate.
Reichardt's great strength in Meek's Cutoff is to create a world most people have never experienced and draw receptive viewers into it. You come away remembering the creak of wagon wheels as they roll over a treeless plain filled with nothing except rocks and sagebrush. But this is a harshly beautiful landscape, and the filmmakers give you many arresting, well-composed shots.
Meek's Cutoff is basically an ensemble piece for nine actors, but Michelle Williams gradually emerges as more or less the lead, giving the film a feminist slant. Also, Bruce Greenwood is good as the frontiersman Meek, who is a braggart and teller of tall tales. Overall, the actors help give the movie a strong feeling of authenticity.
Seven Pioneers and a Mountain Man
As Meek's Cutoff opens, we see a small group of people fording a river. Through flowing water that at one point comes up to his armpits, a man leads a pair of oxen pulling a covered wagon. Women wearing bonnets and full skirts that almost reach the ground walk slowly through the water, carrying above their heads things they must keep dry. When the tedious river crossing is completed, the group pauses. One man scoops river water into a barrel, while a woman scrubs a pan. Another woman puts drinking water in a cage containing a little yellow bird, while another man carves a word in the trunk of a fallen tree: LOST.
When the group resumes their journey, it can be seen that there are eight people, three wagons and some livestock. Among the people are three married couples. Each of the husbands walks along leading a pair of oxen pulling a covered wagon, while the wives walk behind. One couple has a son, about 12, who is allowed to ride part of the time. On horseback out front of the group is a mountain man.
The film is sketchy about the backstory for this little wagon train, but it goes something like this: Hearing there was a paradise in the Pacific Northwest, Emily Tetherow (Michelle Williams) and her husband and two other couples came west on the Oregon Trail. Along the way they met frontiersman Stephen Meek (Bruce Greenwood) and paid him to guide them to the Willamette Valley via an alternate route. (The movie is partly inspired by a real-life event, and if you want to pursue this, look up Stephen Meek and the Meek Cutoff Historic Trail.)
An Indian Changes the Group Dynamics
After the group leaves the river, it becomes obvious that Meek doesn't know what he's doing. He leads them into the Oregon High Desert, where they can't locate any drinkable water and soon find themselves in a life-and-death situation. We watch with a growing sense of dread.
But Meek's Cutoff isn't one of those amazing tales of survival, nor is it an inspiring story of triumph over adversity. It's about living in an uncertain world and playing the odds as intelligently as you can.
The turning point in Meek's Cutoff comes when the men capture an Indian who is tracking them. Meek says the captive is Cayuse, a tribe of slave traders. Throughout the film, the Indian remains completely enigmatic. His actions are unreadable, and he speaks a language no one on the wagon train can understand. (The movie doesn't supply subtitles for the Indian's dialogue. Rod Rondeaux, the actor playing the role, posts on Facebook that he is an enrolled Crow Tribal Member who speaks his tribe's language and several others.)
Capturing the Indian triggers a battle of wills between Emily Tetherow and Stephen Meek, and this provides the dramatic tension for the rest of the film.
A Short Making-of Featurette
Oscilloscope is releasing Meek's Cutoff in a package that contains two discs, one Blu-ray and the other DVD. The contents of the two discs are identical: the feature film, the original theatrical trailer and a making-of featurette.
The making-of runs less than 10 minutes and has no interviews, no narration and no clips. It consists solely of the crew and cast working on the film at unidentified locations — presumably in Harney County, Oregon — and only sporadically is it possible to hear what anyone is saying. The featurette suggests that the production must have had its share of logistical problems due to shooting out in the boondocks, animal wrangling and high winds.
DVD Release Date: September 13, 2011
Feature Film Runtime: 1 hour 43 minutes
MPAA Rating: PG for Some Mild Violent Content, Brief Language and Smoking