Meek's Cutoff

Kelly Reichardt: Meek's Cutoff (2010). Photo from IMDb. The film itself is in Academy, not scope. Please click on the image to enlarge it!

Meek's Cutoff – kadonnut vankkurikaravaani.
    US © 2010 Thunderegg LLC. PC: Evenstar Films / Film Science / Harmony Productions / Primitive Nerd. P: Elizabeth Cuthrell, Neil Kopp, Anish Savjani, David Urrutia.
    D: Kelly Reichardt. SC: Jonathan Raymond. Cin: Christopher Blauvelt – negative: 35 mm – colour – 1,33:1 – digital intermediate 2K – released on 35 mm (Fuji). PD: David Doernberg. AD: Kat Uhlmansiek. Cost: Vicki Farrell. Makeup: Leo Won. Hair: David Kennedy. M: Jeff Grace. "Nearer My God, To Thee" (Sarah F. Adams, Eliza Flower, 1841 [the original tune]). S mixer: Felix Andrew. S: Javier Bennassar, Mandell Winter. ED: Kelly Reichardt.
    C: Michelle Williams (Emily Tetherow), Bruce Greenwood (Stephen Meek), Will Patton (Soloman Tetherow), Zoe Kazan (Millie Gately), Paul Dano (Thomas Gately), Shirley Henderson (Glory White), Neal Huff (William White), Tommy Nelson (Jimmy White), Rod Rondeaux (the [Northern] Paiute).
    Loc: Oregon (Burns, Hines), November 2009.
    104 min
    Festival premiere: 5 Sep 2010 Venice Film Festival.
    US release: 8 April 2011.
    Finland: dvd release: 14 Aug 2013 Atlantic Film.
    Finland: telepremiere: 17 Feb 2017 Yle Teema, Finnish subtitles by Vesa Kuittinen.
    Corona lockdown viewings / Women Make Film.
    Yle Areena, HD, viewed at home in Helsinki on a 4K tv set, 28 April 2020.

IMDb synopsis: "Settlers traveling through the Oregon desert in 1845 find themselves stranded in harsh conditions."

AA: Many Westerns and television series have been made about the Oregon Trail, the most famous being Raoul Walsh's epic The Big Trail (1930) in which John Wayne was cast in a leading role for the first time.

Kelly Reichardt's film reverses genre expectations. The scout of the settlers, Stephen Meek (Bruce Greenwood), is a historical character, and Meek's Cutoff is an actual historical trail in Oregon. But Reichardt's film is not an epic and Meek is not a hero. Instead, the violent and braggadocious Meek turns out to be clueless in the Oregon desert. He does not know his way there, and he puts the lives of the settlers in danger.

The settlers run out of water and decide to ask for advice from a lone Paiute man. They do not understand each others' languages, but in the finale the Paiute leads them to a tree at the edge of the desert. Where there's a tree, there must be water. During the trek Meek wants to kill the Paiute, but in the last minute Emily (Michelle Williams) intervenes and turns her rifle against Meek.

There are exciting scenes in the movie, such as the lowering of wagons from a mountainside, but the approach is the opposite of a conventional adventure story, and the film is not story-driven at all. Instead, Reichardt's approach is based on durée, as if the events were unfolding in real time instead of rousing montage sequences. Her film has been shot in the classical Academy format, where The Big Trail was shot in Fox Grandeur 70 mm, a pioneering widescreen process. What Reichardt conveys is a sense of really being there.

Meek's Cutoff is an image-driven, painterly and visionary film. Together with her cinematographer Christopher Blauvelt, Reichardt shoots on location in her beloved Oregon, using available light, daring to shoot long takes in the dusk or at night, very often in extreme long shot, visually dramatizing the theme of the struggle for existence. The film is full of gorgeous shots that could be hung on the wall. The theme of seeing is a matter of survival. For instance we learn that because of the thin air things on the horizon seem much nearer than they really are.

The movie has been beautifully shot in deep focus on 35 mm. The feeling of natural light and the fine textures are successfully conveyed in the digital intermediate.