Master director Kelly Reichardt spins an understated but unforgettable feminist revisionist Western about 19th century settlers.
There may not be a more underappreciated director working in the United States right now than
Kelly Reichardt, the reigning queen of
slow cinema (see my
First Reformed [2017] post for a thorough explanation of slow cinema). In
Meek’s Cutoff, Reichardt masterfully inverts nearly every trope of the
Western genre, where the swaggering cowboys and gunslinging outlaws are replaced by a group of disoriented and miserable 19th century settlers lost in an endless wilderness.
Reichardt also substitutes the classic widescreen format of Westerns - meant to showcase the sweeping vistas of open land and portray the freedom and endless opportunity of the Wild West - with a box-like 4:3 aspect ratio. For Reichardt, as the aspect ratio indicates, the West did not depict freedom, but rather a confinement and oppression that was just as present as anywhere else for women during that time period. In the eyes of Reichardt, and her female protagonist Emily Tetherow (played by the equally underappreciated
Michelle Williams), the journey west does not symbolize opportunity, but a senseless death march willed on by masculine vanity.
As the movie goes on, with the group drowning in an arid sea of inhospitable wilds, and under the bullheaded rule of their patriarchal guide Mr. Meeks - a man shaped by ego and wrath - their trek increasingly resembles a voyage into a perpetual limbo, where sticking to the status quo could mean the end for all of them.
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