2010 Directed by Kelly Reichardt
Set in 1845, this drama follows a group of settlers as they embark on a punishing journey along the Oregon Trail. When their guide leads them astray, the expedition is forced to contend with the unforgiving conditions of the high plain desert.
O Atalho, Meek's Oregon 1845 Cutoff, To perasma tou Meek, La dernière Piste, 믹의 지름길, Пътят на Мийк, Auf dem Weg nach Oregon, Tierra Brava, La Dernière Piste, המשלחת של מיק, Обход Мика, Kestirme Yol, Обхід Міка, 米克的近路
Italy
USAPG
Spain
IrelandPG
UKPG
AustraliaPG
Portugal
UKPG
Australia
Ireland
Italy
Portugal
Spain
UK
USA
cotton dresses, dirty hands, unintelligible men, tiny drawings on a vast indifferent canvas, "this was written long before we got here", distant/following/spying camera, aspect ratio like tunnel vision/horse blinders/looking down the barrel of a gun (or looking into the barrel of a gun/looking into an empty barrel). meek is cut off. this movie has a lot of puns, each short interaction says more than most movies do with an entire chatty script and the camera does just as much of the talking. i'd call this "slow cinema", except there's always something happening if you're paying attention.
Hardly anything happens in this movie. Watching it is kind of like playing Oregon Trail on the slowest setting without all the excitement of trying to kill off the people traveling with you.
I LOVED IT.
For all practical purposes, 'Meek’s Cutoff' is a Western. But for many viewers, here lies the problem, for at its heart 'Meek’s Cutoff' doesn’t function like a genre film. It certainly revises and challenges traditional elements of the Western genre — accentuating the females’ perspective, avoiding an action-centric narrative for something more explorative — but 'Meek’s Cutoff' is the type of film that shows a weakness in words like “subversive." Reichardt isn’t just toying with conventions, she is leading us into more uncharted territory. With this, the film encourages a loosening of our understanding as viewers and a willingness to get a little lost.
The Wild West is truly wild in 'Meek’s Cutoff.' Reichardt uses the setting as a means…
I worship Reichardt's patience as a storyteller. Restraint as a weapon. Upon a second watch, this is one of the key movies of the century.
85/100
[originally written on my blog]
Just skimming the Metacritic blurbs threatens to render you comatose: "104 minutes of punishment"; "visually and emotionally severe"; "courts tedium"; "ponderously slow in pace"; "threaten[s] occasionally to stultify"; "there are stretches that are, frankly, boring." So why do I find it nonstop mesmerizing, even on second viewing? Above and beyond the strange tension Reichardt derives from the sheer arduousness of even simple tasks, there's a relaxed vigor to every shot that forestalls inattention, at least in my case. Other directors (most notably Van Sant) have employed the Academy ratio in recent years, but this is the first time it's seemed like more than an affectation—the boxy frame forces Reichardt to achieve certain "obvious" effects…
Meek's Cutoff is a montage of seductive landscape paintings masquerading as a movie. Perhaps it knows that if it does nothing it can't be accused of doing anything wrong. Critics often mistake inertia for high-art. The performances, photography and score are excellent. It's an easy film to admire, but the inherent tension in the story is thwarted by a plodding pace, overused wide shots that keep the characters at a distance, and a director too afraid to draw any substantial insights from her material.
Three couples in the West are travelling through harsh terrain trying to survive. They're led by a story-telling guide who might not actually know where he's taking them. As water becomes scarce, paranoia sets in -…
Some westerns paint us a vista of an era long-forgotten. Some westerns portray a civilization living on the fringes of society. Some westerns present to us the unassailable lawlessness of a barren, yet free land.
This western proves watching paint dry can be fun.
In all seriousness, Meek’s Cutoff is a bold work that sets out to do something most films would recoil at: actively be un-entertaining. The West as it was has always been a barren, inhospitable land, and the work done to survive in it is menial, monotonous, mundane. Boring actions do not make for an exciting film, and so film-makers have inserted fictitious actions into westerns to make them entertaining. Gunfights, horseback chases, even just good old…
Never send a man to do a woman's job, or he'll bring "destruction" to the western formula (I am thinking violence, bullets and action stars) instead of the "chaotic" perspective of a woman's contemplative persona, which is described in the following paragraphs.
Kelly Reichhardt's absolutely breathtaking and meditative take on the earliest days of the Oregon Trail set in 1845 is a slow-paced, compelling essay on fear, trust, prejudice, and the human instincts and inner demons that flourish to the surface when mankind faces uncertainty and is compelled to witness mortality face to face. Surprisingly filmed with a 1.33 : 1 ratio, a rare artistic decision taken also by extremely underrated filmmaker Andrea Arnold (think of her equally underrated masterpiece…
Kelly Reichardt’s “Meek’s Cutoff” robs its audience of aspiration. Hope is discarded in favor of survival.
“Meek’s” is based on a true account of three families led astray in the American wilderness by a narcissistic charlatan of a guide.
Reichardt structures the film in a similar manner to the classic Westerns of John Ford, but deliberately rejects their iconic imagery. Reichardt stated that she intended to omit all ‘beauty shots’ from “Meek’s.” There would be no romanticism of the West; only an environment so stark as to cause every minor physical and visual practicality to seem luxurious.
It makes Reichardt’s work the equivalent of ‘do it yourself’ movie making. She provides the kit and materials, but it’s very much up…
On his WTF podcast, Marc Maron mentioned to Boyhood director Richard Linklater that a scene where a character looks down at his phone while driving had made him nervous, because he was convinced it was the precursor to an auto accident or some other terrible malady. His logic being, that this was known to be a dangerous activity in real life, so its inclusion in the film must have been a set up for some kind of terrible result. When no tragedy occurred, Maron mentioned that he was unsettled; left with the feeling of a build up with no resolution. Linklater laughed, and mentioned that this scene, and the feeling Marc had mentioned, had come up more than once, and…
85/100
[originally written from TIFF '10]
Stephen Meek was a real person. He died in 1886 at the age of 78. You can look that up in about 10 seconds—I should know, I just did. So it's not as if Reichardt, by concluding this stubbornly materialist Western the way that she does (or doesn't), is engaging in cutesy postmodern gamesmanship. Just as our heroes ultimately chuck the grandfather clock and other burdensome non-essential items, Reichardt has pared Meek's ill-advised Oregon Trail detour down to its dusty, laborious essence, which means—water in the desert indeed—that we get a bona-fide drama rather than a musty history lesson. Granted, it's a tale told glancingly, to the point where it took me nearly two…
