Meek's Cutoff (Friday, April 8, 2011) (24)

Kelly Reichardt makes very slow movies about nothingness. Her previous two films, Old Joy and Wendy and Lucy both follow people (and a dog) doing mundane stuff with no real plot or formal narrative structure. Her movies are basically the answer to the question, "What would a movie about my life look like." The simple answer is: it would be rather uneventful.

But Reichardt shines in this dullness and makes it rather beautiful. Her newest film, Meek's Cuttoff is a departure from her previous films as it is not set in our contemporary world, but is otherwise very similar in tone and concept. It follows a wagon train of three settler families as they cross the desert wastelands in Eastern Oregon in the mid-1800s. They are being led by a mysterious man named Meek who has either lost his way and is lying about knowing it or knows where he is going but can't explain to the families how long the journey will take. Whichever one it is, the train seems to not be making much progress in the middle of the desert.

As they move along, there is tension between the families and Meek, fighting within the families and a constant fear that the Native people of this part of the country will kill them for trespassing on their land. Along the way they pick up a native guide who speaks no English (his dialogue is not subtitled, leaving us as much in the dark about what he's saying as the characters are) and seems to be as much a harbinger of death as a pathfinder. The eeriness of desolate landscape is made even more spooky by the lack of any particular action or the change in topography. It seems the group might be going in circles, but it's never really clear.

Technically this film is a real triumph of doing a lot with a minimal amount of flare. Whereas with her past two films Reichardt showed a particularly DIY quality, here everything looks a bit more polished, though still with a very simple, non-showy nature. She uses mostly available light so it's particularly bright and white/yellow during the day and is black with firelight at night. She employs wonderful silhouettes during the day and shadows at night.

Her very natural recording of sound is one of the most amazing parts of the film, where the microphones are clearly put in positions to not only catch the blowing wind but also the snippets of conversation of people talking far away, as if you were in the desert with them. The most remarkable scene has the men talking in a group about 50 yards away from the women who are watching them. Reichardt sets up the mic close to the women so you hear what they hear, drowned out by the distance, rather than what most directors would do, setting the mic over by the men and just gaze at them from afar.

There does seem to be a rather feminist or at least "women's" point of view here. The costumes throughout the film are particularly wonderful (designed by Victoria Farrell) but the women's costumes are bright in fantastic colors, and much more interesting than their very basic designs. What's very important is that all the women wear bonnets whose brims hide their faces. A few times Reichardt puts the camera inside the wagons looking forward or backward so the arch-form of the frame imitates the arch-shape of the female headgear, giving us a similar view to what they are seeing.

Almost all of the characters appear throughout the film with obscured faces. Meek (Bruce Greenwood) has one of the all-time bushiest beards ever seen on film (you can barely tell it's him because you can't really see much of him). The men all wear hats and the women wear their bonnets, and everyone has filthy faces from the miles they've traveled, of course.

All of the acting is very strong, thought none of the performances are particularly noteworthy as they all become part of the harsh landscape. Michelle Williams, Paul Dano, Shirley Henderson, Will Patton and Zoe Kazan are all very talented actors and recede into the background when it is most important.

The allegorical content here is very interesting and just as unanswerable as any question in the film. There are clear allusions to the Odyssey, the Aeneid, the Book of Numbers and, of course, the Inferno. It seems like the group might be traveling through hell and that maybe they're dead already or on their way to being dead. It's never clear if Meek is a charlatan, a false idol, or if he is really a cryptic guide who moves in a timespace that humans can't understand so well.

This really is an existentialist film at its heart and the closest literary connection might be Sartre's No Exit. Whether these people are really going anywhere or are just stuck with one another for eternity is never totally clear. The only person who seems to have a clear vision of what is going on is the Native tracker who abandons the group at a point. I particularly love that Reichardt gets all this amazing thematic and formal content into such a simple-looking film. She touches on all these things but doesn't dwell on any one aspect. It's really a beautifully and brilliant execution.

Stars: 4 of 4