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…

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 -…

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…

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

[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 full…

reichardt returns us to the early silent westerns of ford, dwan, king, etc., where the simple portraiture of the landscape dwarfing the lone figures within its borders lends itself to cosmic grace, cultural diffusion and political critique. the situational humor gives humanity to the monolithic images -- the passage of the pioneer wagon almost entirely plays out from right-to-left framing (east coast to west coast), against the fundamentals of classic hollywood formalism and western literature, where left-to-right is the norm. and like daves/ray, she places equal emphasis on the verticality of the frontier as much as the horizontal aspect (reflected in the film's ambient paranoia, spreading out in all directions) so we are removed from the post-cinemascope legacy of the…