Meek's Cutoff (Kelly Reichardt) [151 points/16 votes]
"'Hell's fulla bears, Jimmy. But there's no bears here.' Bruce Greenwood's loquacious frontier pathfinder mutters this early on as a closer to one of his discursive flights of storytelling fancy as he regals a young boy with a tall tale involving a man wrestling, yes, a bear. He also, unwittingly, cuts straight to the essence of Meek's Cutoff -- what seems like an endless slog through a dusty, sagebrushed Hell is rather a purgatorial suffering, an agonzing march through a flat and featureless space that nonetheless ends with an idea of a destination.
Whether that destination is desirable or even concretely foreseeable at film's end is another story, but then story's in the telling and the journey's in the taking. Meek's Cutoff is a film about a journey, and director Kelly Reichardt means to immerse us in this. Every rustle of home-stitched fabric, every squeak of a wagon wheel, every parched throat and aching joint and dragged footstep is ours to share with the characters. This is one of the most material-minded films I've seen in a long while -- even the credits are displayed as cross-stitchings, labors with tactility and weight. Any failure of equipment or (in a heart-stopping sequence) breakdown of transportation can be a tragedy, and it's this relentless dedication to the tiniest sensory details of the moment, even more than the inspired choice to use only natural lighting or the terrific work of a game cast of actors, that get across the you-are-there total absorption.
Not that the cast isn't instrumental. I could just point out that Reichardt, more than any director I can think of not named Paul Thomas Anderson, makes skilled and beneficial use of Paul Dano's natural ability to be intolerably annoying, but that would give short shrift to the strong turns from the rest of the cast, including a steadfast Will Patton and Rod Rondeaux as the Indian who becomes so crucial to the narrative in the film's second half. Slim as said narrative is, though, it ultimately boils down to a contest of wills between Michelle Williams's steely Emily Tetherow and Greenwood's garrulous Stephen Meek. Reichardt and and screenwriter Jonathan Raymond establish friction early on, with the group's open disillusionment in Meek's guidance painted across Williams' face and entrenched in her few, vinegary interactions with him. With the entrance of the Indian, this friction becomes flat-out hostility until the tension and threat of revolt in the face of starvation becomes as palpable as the moccasin Emily repairs for the Indian.
Still, for all the character work and back-and-forth that occurs in the second half, Meek's Cutoff is primarily an extraordinary sensory experience and derives the force of its drama from such. It's a film about the terror of being lost, the delirium of deprivation and the difficulty of just scraping by. Even the divisive final scene, in essence, is a final shot of immersion. Stop, look through the branches and the leaves of this tree. Listen to the breeze, feel it blow against your face. See that Indian? Hell's fulla Indians." - Steve Carlson
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