Meek's Cutoff (3/5 Stars)

Day (???), Wagon Axel broke, LOST

Director Kelly Reichardt and star Michelle Williams, the team from “Wendy and Lucy,” are collaborating for the second time on the near perfect movie about a lost wagon train on the Oregon Trail in 1845 named “Meek’s Cutoff.” The star rating I gave and the words “near perfect” may confuse you. Let me explain. Star ratings aren’t really helpful in that it rates a movie good or not relative to all movies and not other in kind movies of a particular genre. For instance I gave “Sucker Punch,” a flawed movie, four stars mainly for its ambition. It tried for about 100 things and got fifty of them right. “Meek’s Cutoff,” a near perfect movie, gets three stars because it is small. It tried about 10 things and got nine of them right before ending on an ambiguous anti-climax that I didn’t really care for. Does that mean people should like “Sucker Punch” more than “Meek’s Cutoff” generally. No of course not. I just like a bigger movie, that’s all. What I’m trying to say I guess is that the reader is better off reading the review before deciding whether they want to see the movie or not. The mark of a superior reviewer is one that describes a movie well enough that someone interested in that type of movie will have their interest piqued whether or not the reviewer liked it himself (and vice versa). 

In describing Reichardt’s work one has to take out some pretty arty words. Words like “contemplative,” “aesthetic,” “serene,” “minimalist,” etc. Reichardt likes setting her places in Oregon. She likes lingering in long shots. She focuses in on minute details and treats conversations like she would the cinematography. Most of them are not entirely important and fit nicely into the background. I would be surprised if the budget for this movie went into seven figures. In a way, Reichardt works like the wagon train. She’s out there in the wilderness with very little crew or way of direction, trying out something original that almost nobody will see. Still the movie is very well made. The score gives the movie an unsettling tone. The acting is exceedingly natural. Over time, as the water runs out and tensions rise, suspense builds. The climax of the movie should be completely unexciting by any normal movie standard as it involves a situation that is often only the start of much larger action sequences. But here it still works because there is such a sense of reality that people pointing guns at each other feels very serious. It also helps that one is a woman who does so reluctantly. “Meek’s Cutoff” isn’t some sort of revisionist history. The Michelle Williams character, like the other women in the three wagon train, is of her time and place. She acts subordinate to her husband and men in general. But she also doesn’t want to die. And after wandering the desert being led by a braggart named Meek (played by Bruce Greenwood) who hasn’t the slightest idea of where he is going nor the slightest inclination to admit it, she becomes less and less enthusiastic about standing around waiting for the water to run out. Little by little she oversteps her bounds in the politest way possible until finally there is no more room for being polite.   

It was once said by William Goldman (Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid) that the hardest thing about writing a Western was finding something interesting for the women to do while the men had fun shooting each other and what not. “Meek’s Cutoff” doesn’t necessarily give the women things to do that usually belong to the men, but it is told through the POV of the women. Normally this wouldn’t be so interesting as it involves them spending a good amount of screen time gathering brush, cleaning, and cooking. But here it serves the movie’s purpose in that it underscores the complete hopelessness of the journey. It’s one thing to have an argument over whether to go North or South in search of water, it’s another thing to have to silently stand around while the men argue over which way to go off in the distance. Things get more complicated when Meek captures a lone Indian. He has the bright idea to kill the heathen right then and there. Or perhaps they could ask the Indian to lead them to water. I guess you can say this is the Oregon Trail version of the modern cliché of a guy not wanting to ask for directions.

Bringing along paranoia and emotional wailing is another couple on the wagon train played by Paul Dano and Zoe Kazan. Every time I see Dano he is hanging out in an unforgiving desert (Little Miss Sunshine, There Will be Blood.) You would think at some point he would get a tan. Anyway he has been perfectly cast. Mr. Paleface does not belong here. He should not have come. Providing the movie with the necessary amount of historical racism is Shirley Henderson. She has a nice way of going about it, like for instance fearfully remarking that Indians are murderous non-beings and then subsequently backing up the statement with the words, “It’s a well documented fact.” On some level every truthful historical movie is going to have characters that are flawed in such a way. Almost everybody back then was what we would call racist and sexist today. Future generations will probably say similar things about us I’m sure, though for what I have no idea. 

One of my favorite books, “The Education of Henry Adams” had the following quote in it that caught my eye:

“The study of history is useful to the historian in teaching him of his ignorance of women; and the mass of this ignorance crushes one who is familiar enough with what are called historical sources to realize how few women have ever been known. The woman who is known only through a man is known wrong, and excepting one or two like Mme. de Sevigne, no woman has pictured herself.” (1905)

Growing up in school you have this notion that all of world history is accessible simply by opening a book, but this isn’t the case. History is limited by memory and preserved only by the efforts of real people who take the time to write it down. It is a profound truth that the people who did write things down were mainly concerned with men and were almost never women. According to what I’ve rated on Netflix, I have seen 1,511 movies. I can count on one hand how many of these were stories about historical women told by a woman (In this, I am subscribing to the auteur theory of filmmaking by crediting the role of author to not the writer but the director of a movie. In either case, still one hand) Specifically, I have only seen two movies. One was Sofia Coppola’s “Marie Antoinette,” and now this one. This isn’t simply me being not very broad in movie choices nor is it completely the fault of the Hollywood boy’s club (though admittedly they do a downright awful job of marketing their products to half the movie going public.) It represents a literal gap in our knowledge of the world. These stories are lost to history. “Meek’s Cutoff” is based on a true story. There was a guide on the Oregon Trail named Stephen Meek who led a wagon trail in 1845 off into an uninhabitable no-man’s land. He didn’t know where he was going. The train ran out of water. People died and the settlers mutinied. But there were thousands of wagons not just three. And the Michelle Williams character? She’s completely fictional. Certainly there were women there. Yes, they did all the work we see them do in this movie. But if they had any personalities at all, we have no way of knowing what they consisted of. Nobody bothered to record it.

Revolutionary Road 03/22/09 (4/5 Stars)

Call it the feminist argument against Suburbia even though there is no explicit statement to that effect. What this movie illustrates though is why and how the suburban housewife becomes desperate. If I recall correctly, this is the second movie in the year 2008 that Kate Winslett killed herself in. And if I’m not mistaken, she has received a Golden Globe for this one and an Oscar and another Golden Globe for the other (The Reader). Surely, this will spawn jokes about actresses jumping at roles in which they die tragically in order to bait the Oscars. Hilary Swank has gone by that way twice already (Million Dollar Baby, Boys Don’t Cry). Anyway back to Revolutionary Road. I will admit that I liked this film, enjoyed it even. But that isn’t because it’s warm or funny or romantic. I liked it because it makes manifest in artistic form everything I believe about suburbia, in that, it describes it as empty and hopeless. This movie is preaching to the choir. I already thought that such a story was completely possible, and very rational. Call this movie Max Propaganda. I have had ideas of buying the DVD and hosting an anti-suburbia party in my New York City apartment. In it, we would play ‘Revolutionary Road’ on mute in the living room and celebrate the fact that we don’t live in such desperate, empty, and hopeless places. I really want to watch this movie in Paris. See the film, you’ll know what I mean. 
Anyway, now really back to Revolutionary Road. It concerns the volatile marriage of Frank and April Wheeler (played by Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslett respectively). They live in a suburb. Every morning Frank gets into the only car they own and commutes into the city to work at a job he hates. April stays at home, and stranded in the morass of nothingness that is suburbia (and with no way out because Frank took the only car to work) she does household chores and slowly goes insane with boredom. There is a particularly good shot of her taking out the trash and standing silently in her driveway looking down Revolutionary Road. You would expect tumbleweed to blow through the place is so dead. The only respite she seems to have from this existence is when a neighbor stops by. Then she has someone to drink coffee with for about five minutes. Other than that, she spends the day completely alone. After a couple of fights, April comes up with a crazy idea. Why don’t they completely ditch the godforsaken place and move to Paris. She would get a job and he would have time to find himself. Frank thinks about it and says that he will. April falls in love with him again because he seems to understand.
But does he really? There is this idea out there about suburbia in general. That the way it is set up and structured is fundamentally unfair to women. The effect of its design nullifies the responsibilities of the man to his family. He commutes to a distant place where he has free rein to do whatever he wants (Frank in this movie has an affair). In contrast, the wife is stuck at home and forced to raise the kids on her own. Is it a control thing? Did men (all the city planners were men) purposely design a system of living that gave themselves freedom to screw around while encapsulating the women in isolated places, thereby constricting their freedom. Whether there was malicious intent or not, the result is a system where women are deprived of the ability to take care of themselves and thus are dependent on their husbands for everything: money, shelter, and especially social connections. So when Frank decides not to go to Paris, April, of course, cannot also. Is it any wonder that the women of the baby boom generation, which grew up in these homes, took their college educations, got jobs, and exploded the divorce rate in the seventies? Surely they must have noted in some abstract way that the life of a suburban housewife is some sort of scam. 
Frank’s character in this story is given the benefit of the doubt. Once he is offered a raise at his job and April becomes pregnant, he thinks that the choice to stay has a certain amount of logic to it. Like many men, he doesn’t get why April would be unhappy. They have a beautiful house, nice kids, and all this stuff. And if she really feels bad about it, they now have enough money to send her to a shrink. This conveniently forgets the idea that stuff doesn’t make up for a lack of a life and a semblance of independence. (If that were true there would be a hell of a lot more women becoming nuns.) But whatever, you know, I suppose that’s a hard concept to grasp what with all that American Dream house with a white picket fence and two cars propaganda garbage. 
The director Sam Mendes has made good films about suburban malaise before (American Beauty) but they were never as biting as this. I loved a few scenes that brought back vivid memories of my own experience. A father asks his kids what is on TV and is answered with vacant stares directed at static, the whole presentation aspect of playing house: where so much energy is expended to impress the rare guest, and when the couple gets double parked when they visit a local bar they can’t leave because the local bar is too far away from their home. Just the overall quietness of the entire thing, where nothing is happening, nothing has happened, and nothing will happen was eerily familiar. There is possibly no truthful way to tell a story set in suburbia without it being boring. That’s why very few movies are set there. 
Michael Shannon got an Oscar nomination for his role as a crazy man that basically reiterates the only sane way to look at Suburbia. (See my comments above). For once I would love to see a rational person say these things, but I guess a mental patient is better than nothing. He does a very good job. He’s one of those actors you wish were better looking and thus would get better roles. See him in ‘Shotgun Stories’ if you want to see that guy do some great work in a leading role.