Meek’s Cutoff

With Kelly Reichardt in person

Dir. Kelly Reichardt. 2010, 104 mins. 35mm. With Michelle Williams, Bruce Greenwood, Will Patton, Zoe Kazan, Paul Dano. Based loosely on an historical event in which an ill-fated wagon train attempted a shortcut through the Oregon Trail, Meek’s Cutoff depicts the struggles of a three-family settler party led by Solomon Tetherow (Patton) and his wife Emily (a flinty Williams), as they make slow progress through the Cascade Mountains. Guided by a shifty mountain man named Stephen Meek (Greenwood), they quickly find themselves lost and beset by the specters of hunger and thirst, until they capture an indigenous man who may be their only salvation. Possessed of a stark, poker-faced poetry, Reichardt’s revisionist western remains one of her most celebrated achievements. “A tough, quiet revelation of a movie. Ms. Reichardt’s pre-Civil War Oregon is a primordial, unconquered place, more like the Virginia in Terrence Malick’s New World than John Ford’s Monument Valley. A bracingly original foray into territory that remains, in every sense, unsettled.” A.O. Scott, The New York Times.

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