Off-Roading

Every few years, the Western stirs and lets out a muffled croak, although the sound could just as easily be gas escaping from its bloated corpse. The wagon-train movie, however, is well and truly dead, its bones bleached by the sun and coated with exhaust fumes. Who can imagine a time at which it might take weeks to effect a river crossing, months to traverse an expanse a jet can fly over in minutes?

The rap on Kelly Reichardt's Meek's Cutoff, inspired by an ill-fated episode in the history of the Oregon Trail, is that it's pointlessly distended and narratively slight — in other words, slow and boring. And while it's positively zippy compared to the events it depicts, it's clear that Reichardt and her screenwriter, Jon Raymond, mean to convey something of the endless drudgery of a desert crossing, made worse by the dubious navigational skills of Stephen Meek (Bruce Greenwood), a self-mythologizing mountain man with a Buffalo Bill beard and a twang as thick as tar. Large stretches pass without dialogue, and shots of the wagons rolling across the parched ground are a constant refrain.

The scope of the real 1845 expedition is drastically reduced, from 200 wagons to three, a move in keeping not only with the budgetary restrictions of an independent film, but also with Reichardt's desire to whittle the settlers' ordeal down to its core. Details of place and origin are shaved away, leaving only the present tense. We glean little about the three couples undertaking the journey, apart from their immediate responses: the Gatelys (Zoe Kazan and Paul Dano) grow hysterical; the Whites (Shirley Henderson and Neal Huff), anxious; the Tetherows (Michelle Williams and Will Patton), resolute. Their abstracted journey inevitably lends itself to allegorical readings about a nation adrift in the desert, especially once the settlers capture an Indian (Rod Rondeaux) and try to persuade him to lead them out. But though Reichardt and Raymond both point out the story's contemporary echoes in interviews, it cripples the film's resonance to reduce it to a parable of Bush-era folly.

More than a political tract, Meek's Cutoff functions as a sculpture in time, a careful stock-taking of the settlers' progress, both forward and back. When the Indian first appears in the landscape, Reichardt uses the loading of a flintlock rifle to generate almost unbearable tension. In a long shot that reduces her to a hazy figure in the midst of open space, Williams fires a shot into the air, and then reloads, a process that takes a half-dozen steps and what feels like several minutes. Then, she abruptly cuts away on the sound of the second shot, increasing its impact and incidentally demonstrating that the film's "real time" is nothing of the sort. Reichardt and Raymond don't use conventional tools to propel their story forward, but it moves at its own calculated pace.