When I was a young boy, one of my first experiences with computers was with the legendary title Oregon Trail where you controlled a family of pioneers moving West in the 1800s. It was an addictive little game, in no small part because of a particularly entertaining minigame where you got to go "hunting" and kill a large amount of wild animals. But while I fondly remember playing Oregon Trail for years as a child, I don't think that I ever beat the game more than two or three times. I would never get much farther than Colorado before I either got attacked by Indians, died of thirst, or collapsed from dysentery. And so it was for many real pioneers who risked everything to travel West for a new life. Perhaps better than any other film that I have ever seen, Kelly Reichardt's Meek's Cutoff captures what it must have been like to brave the Oregon Trail. The film is a loose reconstruction of a real-life incident on the Oregon Trail in 1845, in which frontier guide Stephen Meek led a wagon train through a dangerous piece of territory which resulted in accidents and the deaths of several of their party. It is told primarily through the perspective of the party's women, delegated to the back of the train where they can only hear soft snatches of conversation from the flustered and frustrated menfolk. It has been a long time since I have seen a movie use diegetic sound to such great effect. It harkens back to other classic films where the interplay between the image and the audio was of equal importance such as Fritz Lang's M (1931), Andrei Tarkovsky's Stalker (1979), and Francis Ford Coppola's The Conversation (1974). Reichardt perfectly captures the harsh, bleak, and empty world of the Oregon Trail with breathtaking cinematography ruled by a steady, restrained hand. It is a nearly flawless film. In the future, when I hear people complain that Americans can't make movies anymore, all I need to do is point to Meek's Cutoff.
9/10
Reichardt's direction is nothing short of a revelation.
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