Screen Machine

Review: Meek’s Cutoff

There is a well-known Native American proverb that goes, “Don’t judge a man until you’ve walked two moons in his mocassins.” Meek’s Cutoff, the fourth feature length film from Kelly Reichardt (whose work is the subject of a specially programmed season at ACMI), goes some way at addressing both the stupidity and wisdom of such a sentiment.

Meek’s Cutoff follows the exploits of a small group of settlers crossing the Oregon High Desert lead by the titular Stephen Meek who may or may not be completely lost. The group has been travelling for much longer than expected, supplies are low, the landscape is unforgiving and this is all taking its toll on the settlers. They come across a lone Native American man wandering through the desert and he becomes the pivot around which the matter of the group’s survival will turn as they search desperately for a source of water.

Reichardt’s great achievement in this film lies in the subtlety with which she approaches the configuration of the Indian as Other. Thankfully Reichardt resists any vulgar humanisation of the Indian (a process which, as Zizek notes, operates as the obverse and the truth of the fear of the toxic Other). We are given neither the conservative certainty of the Indian as savage nor the politically correct version of the Indian as peaceful conduit to the spirit world. Instead we are given the Indian as the question mark (Is he leading us to water? Is he leading us into a trap?) that must nevertheless be treated as a full stop.

Should we consider this emphasis on the “unknowability” of the Indian (the impossibility of walking in his mocassins) as in some way racist? The answer, at least for me, is no because Reichardt universalises the concept of Otherness to encompass all the elements of the film. The world of Meek’s Cutoff is all doubt and anxiety. The Otherness that structures the relationship between settlers and native also structures that of husband and wife, the travellers and their guide, that between friends and between everyone and the harsh landscape they travel in. What is unknowable in the Indian finds itself reflected in Michelle Williams’ performance – the precise way she resists the actorly temptation to falsely externalise her inner life. This is not some high concept Unknowability but a very ordinary unknowability: We may not be given the comfort of subtitles to tell us what the Indian is saying but we are given a face in all its generosity and ambiguity.

But even as Reichardt affirms the impossibility of knowing, she remains a committed observer of the concrete details of her characters’ existence (as in Wendy and Lucy). We may not be able to walk in another’s mocassins, but nevertheless we must do it. Thus, Meek’s Cutoff is a film obsessed with the processes of daily survival. Conall Cash is right when he cites the thirty seconds Michelle Williams spends reloading a gun as “the most compelling in any American film of recent years”. But it’s not just the gun being reloaded. It’s also the food being eaten and the ground being walked across. Meek’s Cutoff is, like Louis Malle’s documentary Humain, trop humain, concerned with the body – the way the environment comes to bear on it, the way it interpenetrates with other bodies. I’m not satisfied with calling Meek’s Cutoff an anti-western. If anything, let’s call it a materialist western because it’s concerned with practical labor and everyday economic needs. When Michelle Williams’ character notices the Indian’s broken shoes and takes it upon herself to mend them, we don’t learn some mush about human vulnerability nor do we receive some “worthy” message about human compassion. We only hear Michelle Williams speaking, “I want him to owe me something”.

Brad Nguyen is a co-editor of Screen Machine. He studied Cinema Studies at the University of Melbourne, was the film reviewer for Triple R Breakfasters and has written for Senses of Cinema.

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