movies
BY RICK LEVIN
Lost in Oregon in Meek’s Cutoff
As with Wendy and Lucy, which
dramatizes with profound compassion
the kind of disposable life most of us
only know as a newspaper statistic,
Raymond takes one of our most cherished
myths — of the proud, hardy pioneer
conquering the abundant West — and, in
Meek’s Cutoff, puts it to the test of truth.
Rather than molding his characters to fi t
some abstract pioneering prototype, he
bestows upon each a fragile humanity,
asking what happens when individuals are
confronted with the cosmic hostility of the
great unknown. “Some people think it’s a
Jack London story,” he says of the fi lm’s
survivalist bent. “It’s much more a Camus
story in my mind. They lived, and they
decimated everything.”
In a recent review in The New Yorker,
fi lm critic David Denby described the
aesthetic of Meek’s Cutoff as “punitive,”
in that it lingers on the everyday hardships
of the pioneers, especially the women,
moving at their deathly pace and fi lling the
screen with long, plodding scenes of a vast
and dusty emptiness. Denby’s grudging
admiration is a political miscue, blinding
him to the creeping beauty of a fi lm that
refuses, almost on principle, to clearly
delineate good and evil through acts of
explosive, cathartic bloodshed. The deep
vein of violence that runs through Meek’s
Cutoff is no less brutal for being almost
entirely implied. This is a Western without
a fi nal shootout, ending instead on a note
of operatic ambivalence. Those in tune
with Raymond’s vision will fi nd the movie
reverberating through their dreams for
weeks afterward.
“I love the idea of a Western,” Raymond
said. Nonetheless, he added, even in
those Westerns that could be considered
revisionist — such as the novels of Cormac
McCarthy or later Clint Eastwood fi lms
like Unforgiven — the subversive critique
An Ignominious Aura
Portland screenwriter Jonathan Raymond
revamps the Western with Meek’s Cutoff
P
Willamette Valley, led by a blowhard guide
who may be a fool or a saboteur, or neither,
or a little of both. As the stark, forbidding
moonscape of Eastern Oregon grinds them
down, these strangers in a strange land are
ravaged by sickness, doubt, paranoia and
the perpetual threat of violence.
With its unsentimental vision of western
expansion and its unwillingness to indulge
genre expectations, Meek’s Cutoff is not
so much an anti-Western as a kind of pre-
Western that pushes its godless realism to
surreal extremes. Thanks to the arid beauty
of Raymond’s writing and Reichardt’s
keenly unnerving direction, the movie feels
like a dilated Twilight Zone episode. It is
mesmerizing and nightmarish at once, and
it feels almost too real — simultaneously
eerie and epic, gritty and ghostly. The fi lm
suggests the survivalist transgressions of
the Donner Party, and it raises far more
questions than it answers.
Speaking last week by phone from
Portland, Raymond told me he fi rst became
interested in writing Meek’s Cutoff while
researching “a weird freelance gig” a
few years back, when he was hired to
name, of all things, a golf course in Bend.
Before that, he’d never been particularly
interested in Oregon Trail history, which
Raymond said “always struck me as just
such a boringly imperial story, the whole
idea of Manifest Destiny was disgusting
to me.” That changed when he happened
upon the idea of a lost wagon train
following an untrustworthy guide into the
Cascade mountain range. “It had such an
ignominious aura to it,” Raymond said.
ortland-based writer Jonathan
Raymond is on a roll. In 2008,
Raymond and director Kelly
Reichardt joined creative forces on the
indie sleeper Wendy and Lucy, a quiet,
haunting movie about a young drifter
and her dog hitting a patch of bad luck
as they pass northward through Oregon.
Starring Michelle Williams and adapted
from Raymond’s short story “Train Song”
from his collection Livability, this fi lm
— with its tidal pacing and tight-lipped
minimalism — turns the nameless face of
austerity and loss into the stuff of tragedy.
Wendy and Lucy is at once poetic and
plainspoken, and about as undeclarative
as movies get. It reveals a solitary life as
a freefall from free will — a compound
error that leads to a single, heartbreaking
decision.
More recently, Raymond — who also
wrote the teleplay for director Todd Haynes’
adaptation of Mildred Pierce for HBO —
has again collaborated with Reichardt (for
the third time) and Williams on Meek’s
Cutoff, which tells the story of a wagon train
of American immigrants in the mid-1800s
traveling west across the Oregon Trail. The
fi lm has garnered reactions ranging from
consternation to lofty critical acclaim —
mostly, and thankfully, the latter.
Meek’s Cutoff is a diffi cult and beautiful
and brilliant fi lm, quite unlike anything
that’s come before. It completely inverts
the triumphalist fables of Manifest Destiny
and westward settlement, focusing instead
on the wages of faith and hope on a small
band of pioneers seeking out the pass into
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of Western traditions is “revisionist in a
weird way,” like “having your cake and
eating it, too.” In the novel Blood Meridian,
for instance — which Raymond considers
“a summation of the Western genre thing
to the ultimate degree” — McCarthy
overturns the heroic mythology of the
West while still spilling buckets of blood
at every turn. No matter how postmodern
or deconstructed the Western, audiences
expect high noon, a showdown with itchy
trigger fi ngers that set guns blazing. In this
way, Raymond said, we are at once “super
self-conscious of these mythologies, but
we’re also going to indulge in these blood
orgies.”
Not so Meek’s Cutoff. What Raymond
sought to do in the screenplay was somehow
dig beneath “that kind of redemptive
violence that is the engine of so much of
this genre.” To this end, he asked himself,
“How do you create tension in drama that
doesn’t drive toward that bloodshed?” It
was “important to me to not have a Mexican
standoff,” Raymond said. The big question
was whether there is still appeal in a fi lm
that subverts such an essential component
of classic Westerns. “It turned out there
is,” he said. “As long as there’s a threat of
violence, then you have narrative tension in
some way.”
And, aside from Denby and other
similarly thick-of-mind critics, Meek’s
Cutoff is being hailed by many as a big
leap in cinematic innovation and vision
— a movie that offers a new language, as
it were, by which to judge our collective
past.
“I’ve been really pleased and surprised
at how many people seem to get what’s
happening,” Raymond said.
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