Meek's Cutoff

2010 // USA // Kelly Reichardt // May 15, 2011 // Theatrical Print (Landmark Plaza Frontenac Cinema)

[Note: This post contains minor spoilers.]

In general, I don't think it's too controversial to assert that the formal aspects of a Kelly Reichardt film are less remarkable than depth and allure of the underlying story. The director's straightforward, lo-fi approach to filmmaking doesn't aspire to seduce the viewer with ecstatic imagery. Rather, the almost documentary-like style of her work aims for a seamlessness with everyday human observation, the better to convey the authentic unease of characters boxed in by social, religious, and financial obstacles. The director's previous film, Wendy and Lucy, pointedly focused on the bare-bones concerns of survival in an economically distressed and cold-hearted contemporary American landscape. Meek's Cutoff, Reichardt's foray into the realm of the revisionist Western, ratchets up the life-or-death quality of such miserably tangible concerns by transporting the action to a much younger US-of-A. Penned by the director's longtime collaborator Jonathan Raymond, the film closely shadows the day-to-day (and night-to-night) ordeals of three pioneer families on the Oregon Trail, who have offered their savings and their fates to a guide who may or may not be hopelessly lost.

Meek's Cutoff exhibits many of the director's signature elements: measured pacing, sparing dialog, a reliance on naturalistic location shooting, and a defiantly ordinary tone to the presentation of pivotal dramatic moments. Her style has never been what one could credibly term "commercial," but Reichardt still tweaks expectations here in eyebrow-raising ways. The film is presented in a claustrophobic 4:3 aspect ratio, and is the first feature since the director's 1994 debut River of Grass to be shot in 35mm, after years of work in the grainier Super 8 and 16mm formats. What Reichardt is presenting, therefore, is a dusty period Western set on the sweeping high desert of eastern Oregon... using the smoothest film stock and squarest frame she has ever employed. These choices aren't as unsuitable as they might seem at first. The slicker look and narrow frame both act to counter the intrinsic emotional remove of the historical setting, respectively establishing a continuity with contemporary life and emphasizing the urgency of the pioneers' plight.

The story itself is, not to put too fine a point on it, wonderful stuff, a superbly executed example of slow-burn anxiety sustained over one hundred minutes using just nine actors and more-or-less one setting. Reichardt and Raymond bore right down to the awful, elemental core of their frontier tale: Namely, the unstoppable anguish that wells up when you know that you are almost certainly fucked, but don't know exactly how fucked. I was reminded of films as diverse as The Lord of the Flies, Mutiny on the Bounty, Deliverance, and the superlative documentary Stranded. Also The Blair Witch Project, of all things, which struck a similar mood, and brought to mind Heather's almost pleading explanation for why she and her hapless colleagues couldn't be lost: "This is America! We've exhausted all of our natural resources!"

Not so in the antebellum Western landscape of Meek's Cutoff, which supplies not only trackless wilds, natural hazards, and Indian hordes (always just behind the next ridge) but also an internal antagonist in the person of the titular guide, Stephen Meek (Bruce Greenwood). Compared to the plain-spoken, worrisome pioneers, Meek is a larger-than-life character, fond of spinning tall tales and projecting cocksure menace. The pioneers, especially hard-eyed Emily (Michelle Williams), suspect that Meek has led them astray and won't admit to his error--or, even more worryingly, has deliberately marched them into the desert to perish. Running low on water and past the point of being able to return to the main trail, they have few options. Depending on each character's biases and degree of pessimism, their shifty guide looks like either their only hope or their worst enemy.

Meek acquires some competition for that two-sided role when the pioneers capture a Cayuse Indian (Rod Rondeaux). Emily and her husband Soloman (Will Patton) suspect that their hostage can lead the group to water, but the others regard him as a latent threat. Rondeaux, who utters not one word of English, gives unquestionably the best performance in the film, almost entirely with his subtly expressive features. The rest of the cast is in generally good form, even the unfortunate Greenwood, whose role seems to have been written in a deliberately hammy manner in order to draw attention to Meek's grizzled phoniness. That said, this is a director's film, not an actor's.

Befitting her interest in the viewpoints of marginalized and neglected individuals, Reichardt generally keeps the focus on Emily and the other wives, devoting rapt attention to mundane tasks such as the gathering of firewood, mending of shoe leather, and kneading of dough. As such, the viewer is often partly excluded from the urgent conversations of the menfolk, who huddle repeatedly about Meek and then report back to the women. Emily in particular is no fool, and her situation is rendered especially galling given how much she perceives and yet how little her voice counts. Soloman seems like a sensible and decent man, and he clearly listens to his wife more closely than his fellows do, but ultimately Emily is merely being led along on a hellish, male-directed ride. When she offers kindness to the group's Indian captive, it's more an act of defiance towards the bigoted, fear-mongering Meek than the moral compulsion of a natural nurturer.

The setting might be Western, but the cinematic language of Meek's Cutoff suggests a thriller (albeit an exceedingly unhurried one), calibrated to maximize the viewer's wariness and sense of mounting dread. Case in point: Reichardt has typically relied on diegetic music, when she utilizes music at all, but here she employs an eerie, gnawing score from Jeff Grace, which not-so-subtly evokes the most ambient bits of Johnny Greenwood's work in There Will Be Blood. It gets the flesh crawling, and lends an unbearably ominous character to superficially innocuous images, such as the glittering surface of an alkali lake or the mysterious glyphs scratched on a cliff face.

It's that sense of incrementally rising tension and clarifying stakes that makes the film's ambiguous, sudden conclusion such a jolt. This will likely be the point where many viewers will throw up their hands in annoyance. After gesturing towards a violent climactic showdown of some sort, the film simply stops, without any satisfactory resolution to the core scenario. This strikes me as a brilliant gambit, although I can certainly sympathize with viewers who feel cheated by what they might perceive as the film's smug reticence. Personally, I see the abrupt, inconclusive ending as impressively shrewd and perfectly consistent with everything that has gone before. While the film's sympathies lie with Emily, there is no reason to regard her as obviously correct in her assessment that the Indian is trustworthy and Meek is duplicitous. We have as much information as any of the characters, and each individual's reactions can be seen as a rational response to a reasonable conclusion. Reichardt's non-ending highlights the fact that regardless of how events unfold after the film concludes, no one will be proven "right," as there is no solution to the band's desperate situation that can be gleaned from a coolly logical reading of the evidence. When one character declares late in the film, "All of this has already been decided," they aren't merely voicing a Calvinist theological sentiment, but making a hard-nosed observation about how little control one has once all the chips are on the table and all the cards are drawn.

On the whole: a tough, chilling, vital work of cinema.

Cave of Forgotten Dreams

2010 // USA // Werner Herzog // May 11, 2011 // 3D Digital Projection (Hi-Pointe Theater)

A feature documentary about the 32,000-year-old paintings within Chauvet Cave near Vallon-Pont-d'Arc, France is almost guaranteed to contain abundant gawking at the archaeological wonders on display, as well as wooly speculation on the site's lingering scientific mysteries. A Werner Herzog documentary about the same topic also promises genuine cinema, as well as a slightly askew consideration of the profound thematic concerns that the director typically espies in any protracted consideration of the natural (or human-made) world.

In this respect, Cave of Forgotten Dreams delivers exquisitely. Granted, when the subject is the oldest cave paintings on Earth, the purple philosophical musings practically write themselves. Heck, the themes are all standing around in plain sight: the essence of human nature, the function of artistic representation, and the relative opacity or porosity of time and space. Still, there's something gratifying in allowing Herzog's delicious German cadences to guide us through Chauvet's wonders, although his characteristically loopy interjections and ruminations are, as usual, a matter of taste. (Referring to the hundreds of thousand of spatial data points used to map the cave, Herzog queries a geologist, "Do they dream?")

It's admittedly remarkable how much detail one can discern from the HD digital footage of the cave's pristine, phantasmagorical spaces, especially given the severe constraints placed on the crew in terms of equipment and access. Herzog's discipline as a documentarian and the 3D element both reveal their merits in the film's long, glacial pans of the paintings, set to Ernst Reijseger's evocative original score. For great lengths of the film, the viewer is simply invited to gaze on the paintings and dwell on their meaning: for the Paleolithic artist, for themselves, and for the human race as a whole. The 3D photography superbly captures the complex curvature of the rock faces, conveying the astonishing manner in which the artists utilized the spatial nature of their medium to create depth, motion, and narrative. While the new film doesn't attain the intellectual sophistication or provocations of his late masterpieces Grizzly Man or Encounters at the End of the World, this film still exhibits Herzog the documentarian at the top of his game.

Hanna

2011 // USA // Joe Wright // May 4, 2011 // Theatrical Print (Landmark Theaters Harbor East)

Joe Wright's frustrating—and curiously lauded—2007 film Atonement features one of the most egregious illustrations of directorial indulgence from the past decade: an unbroken, five-minute pan of Allied forces stranded on the beach during the Dunkirk evacuation. It's a grand gesture as ambitious as it is pointless, apparently added mainly to satisfy Wright's curiosity about whether he could achieve such a logistical and technical ballet. It's also emblematic of Atonement's broader problems. Wright's employment of epic spectacle, hoary melodrama, and clumsy metatextual gestures conceal the fact that his adaptation of Ian McEwan's celebrated novel loses its way after an admittedly crackling first act.

Happily, the lean, jittery spy thriller Hanna seems to have liberated Wright to a degree. Freed from the aspirations of a sweeping, thematically dense work like Atonement, the directors guiltlessly savors his most garish habits and turns them into a feature-length celebration of globetrotting style over substance. The film's raison d'être seems to be defined as whatever scene is currently unfolding, whether it's Saoirse Ronan stalking reindeer with a handmade bow in a snowbound forest, or Eric Bana going bare-fisted with a legion of suit-and-tie-clad intelligence agents in a subway station. Then—zip!—it's off to the next shiny object. It may not be art, but, damn, at least it's not bloated or ponderous.

There's a plot lurking inside this bauble somewhere: Erik (Bana) has raised daughter Hanna (Ronan) in the arctic wilderness to be a perfect survivor and predator, waiting for the appropriate time to unleash her on CIA mastermind Marissa (Cate Blanchett) because of something vengeance something murdered wife something super-soldier program something something. Wright emphasizes that Marissa lives in a cold, sterile apartment and is scrupulous about her oral hygiene, which means she must be dastardly. You just can't trust someone who takes gum disease seriously.

The whole thing is about a mile wide and an inch deep, and often ridiculous, but it's never outright stupid. There just isn't enough story to support stupidity. Indeed, the film privileges the thrilling and the visually mesmerizing to the extent that it has blessedly little tolerance for scenes of dreary exposition. Wright prefers to linger dreamily on a fireside gypsy flamenco performance, or envision a CIA holding facility as a menacing and improbable labyrinth of arcs and long shadows. The film's centerpiece in this respect is the visage of Ronan herself, whose thousand-yard icy gaze, framed by ghostly eyebrows and tangled cornsilk tresses, serves as a signpost amid all the bizarre sets and outlandish action. From the moment the viewer first glimpses them, those eyes signal what's coming: swift, unadulterated death at the hands of a gawky teen.

The Thin Red Line

1998 // USA // Terrence Malick // April 21, 2011 // Blu-ray - Criterion (2010)

When I first encountered Terrence Malick's haunting film in its theatrical release thirteen years ago, I didn't quite know what to think, but I was certain that I had witnessed an inimitable species of war picture. I had never seen a Malick film before, and was somewhat unprepared for the signature elements of his style: the brooding voice-over narration, the rapturous regard for natural beauty, the curiously reflective and philosophical tone. Released around the same time as Saving Private Ryan, The Thin Red Line perhaps unavoidably prompted comparisons to Spielberg's ode to the Greatest Generation. In 1998, I emerged from Malick's film appreciating it as an admirable and unconventional entry in the genre, if a little too unconventional for my tastes. However, its potent visuals left an unforgettable stamp on my consciousness, exemplified by the underwater shots of Melanesians swimming in painfully blue Pacific waters. With a decade's worth of hindsight and broadened cinematic experience, it's obvious to me now that The Thin Red Line is the superior World War II film of that year, a work of genuine cinematic art compared to Spielberg's reverential but problematic R-rated Veterans Day fairy tale.

Indeed, revisiting The Thin Red Line on the stupendous new Blu-ray from Criterion, I'm prepared to call the film a stone-cold masterpiece. Three years ago, I was confident that Malick's The New World was the obviously finer work, but now I'm not so sure. In telling (loosely) the story of the Guadacanal campaign, and in particular the Battle of Galloping Horse, The Thin Red Line effortlessly blends two seemingly contradictory currents: novelist James Jones' profoundly contemptuous stance towards modern warfare, and the director's own euphoric wonderment at life itself, in all its manifestations. The result is undeniably a towering achievement, a tone poem to the cosmos' twin mysteries of cruelty and splendor.

Malick's The Thin Red Line is unfailingly affecting on its own terms, but Jones' pessimistic ethos lurks like an enormous, slouching beast in the film's long shadows. Criterion's liner notes include an essential 1963 essay by Jones, "Phony War Films," in which he excoriates well-loved works such as The Guns of Navarone, Bataan, and Men in War. Jones dismisses Hollywood's war features for their brainless lack of realism; for their trite plots and stock characters; and for their contemptible romanticization of individual heroism in an age of ruthless, mechanized horror. The essay provides valuable context for Malick's adaptation, offering a glimpse of the caustic antiwar sentiment that underlies the source material and compels the film's bleakest sentiments.

Malick strives for authenticity in his depiction of contemporary warfare, with its unpredictable violence and cold disregard for the enlisted man's humanity, but his perpetually awestruck sensibility permits a more sweeping gaze than does Jones' lacerated cynicism. The Thin Red Line regards the massacre of soldiers by pitiless machine gun fire as but one movement in the symphony of the universe. In Malick's hands, such brutality harmonizes with the silent gliding of a viper through rustling grass, or the feeble struggles of a dying nestling. This approach is not without risks, as pulling back too far from the twentieth century's paramount cruelties can diminish them into mere amoral events to be admired for their own dark beauty. And in truth, one of the film's most strangely lovely sequences is a fogbound assault on a starving Japanese jungle encampment, which John Toll's photography and Hans Zimmer's tremendous score transform into an operatic whirl of surreal horror.

However, a filmmaker as adroit as Malick is attuned to his work's inherent risks. Crucially, he establishes within The Thin Red Line a dialogue between the dour pragmatism of Sergeant Welsh (Sean Penn) and the ecstatic hopefulness of Private Witt (James Caviezel). This dialogue is conveyed both through explicit conversations between the two men--where Penn's bitter edge seems dominant, but can never quite find an opening in Caviezel's agreeable evasions--and also through the film's narrative events and luscious visual language. Neither worldview "wins" this duel, of course. Malick parries each desperate lunge of hope and despair with its complement, resulting in a sweat-soaked poetic melee of mutually annihilating questions and answers. I think it is telling, however, that the film ends with joyous Melanesian chanting and the indelible image of a lone, sprouting coconut in the receding tide. The mere endurance of life amid the worst atrocities humankind can muster, Malick suggests, is itself an argument for the blessed character of existence.

Win Win

2011 // USA // Thomas McCarthy // April 20, 2011 // Theatrical Print (St. Louis Cinemas Chase Park Plaza)

Thomas McCarthy's films don't promise adventurous formal cinema or profound explorations of challenging themes. They are Sundance-friendly characters studies first and last, befitting the works of an actor-turned-writer-director. While the stories McCarthy tells aren't exactly formulaic, they do rely on familiar dramatic elements as guideposts, steering the viewer through outlandish social landscapes (dare I say "comedic situations"?) strewn with emotional and ethical hazards. The Station Agent and The Visitor were both chock-a-block with indie funny-serious tropes, and both suffered from their share of screenplay speed bumps. Yet there is something appealingly off-center and restive in McCarthy's sensibility, a kind of recoil from contrived behavior and storybook tidiness that flows from an actor's studious observation of humanity. Ultimately, this quality results in films that favor the sorrowful, the confused, and the ambiguous, at least to a greater extent than comparable indie offerings.

The director's latest film, Win Win, is pitched in a more comedic register than his earlier efforts, complete with slightly cartoonish companions (Terry Cannavale and Jeffrey Tambor) for its standard Sad Sack protagonist, here embodied by ur-Sad Sack Paul Giamatti. Following two stunning lead performances from lesser-known actors in McCarthy's previous films (that would be Peter Dinklage in The Station Agent and Richard Jenkins in The Visitor), Giamatti's presence here is almost too fitting, lending the film a regrettable whiff of artistic conservatism. Alas, this is symptomatic of Win Win's larger approach, which favors the simplicity of stock characters and situations to a somewhat wearying degree.

Still, it remains a slippery and engaging film in several respects. High school wrestling is a pivotal element of the story, and the film even engages in some generic clichés--including a training montage!--but, strictly speaking, it cannot be regarded as an Underdog Sports Film. Unexpectedly, the film is revealed as a kind of morality tale centered on Giamatti's small-town, hard-luck estate lawyer / high school wrestling coach, Mike Flaherty. Another character is held in reserve to serve as a shrill antagonist, but the real villain here is Mike himself, who in the first ten minutes makes a moral blunder that slowly unravels over the film's duration. At first, this offense seems to work to Mike's advantage, as it not only garners him a much-needed paycheck as an elderly client's legal guardian, but also said client's troubled grandson (a marvelously cast Alex Shaffer) as a ringer for his objectively awful wrestling team. Needless to say, it doesn't work out as Mike would hope. The film has its share of wounded souls, but in contrast to McCarthy's prior works, Win Win is less a tale of emotional healing and discovery than a straight-up (albeit lighthearted) tragedy, one that unfolds at the intersection of obligation, selfishness, and humiliation.

Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives

2010 // Thailand // Apichatpong Weerasethakul // April 16, 2011 // Theatrical Print (Webster University Moore Auditorium)

The Palm d'Or-winning Uncle Boonmee is the first of Thai director "Joe" Weerasthakul's unconventional films that managed to elicit a response from me beyond, "Huh. Well that was... something." The director's most celebrated works prior to Boonmee, Tropical Malady and Syndromes and a Century, failed to establish any kind of emotional rapport with me as a viewer. I admired them as attractive and even mesmerizing cinematic objects, but little else. Not so with Boonmee, which I felt compelled to re-visit after encountering it at last year's St. Louis International Film Festival. I suppose that there's a lesson in there about giving challenging auteurs more than a single bite at the apple. Once in a while, something clicks into place with a given director and you can finally see what all the fuss is about.

I'm still sorting out exactly why I responded so strongly to Boonmee, but it's at least partly due to the elemental character of the film's themes, and also the frank manner in which those themes are presented. Frankness, of course, being a relative thing in a Weerasthakul outing. Compared to the opacity of Syndromes, this is pretty straightforward stuff. Boonmee is a film about mortality (among other matters) in which the primary thing that "happens" is the slow, lingering demise of the titular character. Theoretically morbid stuff, but Weerasthakul adds a palpable affection for sensory details, a matter-of-fact Buddhist sensibility, and a healthy serving of deadpan humor. The result isn't easy cinema, by any means. Boonmee features all sorts of curious events, and a couple of confounding digressions, principally a vignette about a Khmer or Siamese princess and her encounter with a talking catfish (?!). However, the film's disparate components just work, at least for this viewer, for reasons that are not entirely explicable. This sort of non-rational filmmaking claims David Lynch as its acknowledged grand master, but it's always exciting to see it emerge from other sources.

Weerasthakul's eye for arresting visuals has been apparent since I first encountered his works, but it took a second trip through Boonmee's eerie and eccentric pleasures for me to comprehend how crucial sound design is to the texture of the thing. The film boasts a luscious soundscape of natural and manmade din, much of it ambient and unremitting, from buzzing insects to roaring waterfalls to squawking televisions. When paired with the handsome but unadorned way that the director shoots everyday activities, the rich naturalism of the sound design seems to fill in the smells, flavors, and textures of Boonmee's world. When a restless, sweaty young monk savors a hot shower in the middle of the night, you can almost feel how refreshing it must be. When Boonmee and his sister-in-law sample tamarind honey straight from the honeycomb, I caught my mouth going slack at the thought of the sweet taste. Now that's transportive filmmaking.