Michelle Williams crosses Harney County on foot, in Meek’s Cutoff
When you watch movies for a living, you start to lost track of what you really like. Your job is to watch everything. You don’t have the luxury of following your nose, refining your own taste.
So it is rare to read a review which leaps with enthusiasm. But A. O. Scott just wrote one:
The first thing you see in “Meek’s Cutoff,” after a hand-scrawled title card placing the action in the Oregon Territory in 1845, is a small group of settlers fording a river. It’s a treacherous, tedious undertaking, and Kelly Reichardt, the director of this tough, quiet revelation of a movie, films it in an uninflected style that makes everything feel at once mundane and mysterious. We are seeing the world more or less exactly as it looked to those hardy, foolish souls on screen (and almost forgetting to notice that most of them are actors we recognize from elsewhere). The way that world looked to them was unimaginably strange, every hill and rock loaded with portent, promise and menace.
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Plus here’s the related slide show of stills.
Meek’s Cutoff opened nationwide on April 8.
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