REVIEW: Michelle Williams Shines in Ambitious, Gorgeous Meek's Cutoff

In Wendy and Lucy, Williams balanced vulnerability with fortitude; here, she's all gunpowder and good sense -- there's no time to worry about feelings. Williams' Emily isn't invincible, but even when her features are clouded with doubt and anxiety, you can see her trying to think her way out from under their shadow. Meek's Cutoff moves at pace that some might call unbearably slow; I see it as a form of hypnotism, a way of being lured into a movie almost against your will. Maybe that's why, when Emily grabs a shotgun at a crucial moment -- she fires it, reloads it and fires again, so expertly you'd think she handles firearms every day of her life -- her efficiency is so quietly thrilling. For the span of a few minutes, Meek's Cutoff almost feels like an action movie.

But of course, it isn't, not in the strict sense. But while plenty of people are anxiously awaiting Terrence Malick's Tree of Life, I suspect I've already seen the most beautiful-looking movie this year. Reichardt and her cinematographer, Chris Blauvelt, allow the weather, the time of day, and the landscape, as it shifts little by little beneath the settlers' feet, to determine the movie's color palette: One minute we see strata of sky, clouds and scrubby land rendered in dry, parched tones; the next we're transported into an early-evening fever dream of unreal-looking purples and blues right out of a Maxfield Parrish painting. Reichardt also pulls off a sensationally subtle dissolve, in which a vista of water and sky melts before our eyes into one of far less welcoming beauty, a dry mountain ridge being crossed by horses and wagons.

The dialogue in Meek's Cutoff is sparse, nestled amid the discreet squeaking of wagon wheels and the soft clattering of oxen's hooves on dry soil. Reichardt finds modest scraps of glory in the movie's smallest moments: In the way the light from a perforated tin lantern casts a fairy-tale glow on an otherwise quotidian moment between two characters, or the way a boy strokes the nose of a distressed, thirsty mule. Reichardt works efficiently, and on the cheap -- this clearly isn't a movie made on a lavish budget. But it's as resourceful and resolute as its characters are. Sometimes even a small movie can feel as big as the sky.

Pages: 1 2