Meek's Cutoff (2011)

If you hate the "boring" chapters set the woods in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, then you'll hate this.

Reichardt’s incredible formal achievement refreshingly deflates the western of the macho posturing that frequently plagues the genre. But the film also too frequently operates on the level of obvious symbolism: The white men are all simps or braggarts, the white women either headstrong individuals of purity or cowering conformists, while the lone Native American they capture along the way is seemingly a voice of control and good sense. For most of the first hour, the film is a well-photographed and extremely politically correct—or, in other words, deadly dull.

[…]

A man doing a purposeful caricature walks away with Meek’s Cutoff: As Meek, Greenwood, a talented but sometimes stiff actor, seems to thrill in playing a larger-than-life fool in the mode of Buffalo Bill. Greenwood would appear to understand that the film—even if it’s attempting to criticize or revitalize western iconography—needs to offer at least a few of the conventional pleasures of the genre. Meek, the least sympathetic character in the film, is also the only one who seems to be alive.

— Chuck Bowen (Slant Magazine)

Uncertainty about the authentic nature and motivations of its characters elevates Meek’s Cutoff into something more ruminative, indistinct, and unsettling than its political metaphors initially suggest. And had Reichardt opted to craft three-dimensional protagonists as well, her film might have approached the spartan masterpiece it frequently seems poised to become. Unfortunately, by keeping her emigrants at a persistent remove, the filmmaker renders them more representational figures than living, breathing humans, and thus her inquiry into her chosen themes comes off as a tad too conceptual and academic to generate consistent engagement with their poignant emotional plight.

— Nick Schager (Slant Magazine)

“Meek’s Cutoff” is built around a dialectic of freedom and constriction. The landscape is wide and vast — coastal plains, rippling mountains and high scrub stretching toward a distant horizon — but [the women] wear bonnets with long, straightened brims, which hide their faces from us and limit how much they can see. The small covered wagons look like coffins on wheels, as if the goal of this journey were not a new life but the discovery of a suitable burial ground.

— A. O. Scott (The New York Times)

A stationary shot early on appears to find the group’s covered wagons exiting the bottom of the frame as another set of vehicles looms in the distance. It takes a moment to realize that Reichardt—also the film’s editor—is using an extremely slow dissolve, and that the top of the frame displays the same wagons approaching in a new location. An entrancing moment of cinematography and editing, it quietly dislocates us, painting the landscape as a site of shifting borders and uncertain perspectives.

— Matt Connolly (Reverse Shot)