Review by
Eric Hillis
Directed by: Gabe Polsky
Starring: Nicolas Cage, Fred Hechinger, Xander Berkeley, Rachel Keller, Jeremy Bobb, Paul Raci
Nicolas Cage recently made his western debut with the mediocre oater
The Old Way. The flamboyant actor was miscast in a role crying out for a Kevin Costner
or a Jeff Bridges. On paper, director Gabe Polsky's
Butcher's Crossing should be a better fit for Cage's
theatrics, as he plays a literal madman here. Oddly, Cage is so reined in
that he's barely present, something I never thought I'd say about
Hollywood's most exuberant star.
Based on the 1960 novel by John Edward Williams, the film opens in
1874 Kansas. Young minister's son Will Andrews (Fred Hechinger) has
dropped out of Harvard and headed west with romantic notions of seeing the
real America. Looking to join a buffalo hunting party, Will finds himself in
Buffalo's Crossing, a busy trading post for the fur trade. There he finds
Cage's Miller, a gruff buffalo hunter who speaks of a legendary herd
numbering the tens of thousands which he came across in a remote Colorado
valley a decade earlier. Andrews is so enamoured of the hunter that he
agrees to finance an expedition to the valley.
Will and Miller are joined by Miller's elderly companion and cook Charlie
(Xander Berkeley in the sort of role Walter Brennan might have
played), and by Fred (Jeremy Bobb), a boorish buffalo skinner. The
expedition sees the party trek across the desert, where they run low on
water and encounter the usual victims of Indian raiding parties along with a
desperate mother seeking water for her children. Miller's refusal to spare
any of his party's water gives Andrews his first glimpse of the Darwinian
coldness of the west.
When the men finally arrive at Miller's fabled valley, it turns out he
wasn't exaggerating, with buffalo so numerous they paint the landscape
black. Andrews is thrilled as he's taught how to kill and skin the beasts at
the experienced hands of Miller and Fred. But as winter approaches and
Miller insists on staying until every animal in the herd is dead, tensions
begin to rise.
Williams' novel is widely acclaimed as a gruelling, punishing read that
treats its subject matter in unflinching detail. It's easy to see why this
subject would make for a fine literary work in the mould of Jack London or
Joseph Conrad, but its ideas aren't so easy to communicate in the
restrictions of a two hour movie. For a start, Polsky and co-writer Liam Satre-Meloy
struggle to convey time and space. The film relies on characters telling us
how far they've travelled, and it comes as a surprise when such distances
are verbally conveyed. The men seem to arrive at their destination in a
couple of days rather than the months we're supposed to believe it actually
took them. The men talk a lot about being thirsty but rarely look thirsty.
Worried characters talk of the onset of winter but there's no visual sense
of this passage of time save for the eventual snowfall. Even when the men
find themselves trapped in the valley by snow they never quite seem as
visibly affected as you might expect by such conditions. Simple visual
signifiers like steamy breath, huddling around campfires and pulling buffalo
hides close to their bodies are oddly absent, leaving us in no doubt that
the actors are no more than a few feet away from a craft services table and
a warm trailer. When Miller tells us there's no way out of the valley for at
least six months, we don't buy it as the film never shows us any visual
evidence to back up such a claim.
Just as unconvincing as the film's setting are its characters. All four are
little more than archetypes and we never really get to know any of them
despite spending two hours stuck in a valley with this bunch. Andrews is
young and naive. Miller is nuts. Charlie is a drunk (who somehow managed to
bring enough alcohol to keep him sozzled for a full year???). Fred is an
asshole. That's as deep as it gets. The central relationship between Andrews
and Miller is woefully underexplored. You might think the film would lean
into the idea of Andrews viewing Miller as a father figure who represents an
antidote to the stuffy world he left back east, but this dynamic is barely
broached.
The film closes with a string of facts about how the white man almost made
the buffalo extinct and how the animal is now making a comeback thanks to
the preservation efforts of Native Americans. The suggestion is that we've
just watched a movie with a message about conservation, but the film itself
never really gets that idea across. The plight of the buffalo is very much
secondary to that of its human (or inhuman) characters, none of whom are
interesting enough for us to care about.
