Meeks Cutoff Reseña

Meek’s Cutoff Review

The film “Meeks Cutoff” adapts the true story of Meek, an inexperienced guide that in 1845 lost a caravan of about 200 cars in the desert of Oregon. The director, KellyReichardt, based the film on diaries of the expedition that were preserved (most written by women, an issue relevant to the point of view of the film) and reduces the dimensions of history, for economic andnarrative necessity. The filmmaker does not intend to shoot a Western epic, nor cares about the origin and final destination of the three families that star in the film. The important thing is the(anti) adventure, gritty physical and emotional journey of his characters. From the beginning the colonists begin to distrust Meek, a presumptuous guide who promised to lead though an alternative routeand ended up getting lost in the middle of a desert. Weathering, uncertainty and tension between the characters gradually will lead to a clash of views with the emergence of a Cayuse Indian. Eventhough the Indian might pose a threat to all of them, he might be the only possible way to find water, yet throughout the movie, he reveals himself as just as lost as they were. In this atmosphere ofconfusion, Emily emerges as the only character with serenity and courage to take the only reasonable decision.
The representation of women in Meek's Cutoff is one of the most striking aspects of thefilm. Not only because of the strangeness of a western film to have a woman who takes the lead, building a female hero without masculinizing her, simply leaving it on equal terms with men, but by showingthe role of women as never before seen in a western flick, depicting the harshness of daily work, pausing in his routine, paying attention to every gesture.
Meek's Cutoff inherits a sense, a way ofunderstanding art film that stretches across part of the film. The importance of the American landscape, physical and psychological effect on the characters that somehow face it, set another kind of...