It’s been a bit greater than a yr since “Butcher’s Crossing” premiered on the Toronto Film Festival, however the timing of its theatrical launch may hardly be extra propitious. Director Gabe Polsky’s grimly fatalistic Western has lastly arrived on the megaplexes simply days after the PBS airing of “The American Buffalo,” Ken Burns’ fascinating (and infrequently infuriating) documentary about how bison had been very practically hunted into extinction on this nation earlier than an unlikely group of preservations saved the shaggy beasts. As Burns emphasizes in his two-part movie, and Polsky’s drama duly notes throughout its finish credit, an estimated 60 million bison roamed the American West as late as 1860. Two a long time later, nevertheless, the bison inhabitants plunged to lower than 300.
Working from a script he and Liam Satre Meloy tailored from the novel by John Edward Williams, Polsky means that this staggering lower was brought on largely by males like Miller, the life-hardened buffalo hunter successfully performed by Nicolas Cage with equal measures of seasoned authority and tamped-down menace.
When we first encounter Miller in Butcher’s Crossing, an aptly named 1874 Kansas city the place the foremost trade is freighting buffalo hides, Miller appears implacably obsessed but not totally unreasonable as he talks about making a once-in-a-lifetime “huge kill” in a valley hidden deep within the Colorado Territory. He claims he stumbled throughout the place years earlier, and witnessed lots of, possibly hundreds, of buffalo roaming undisturbed. All he must seize “one of many largest hauls anybody has ever seen,” Miller says, is a reliable crew and, in fact, monetary backing.
Enter Will Andrews (Fred Hechinger), the privileged son of a Presbyterian minister, who has dropped out of Harvard to, as he places it, “broaden my understanding of the world past Boston.” He arrives in Butcher’s Crossing hoping to seek out work with McDonald (Paul Raci), a distant household good friend who discovered God underneath the steerage of Will’s father, and made his fortune within the buffalo-hide commerce. But the grizzled dealer, who as soon as dealt with 100,000 hides in the midst of yr, is aware of the demand for buffalo fur already is diminishing, and he isn’t searching for new workers. More essential, he warns Will to not settle for work in every other looking celebration: “You begin out with these males, and it’ll damage you. It’ll get in you want buffalo lice. You’ll be rotten from the within.”
Unfortunately, Will ignores McDonald’s counsel. Even extra sadly, he quickly makes the acquaintance of Miller, who’s greater than keen to miss the younger man’s inexperience and convey him alongside for the damaging trip —offered Miller makes a large money funding within the enterprise.
“Butcher’s Crossing” is at coronary heart a brutal coming-of-age story, as Will — a personality who may be described as a tenderfoot in a extra conventional Western — loses his innocence whereas discovering that McDonald’s warnings had been, if something, understated. He joins Miller, a crotchety Bible-thumping cook dinner named Charlie (Xander Berkeley), and a cynical skinner named Fred (Jeremy Bobb) within the lengthy trek by way of harmful territory that different hunters have averted, to reach on the website within the Colorado mountains the place Miller plans to make his desires come true.
But desires have a nasty behavior of turning into nightmares.
Even earlier than they attain the distant valley, Miller comes throughout as a risky mixture of Captain Ahab and John Wayne’s Thomas Dunson in “Red River,” relentlessly pushing himself and his males as they danger dying of thirst, encountering hostile Indians (who’re referenced however by no means seen), or just getting irretrievably misplaced. After they lastly do attain their vacation spot, nevertheless, Miller — whose shaven head unavoidably conjures reminiscences of Marlon Brando in “Apocalypse Now”) — descends into one thing perilously near insanity as he systematically slaughters scads of bison, winding up with way more hides than he and his crew may fairly count on to move again to Butcher’s Crossing.
Will is repeatedly sickened by the carnage — certainly, the graphic depiction of the killing and skinning might repulse members of the viewers as properly — and Fred pointedly warns that they need to depart earlier than winter snow blocks their path dwelling. Which, in fact, it will definitely does, setting us up for an intense drama on the order of “The Treasure of Sierra Madre” as greed and isolation take their psychic toll.
Trouble is, there’s a conspicuous dearth of real suspense all through “Butcher’s Crossing,” a film that, whereas compelling in stretches, is just too ponderous general to attain the influence for which it clearly strives. Polsky peppers the movie with Will’s desires and hallucinations, sequences that resemble nothing a lot because the dangerous LSD journeys in drug-centric Nineteen Sixties exploitation flicks, and are extra annoying than illuminating. The characters are so thinly written that they’re nearly totally outlined by the actors taking part in them. This is especially true of the younger prostitute performed by Rachel Keller, who’s seen early within the movie and later in Will’s fantasies, and probably will remind some film buffs of the stomach dancer who fleetingly seems in Robert Aldrich’s “The Flight of the Phoenix” primarily so they might place a lady on the poster.
And but it will be unfair to dismiss “Butcher’s Crossing” totally out of hand. David Gallego’s putting cinematography enhances each the wonder and the threats of the pure landscapes — the film was shot in Montana — and Cage is welcomely understated in a efficiency that’s all of the extra spectacular for his avoiding his trademark extra. Call it dialing right down to a 6 from an 11, and also you received’t be far off the mark.
Ultimately, “Butcher’s Crossing” works greatest as a blunt-force cautionary story depicting how the West was misplaced due to males like Miller, who wantonly raped the land whereas searching for fortunes or, in Will’s case, satisfying their curiosity. The bitterly ironic ending stops wanting force-feeding simply desserts to the entire characters. But it’s a satisfying conclusion nonetheless.
