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BUTCHER'S CROSSING
Director: Gabe Polsky Cast: Fred Hechinger, Nicolas Cage, Jeremy Bobb, Xander Berkeley, Paul Raci, Rachel Keller MPAA
Rating: Running Time: 1:45 Release Date: 10/20/23 (limited) |
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Review by Mark Dujsik | October 19, 2023 A young man decides to travel west to see the country and to find himself. That's the basic premise of Butcher's Crossing and an idea that's about as old as the United States (and, without the specifics of the direction and the land, stories themselves, for that matter). It's based on John Williams' 1960 novel, which arrived at a time when deconstructing the romance of the Old West would have been seen as revolutionary, but the movie adaptation arrives more than a half a century after other books and plenty of movies have dissected the old, idealized notions of the era. It's covering very familiar ground, in other words. Stories don't need to be new or different to be or say something worthwhile, though, so let's not hold the belated nature of this adaptation against it too much. There's a sincerity to co-writer/director Gabe Polsky's movie in terms of its message and its examination of people under duress in the wild. That this tale doesn't have anything new or different to say, though, only highlights how little it actually does do within those familiar terms. The young man at the center of it is Will Andrews (Fred Hechinger), who abandons an Ivy League education to take a train to an unknown future in Kansas. His plan isn't much of one, except to find J.D. McDonald (Paul Raci), a man who once received help from Will's minister father and now runs a successful trading post in the town of Butcher's Crossing. Buffalo hides are all the rage at this moment in 1874, and Will just wants the opportunity to join a hunting party, so that he might get some first-hand experience living on and working out in the frontier. The whole current of the tale, really, is just to keep presenting Will with problems and obstacles that narrow his wide-eyed gaze of wonderment and flatten the bright smile that define his first arrival in Kansas. The first problem for his vague ambitions comes when J.D. turns down his request. This is hard land and a tough business for someone as green as Will, so it's best, according to J.D., if the young man realizes his romantic illusions of life out West are just that—a fantasy. Does the kid listen? Of course he doesn't. Instead, he finds the mysterious, bald-pated Miller (Nicolas Cage), who has seen buffalo diminish in the region but knows of a place along the Colorado Rocky Mountains where they're as widespread as they used to be here. In case it isn't apparent, the movie's central theme, apart from how nature can destroy the toughest of men and transform even the most idealistic into hardened and cynical ones, has to do with conservation. It's a well-meaning message, drenched in the blood, viscera, and senseless slaughter of animals that will nearly go extinct in the near-future of the narrative, but that's about the extent of it in Polsky and Liam Satre-Meloy's screenplay. The bulk of the story revolves around the hunters: the wholly inexperienced newcomer, the grizzled Miller, his old and religious coot of a camp manager Charley (Xander Berkley), and expert skinner Fred (Jeremy Bobb), who's the only man greedy or naïve enough to be convinced by Miller's tale of a land of countless bison. There are minor tensions at the start that escalate as food and water become scarce on the trail. Will, for example, is kind-hearted enough to offer a single mother and her two children, separated from a wagon train, some water from his canteen, but Miller stops him, telling him the world doesn't suffer the fool-hardy or something akin to that. Charley has some vague warnings, too, about how the young man will certainly discover why every man should fear the divine. For the most part, the performances start at an exaggerated pitch of one broad type, only to suddenly shift to an equally over-the-top tenor of a different one. It makes one long, as Will does for her character, for the brief subtlety of Rachel Keller's appearance as yet another clichéd type: the sex worker with a heart of gold, whose advances Will turns down for some hope of real love upon his return from the hunt. The rest of this is fairly predictable, as the men kill, skin, and butcher many bison, while Miller becomes obsessed with having the largest haul of hides in the recent memory of Butcher's Crossing. His obsession wears the other men thin, and eventually, nature does the rest of the work, when the quartet becomes stranded in the middle of nowhere. Of the actors with whom we're stuck in the wilderness, Bobb has the strongest handle on making minor adjustments to his character's worsening state of mind. Both Cage and Berkley go loud, the former in facial expressions and the latter vocally, and Hechinger simply drops an amusingly broad grin. The performances, basically, are about as limited as the material, which builds toward a resolution of multiple ironies. Butcher's Crossing can't muster much more than to point out that the legend of Old West isn't all that's cracked up to be, and at this point, that's not much of a point in the first place. Copyright © 2023 by Mark Dujsik. All rights reserved. |
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(for language, some violence/bloody images and brief sexual content)
