It’s been a bit greater than a 12 months since “Butcher’s Crossing” premiered on the Toronto Movie Competition, however the timing of its theatrical launch might 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 sometimes infuriating) documentary about how bison have been very almost 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. 20 years later, nonetheless, 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 precipitated 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.
After 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 “large kill” in a valley hidden deep within the Colorado Territory. He claims he stumbled throughout the place years earlier, and witnessed a whole bunch, possibly hundreds, of buffalo roaming undisturbed. All he must seize “one of many greatest hauls anybody has ever seen,” Miller says, is a reliable crew and, after all, 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, “develop 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 beneath the steering of Will’s father, and made his fortune within the buffalo-hide commerce. However the grizzled dealer, who as soon as dealt with 100,000 hides in the middle of 12 months, is aware of the demand for buffalo fur already is diminishing, and he isn’t in search of new staff. Extra essential, he warns Won’t to just accept work in every other looking get together: “You begin out with these males, and it’ll wreck you. It’ll get in you want buffalo lice. You’ll be rotten from the within.”
Sadly, Will ignores McDonald’s counsel. Much more sadly, he quickly makes the acquaintance of Miller, who’s greater than prepared to miss the younger man’s inexperience and produce him alongside for the harmful experience —supplied 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 could be described as a tenderfoot in a extra conventional Western — loses his innocence whereas discovering that McDonald’s warnings have 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 harmful territory that different hunters have averted, to reach on the web site within the Colorado mountains the place Miller plans to make his desires come true.
However desires have a nasty behavior of turning into nightmares.
Even earlier than they attain the distant valley, Miller comes throughout as a unstable mixture of Captain Ahab and John Wayne’s Thomas Dunson in “Pink 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, nonetheless, 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 staff might moderately 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 could repulse members of the viewers as nicely — and Fred pointedly warns that they need to go away earlier than winter snow blocks their path dwelling. Which, after all, 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.
Bother is, there’s a conspicuous dearth of real suspense all through “Butcher’s Crossing,” a film that, whereas compelling in stretches, is simply too ponderous general to realize the impression 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 enjoying them. That is notably true of the younger prostitute performed by Rachel Keller, who’s seen early within the movie and later in Will’s fantasies, and likely 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 girl on the poster.
And but it will be unfair to dismiss “Butcher’s Crossing” totally out of hand. David Gallego’s placing 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. Name it dialing right down to a 6 from an 11, and also you received’t be far off the mark.
Finally, “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 in search of fortunes or, in Will’s case, satisfying their curiosity. The bitterly ironic ending stops in need of force-feeding simply desserts to the entire characters. However it’s a satisfying conclusion nonetheless.
