Available on DVD: “Meek’s Cutoff”

Shirley Henderson, Zoe Kazan and Michelle Williams in Meek's Cutoff

The first thing you see in Meek’s Cutoff, after a hand-scrawled title card placing the action in the Oregon Territory in 1845, is a small group of settlers fording a river. It’s a treacherous, tedious undertaking, and Kelly Reichardt, the director of this tough, quiet revelation of a movie, films it in an uninflected style that makes everything feel at once mundane and mysterious. We are seeing the world more or less exactly as it looked to those hardy, foolish souls on screen (and almost forgetting to notice that most of them are actors we recognize from elsewhere). The way that world looked to them was unimaginably strange, every hill and rock loaded with portent, promise and menace.

How much has changed? The period setting marks Meek’s Cutoff as a western, and it has some other familiar trappings of the genre: horses, guns, Indians (or one Indian, anyway). Most classic westerns, though, are set during the later decades of the 19th century, in a wilderness already showing signs of development, with railroads, trading posts and lawmen wearing tin stars on their vests. Reichardt’s pre-Civil War Oregon is a primordial, unconquered place, more like the Virginia in Terrence Malick’s New World than John Ford’s Monument Valley. And yet it is also recognizably the same Oregon Reichardt has explored in two previous films, Old Joy and Wendy and Lucy, both set very much in the present and both written with Jon Raymond (who is the screenwriter here and is also a writer of the Mildred Pierce mini-series on HBO).

Meek’s Cutoff makes it clear that those earlier movies, in their way, were westerns too. The three films form a loose trilogy in which the durable mythology of the West — in the American imagination it’s always where you run to, where you start over, where you lose yourself — comes up against some flinty realities. These movies are, at first glance, simple and austere stories in which very little happens: two friends go camping in the woods; a young woman’s car breaks down on her way to Alaska; three families tramp for days in search of a new home, or at least some fresh water. But tucked inside these carefully told, almost anecdotal narratives are intense emotions, intractable social problems and human truths that are too deep, too sad and perhaps too painfully absurd to name.

Among the items the Meek’s travelers have brought with them from back East — Bibles, blankets, housewares — is a bird cage with what looks like a yellow parakeet inside. The cage and its inhabitant are tokens of refinement, artifacts and symbols of a civilization being transported, piece by piece and at great risk and cost, into a new and hostile environment. The bird, a wild creature confined in the midst of an open wilderness, is also a metaphor for the contradictions at the heart of that enterprise and for the predicament in which Reichardt’s characters, the women in particular, find themselves.

Meek’s Cutoff is built around a dialectic of freedom and constriction. The landscape is wide and vast — coastal plains, rippling mountains and high scrub stretching toward a distant horizon — but Reichardt and her cinematographer, Christopher Blauvelt, enclose it in a boxy, narrow frame. The women (played by Shirley Henderson, Zoe Kazan and Michelle Williams, the Wendy of Wendy and Lucy) wear bonnets with long, straightened brims, which hide their faces from us and limit how much they can see. The small covered wagons look like coffins on wheels, as if the goal of this journey were not a new life but the discovery of a suitable burial ground.

The pall of fatality that hangs over this motley caravan provides an undercurrent of mordant comedy. The people appear so incongruous in their surroundings, and their sense of determination — and also of divine entitlement to good fortune and happy days ahead — makes their hardship look like a cosmic joke. But if the universe is mocking them, Reichardt is a bit more compassionate, acknowledging the bravery as well as the foolishness of their quest.

Sometime before we meet them, three families hired a man named Stephen Meek (Bruce Greenwood), who claimed thorough knowledge of the territory and promised to help them find a place to settle. It may have seemed like a good idea at the time, but now the menfolk (Will Patton, Paul Dano and Neal Huff) are debating whether to hang Meek from a wagon frame and forge ahead without him. Their wives, excluded from serious deliberations, strain to overhear the conversation and wearily submit to the dictates of their husbands.

Meek is a braggart and a blowhard, a blustery, broken-down incarnation of a familiar western archetype: the frontiersman whose half-wild, half-civilized status makes him both an ideal guide and a convenient scapegoat for the genteel migrants whose society will ultimately take root in the West. He is the most talkative figure in the group, and as such the most entertaining and the most annoying.

The others are variously fearful, stoical and weary, and the tensions and bonds of solidarity that develop among them are the film’s dramatic sinews. There is not much action, but rather a gathering mood of dread and suspense, intensified by Jeff Grace’s score and the alterations of the terrain. When the Indian (Rod Rondeaux) shows up and is captured, buried conflicts erupt and the latent threat of violence rises to the surface. And as in so many westerns, basic ethical questions arise with stark, life-and-death force.

Reichardt is too wise and self-assured a filmmaker to offer easy answers. Meek’s Cutoff is as unsentimental and determined as Williams’s character, its absolutely believable heroine. It is also a bracingly original foray into territory that remains, in every sense, unsettled.