Meek's Cutoff (Kelly Reichardt, 2011)

Meek's Cutoff is an arduous trek through purgatory, the cracked and arid plane of reality separating the paradise a group of Oregon settlers seek to find and the hell to which they seem hopelessly destined. When the travelers change altitude on the bleached-bone plains of the Oregon High Desert, they always seem to go down, down, down deeper into this unforgiving pit of land. The expedition's guide, Stephen Meek (played by Bruce Greenwood, though you won't know it until you see his name in the credits), foretells the contents of hell, warning that it is full of bears, Indians and mountains. But those always seem to be just outside the frame, suggesting that they will fall into the bottomless maw of fire and pain at any second.

Of course, purgatory itself is a punishment meant to cleanse its prisoners of sin, and Kelly Reichardt opens her film with mood-establishing shots that set a tone of repetitive, grueling labor meant to deliver the three families (Will Patton/Michelle Williams, Paul Dano/Zoe Kazan, Neal Huff/Shirley Henderson) to their Eden. Long, static shots show the settlers moving across a river, descending down the sloping riverbed as if being swallowed at the start. Later, this vaguely disturbing scene will seem idyllic as the party moves further and further away from the fresh water they waded through to continue their journey west. Already, the seeds of dissolution, resentment and panic are setting in: before heading on with a few barrels of water to last them, one man carves "Lost" into a fallen tree nearby.

Where the Wild Things Are

There are so many places where Spike Jonze's third feature Where the Wild Things Are could go wrong. If I told you that the first ten minutes consisted of the director setting up its protagonist as a child in a broken home, neglected by a divorced mother trying to keep her job to continue to support her children, you'd probably -- Hey, come back! Let me finish. What on paper sounds like the beginnings of some half-assed Sundance feature becomes, under Jonze's wondrous direction and Dave Eggers' celebration of pre-pubescent angst, one of the finer films of the year and a technical marvel.

Jonze has a genuine find in Max Records, who plays the young hero Max. Imaginative but petulant, Max cannot connect with either his teenage sister nor his mom, and when mom invites a boyfriend over, an already cheesed Max acts out and ultimately runs away. Suddenly, he finds a sailboat that looks suspiciously like a small model he made for a miniature world in his bedroom, and sails until he reaches an island inhabited by huge monsters. Eggers and Jonze don't waste time in these first 15 minutes: as soon as he stumbles across the monsters, locked in the middle of some sort of argument, Max proudly strides in the middle of them and avoids being eaten by declaring himself their king.

Now that he's established the plot, Jonze slows the proceedings down and begins to explore this strange little world and its characters. Each of the monsters reflects a certain aspect of pre-teen moods: Alexander (voiced by Paul Dano), a goat-like beast, is timid and largely unheeded despite his keen observations; Judith (Catherine O'Hara) has the general snottiness and tactlessness of an impish child. Carol (James Gandolfini), the most prominent of the wild things, comes closest to Max's full range of emotions; Carol is the first to accept Max into the group, and he places all of his hopes on Max to keep the splintering wild things together.

Jonze has proven his visual acuity with his music videos as well as, to a more formal extent, his work directing his previous two features, both of which nicely juggled believable scenarios and set design with the skewed vision of Charlie Kaufman. Here, he at last unleashes the full range of his visual skill. The sharp, stripped branches jutting out from trees, and the houses and forts made from those sticks, reflect the characters' feelings of angst and loneliness, and one wonders how these large, hollow balls offer any sort of warmth or comfort to its residents. In one lovely segment, the wild things all pile on one another and Max, who is so dwarfed by this giant fur dome that he can wander freely in the middle of his new buddies.

I cannot honestly say, however, how well children might respond to this adaptation of a beloved children's book. Maurice Sendak's short story consisted of only 10 sentences and communicated the rest through illustrations, leaving a lot of space for Jonze and Eggers to fill. The script contains a number of fantastically funny moments -- many of them involving Alexander's quiet protests -- but for the most part the two focus on the sadder side of youth: their Max doesn't rebel because of unrestrained adolescent impudence but because he feels unloved and unwanted. Jonze keeps this idea grounded by presenting his mother's neglect without words and also inserting a number of shots that clearly demonstrate people caring for Max to prove that some of his feelings are hyperbolic and selfish. The mixture allows him to present Max both as a typical brat, but one with some pathos that never allows him to drift into the extremities of either unlikability or transparently sympathetic. The wild things also have their issues, and I found myself caring as much about whether this weird family stayed together as Max and his problems.

Interestingly, one segment of the film draws not from Sendak but Antoine de Sant-Exupéry and his classic Le Petit Prince: as Max and Carol wander through a desert (itself a clue to the scene's influence), Max relays something his science teacher told him earlier, that the sun would die one day. With only a moment's pause, Carol happily shuns such thoughts. "You're the king, and I'm big!" he says, "How could guys like us worry about a tiny little thing like the sun?" For all the film's dark themes of alienation and isolation, that one line is like a Beatles song in prose: I defy it not to bring a little cheer to people.

Most striking about the film, however, is the bizarre and magnificent design of the wild things. A combination of CGI and traditional puppetry and animatronics, the monsters can tread the line between purely fantastical (their heads are wider than their shoulders) and the realism that comes from an actual object being in the scene with the human actors. Often these creatures can be frightening, but I found myself strangely wishing to hug one of them, just one (probably not Judith).

Sadly, the film occasionally falters, such as its large storyline concerning a romance between the petulant and childlike Carol and the more reasonable KW (Lauren Ambrose), which drifts in and out of being interesting and grinds the picture to a halt when it isn't, as well as the ending, which to be fair couldn't really drawn upon Sendak's lack of resolution but fails to effectively conclude the story in its own way. These are minor quibbles, however, in the face of this charming but introspective young adult -- that's likely the area the film should be placed in, irrespective of the book -- feature that celebrates and contemplates the unrefined emotion of youth in equal measure. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go try to start up a dirt clod fight.

There Will Be Blood

1898. A man picks at the stone in a deep well, alone, hoping to find silver. Eventually, he falls and breaks his leg and must save himself. Several years later, he runs a small team of drillers and has abandoned silver for oil. In 1911, he runs a fledgling empire. We move through these periods with little diegetic sound, as buzzing violins crescendo over the desert landscapes.

Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood announces a fascinating new direction for one of the most promising of America's modern directors. I admit that, beloved as Magnolia was, I found it a pretentious, rambling (and not in a fun or insightful way) mess that tried to mix Altman's style of film with Scorsese' type of filmmaking and ended up a hollow masturbatory exercise that called more attention to the camera itself than the objects it captured. However, Boogie Nights remains one of my favorite films, and I keep bumping Punch-Drunk Love farther and farther up my queue until it is, at last, on deck.

Why do I bring this up? Well, this is a blog, so it's only fitting I talk about meaningless personal business, but also because it gives me a certain sense of happiness knowing that, even if I detest Punch-Drunk, I know that PTA never lost it because I've seen this film. Of course, his prior filmography is totally irrelevant, because Anderson tosses out his ensemble casts and surreality in favor of a stark vastness that explores a man as insoluble as Iago, and almost as sinister. It's as if he threw out Altman for Kubrick.

And he succeeded beyond my wildest dreams. Anderson still has a certain Scorsesian restlessness with his camera, but he puts it to good use here, moving along the barren lands, zooming in and out, locking into place in moments of minimalistic beauty. With this camera he follows Daniel Plainview, the oil man we meet at the start. Daniel Day-Lewis offers up possibly the finest performance of his career in terms of thematic weight as Plainview (though I'd still side with his Christy Brown in My Left Foot for the sheer effort involved), all the more surprising when you consider how little depth the character has.

That lack of depth threw me a bit at first. I've loved the film ever since I first saw it, but I could never figure out Plainview. At last, after multiple viewings and endless research, I've finally learned that that's the point: Plainview is a man so emotionally guarded and self-absorbed that we are never meant to learn about him. In that respect, it shares more than a little with Citizen Kane, a comparison I've seen in a number of more glowing reviews; like Kane, Plainview forms the nucleus for the story, yet the audience does not and cannot learn all or even most there is to know about the man. Both are character studies whose characters are too complex to be truly studied.



For that reason, the film feels intensely claustrophobic despite its epic visuals. Many, including myself, have compared it to Stanley Kubrick's masterpiece 2001: The Space Odyssey, from their use of terrifying glissandi violin movements over a vast setting with sparse dialogue. However, there's a fundamental difference between the two: Kubrick's film dealt, as most of his oeuvre did, with the loss of individuality. Kubrick always strove to reduce the individual to the nothingness he really was, and 2001 was his ultimate (and, funnily enough, his most sentimental) statement on the future of the individual: absorption into the universe and cold machinery, allowing man's evolution. There Will Be Blood, on the other hand, shows us a man who will not be swallowed whole by the space around him, a man who in fact comes to dominate that space.

Plainview regards everything around him as unworthy. Anderson captures the majesty around the character, but Daniel is always the dominant object in the frame. Endless films exist about self-centered anti-heroes, but here at last is true solipsism: if characters are standing damn near right next to Daniel they tend to stand at least slightly out of focus. This is Daniel's film, and it is why we learn so little. Precious few ever really move into focus (and thus into Plainview's limited consideration), and even then they do not always stay there. One is Daniel's son H.W.; when we first see him in adolescence, he stands behind his father in town meetings, seen but not heard, putting a pretty face on a "family business." When an accident at the derrick leaves the boy deaf, Daniel shows genuine compassion towards his son, even if he has even more difficulty showing it. Their relationship eventually crumbles in a flurry of cruelty, but the more I see the film the more I think it's Daniel's way of freeing his son.



Later in the film, a man shows up in the town Plainview has taken over claiming to be his half-brother Henry. After a few stories check out, Daniel surprisingly invites him into his fold, confiding in him more than any other character. In one particularly memorable scene (my favorite, as a matter of fact), Daniel gives us the closest thing we get to a breakthrough when he says to Henry "There are times when I look at people and I see nothing worth liking. I want to earn enough money that I can get away from everyone...I see the worst in people. I don't need to look past seeing them to get all I need. I've built my hatreds up over the years, little by little, Henry... to have you here gives me a second breath. I can't keep doing this on my own with these... people." He's not a man who studied humanity and found nothing worth saving; he started there and moved on to other things. When he learns the truth about Henry, there's genuine pain in Daniel's eyes, not because he feels betrayed but because it means he'll have to remain amongst mortals.

But the most important supporting character is certainly Eli Sunday, played with gusto by Paul Dano. A young Pentecostal preacher, Eli, in a subtle but obvious way, ran the town before Daniel showed up looking for oil on a tip from Eli's twin Paul. Then Daniel shows up and promises the barren town prosperity, black gold and irrigated crops and new buildings, and he sells it all so beautifully I wanted to give him money. The townspeople look to Daniel and Eli as pillars, saviors even: Eli speaks in tongues and "heals" his parishioners, the spiritual savior. Daniel, on the other hand, will bring these people out of hardship through pure capitalism: through him at last comes the capacity to grow grain on their rocky soil and to rebuild rotting shanties into sturdy, beautiful buildings.



The two immediately enter into a battle of wits for supremacy, not of the town, but of the person who dares count himself as an equal. Eli, though certainly a believer, gains power from his status, to the point that I wondered if he considered himself to be the true vessel of the Lord. Daniel establishes his distaste for religion, and for the first time the townspeople have a choice, and it enrages Eli. Over the course of decades the two go about their back and forth: Daniel snubs Eli's offer to bless the well and ignores his initial promise of the $5,000 bonus for Eli's church, and Eli ultimately shames Daniel in front of the congregation. Finally the two reunite in the middle of the Depression, as a broken and bankrupt Eli comes to the still-affluent Daniel to beg for money, and the sadistic delight on Plainview's face is even more disturbing than his wheezing laugh following his speech to Henry.

Why, if this film has no real underlying point, is it so good? Yes, capitalism and religion are both touched upon, and it's possible to draw meaning from the both, but they're chiefly weapons Daniel and Eli use to infuriate one another: Eli exploits Daniel's money-grubbing by forcing him out of 10 grand at the start of the business venture, while Daniel resists any attempt to bring religion anywhere near him or his rig. Some have complained of a lack of female characters, but I agree with it actually; this is a film from Daniel's POV, and it only makes sense that a man so thoroughly cut off from everything would gladly cut out 50% of the world's population on the basis of some anatomical difference. There is one little girl, Mary, who in another film would have been almost central to the proceedings. We meet her when she's about H.W.'s age, and the two grow together, fall in love, and get married. Mary even learns sign language for her beau. But she gets relegated to the background, barely appearing and usually silent when she does turn up, because Daniel simply doesn't care about her.

Perhaps the reason I love the film so dearly is that it so thoroughly plays against type. People label it a Western, and that's not a ridiculous claim, but I find myself increasingly disagreeing with the term; traditional Westerns show us life as it was in the Old West, generally with some romantic, archetypal ideal attached, while revisionist Westerns tend to make some sort of claim about traditional Westerns, a deconstruction of the myth that shows us how life really was. This does neither; the craggy desert is simply a backdrop for a completely inexplicable man who moves through it with such contempt and disregard the setting melts away, and Johnny Greenwood's unsettling score cuts into the pure hatred within. We have anti-heroes and anti-villains. Meet Daniel Plainview: the anti-character.