Not even bald Nicolas Cage can save Butcher’s Crossing, a Western that has the strange problem of glossing over its story the moment it gets interesting. Perhaps director Gabe Polsky wanted to make a more ambitious film, a story about greed and conservation that also doubles as a dark character study, and ran out of money or ideas at crucial inflection points. His source material, the novel by John Williams, is more of an intellectual exercise – the protagonist tries to reconcile the rugged individualist ideal with Ralph Waldo Emerson – whereas this film is a hardened riff on noirish Western classics like The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. Grim fate and hardened characters drive those films, and while they can be found here, it is easy to dismiss the plot. Each dubious choice only adds to the inability to suspend our disbelief.
Before Cage glowers atop a horse, there a handful of dialogue scenes that create a sense of credibility. Fred Hechinger plays William Andrews, a familiar Western archetype: a naïve young man drawn to the frontier because of his desire for adventure. He has a connection in Butcher’s Crossing, a Kansas trading post where a cranky merchant (Paul Raci) offers top dollar for buffalo hides. When Williams asks the merchant for work, he sees through him immediately, saying he will not survive in the wilderness where hunters toil. Undeterred, Williams bankrolls a hunting trip envisioned by Miller (Cage), who says a fortune’s worth of hides are waiting somewhere in the Rockies. Together with Fred (Jeremy Bobb) and Charlie (Xander Berkeley), the hunting expedition is a success beyond anyone’s dreams, at least until Miller’s insatiable desire for glory gets in the way.
Title cards offer a preview of how the journey goes wrong. When you see the word “FALL” on the screen, it suggests that winter is just around the corner. No one in Miller’s crew seems particularly concerned, and if there is friction among the four men, it is due to the breadth of the killing. Many shots communicate how the buffalo are bountiful, until later when we see a field full of corpses. It is an obvious metaphor for environmental waste, albeit a potent one, so the more frustrating thing is how Butcher’s Crossing declines to burrow deeper. In fact, at one point William asks point blank what attracts Miller to hunting, and why this expedition is so important to him. Cage gives a flourish of non-verbal acting, as if he is about to embark on a big monologue, then something curious happens. Polsky cuts to the next scene.
Many directors do not how to use Nicolas Cage, an actor who will go for broke, perhaps because he intimidates them. In this film, Miller is on the cusp of a larger-than-life figure, almost like the character of The Judge in Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, and yet his character does not have a satisfying arc. Sure, there are great scenes like when Cage uses a straight razor to shave his head, and yet the actor cannot communicate the notes of madness and rage his character obviously requires. At least Bobb, a character actor who made a name for himself in Steven Soderbergh’s The Knick, can keep up with Cage. Fred is a jerk, although he is the most rational one of the four, a man who sees no glory or majesty in the frontier – only hard work.
After the conclusion of the hunt, Butcher’s Crossing shifts into more of a man vs. nature tale. It is also the moment where Polsky loses his grip on the material. The four men do not leave the mountain in time, so when the snow begins, Miller announces he and the others are stuck there until spring, six to eight months. You would expect the film to become more brutal at this moment, no? Maybe scenes of the four turning on each other, to say nothing of how they endure the hardship of bitter cold and other elements? Instead, the film inexplicably flashes forward through the entire winter season, and the four men look like they’re in good shape as they descend the mountain with the hides in tow. There is no sense of the trials they endure, whether it’s frostbite or madness from isolation. Like the aforementioned non-monologue, again Polsky shies away from the most compelling parts of his material.
Butcher’s Crossing is Polsky’s first feature-length film, and in his handling of the material, he makes a crucial misstep. He wants to tell a small story with big ideas, a kind of allegory, and he fails to understand that the little details are the best way to fulfill that goal. William is a static character, who hardly seemed hardened by his experience, another way of saying that the film denies him an opportunity for development. There are hardly any scenes of starvation or dehydration, to say nothing of frostbite, as if depicting hardship is beneath Polsky. By the time the inevitable final scenes arrive, a denouement that will be familiar to anyone who has a basic sense of karmic irony, they do not land with the anger and despair they should. Polsky has great admiration for his source material and his cast, and fails them both through his attempt to give them too much dignity. \
Photo courtesy of Saban Films
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