Review by Mark Dujsik | October 19, 2023 A youngman decides to travel west to see the country and to find himself. That's thebasic premise of Butcher's Crossingand an idea that's about as old as the United States (and, without the specificsof the direction and the land, stories themselves, for that matter). It's basedon John Williams' 1960 novel, which arrived at a time when deconstructing theromance of the Old West would have been seen as revolutionary, but the movieadaptation arrives more than a half a century after other books and plenty ofmovies have dissected the old, idealized notions of the era. It's covering veryfamiliar ground, in other words. Storiesdon't need to be new or different to be or say something worthwhile, though, solet'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 itsmessage and its examination of people under duress in the wild. That this taledoesn't have anything new or different to say, though, only highlights howlittle it actually does do within those familiar terms. Theyoung man at the center of it is Will Andrews (Fred Hechinger), who abandons anIvy League education to take a train to an unknown future in Kansas. His planisn't much of one, except to find J.D. McDonald (Paul Raci), a man who oncereceived help from Will's minister father and now runs a successful trading postin the town of Butcher's Crossing. Buffalo hides are all the rage at this momentin 1874, and Will just wants the opportunity to join a hunting party, so that hemight get some first-hand experience living on and working out in the frontier. Thewhole current of the tale, really, is just to keep presenting Will with problemsand obstacles that narrow his wide-eyed gaze of wonderment and flatten thebright smile that define his first arrival in Kansas. The first problem for hisvague ambitions comes when J.D. turns down his request. This is hard land and atough business for someone as green as Will, so it's best, according to J.D., ifthe young man realizes his romantic illusions of life out West are just that—afantasy. Doesthe kid listen? Of course he doesn't. Instead, he finds the mysterious, bald-patedMiller (Nicolas Cage), who has seen buffalo diminish in the region but knows ofa place along the Colorado Rocky Mountains where they're as widespread as theyused to be here. In case it isn't apparent, the movie's central theme, apartfrom how nature can destroy the toughest of men and transform even the mostidealistic into hardened and cynical ones, has to do with conservation. It's awell-meaning message, drenched in the blood, viscera, and senseless slaughter ofanimals that will nearly go extinct in the near-future of the narrative, butthat's about the extent of it in Polsky and Liam Satre-Meloy's screenplay. Thebulk of the story revolves around the hunters: the wholly inexperiencednewcomer, the grizzled Miller, his old and religious coot of a camp managerCharley (Xander Berkley), and expert skinner Fred (Jeremy Bobb), who's the onlyman greedy or naïve enough to be convinced by Miller's tale of a land ofcountless bison. There are minor tensions at the start that escalate as food andwater become scarce on the trail. Will,for example, is kind-hearted enough to offer a single mother and her twochildren, separated from a wagon train, some water from his canteen, but Millerstops him, telling him the world doesn't suffer the fool-hardy or something akinto that. Charley has some vague warnings, too, about how the young man willcertainly discover why every man should fear the divine. For the most part, theperformances start at an exaggerated pitch of one broad type, only to suddenlyshift to an equally over-the-top tenor of a different one. It makes one long, asWill does for her character, for the brief subtlety of Rachel Keller'sappearance 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 fromthe hunt. Therest of this is fairly predictable, as the men kill, skin, and butcher manybison, while Miller becomes obsessed with having the largest haul of hides inthe 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 becomesstranded in the middle of nowhere. Of the actors with whom we're stuck in thewilderness, Bobb has the strongest handle on making minor adjustments to hischaracter's worsening state of mind. Both Cage and Berkley go loud, the formerin facial expressions and the latter vocally, and Hechinger simply drops anamusingly broad grin. Theperformances, basically, are about as limited as the material, which buildstoward a resolution of multiple ironies. Butcher'sCrossing can't muster much more than to point out that the legend of OldWest isn't all that's cracked up to be, and at this point, that's not much of apoint in the first place. Copyright © 2023 by Mark Dujsik. Allrights reserved.
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