Meek’s Cutoff: Lost in the West

Horses, guns, wide open spaces, covered wagons, Indians. The new movie Meek’s Cutoff, directed by Kelly Reichardt and starring Michelle Williams, has all those elements, but it’s not a Western as we know them.   It’s far more realistic, and bleaker.   Three families traveling west in 1845 on the Oregon Trail have hired a guide – a shaggy, blustery mountain man who’s gotten them desperately lost on their way to a purported short cut.   And the Indian who might help them also might want them dead.   Reichardt tells Kurt Andersen why she’s drawn to stories of Americans who’ve lost their way.
  

Michelle Williams stars in Kelly Reichardt’s film, Meek’s Cutoff (Oscilloscope Laboratories)