Meek's Cutoff (Kelly Reichardt, 2010)

Meek's Cutoff (Kelly Reichardt, 2010)

Cast: Michelle Williams, Bruce Greenwood, Will Patton, Zoe Kazan, Paul Dano, Shirley Henderson, Neal Huff, Tommy Nelson, Rod Rondeaux. Screenplay: Jonathan Raymond. Cinematography: Christopher Blauvelt. Production design: David Doernberg. Film editing: Kelly Reichardt. Music: Jeff Grace.

Kelly Reichardt's Meek's Cutoff leaves its viewers in the dark in more ways than one. The night scenes are illuminated only by what would have been available to the members of the wagon train making its slow way west: lanterns, firelight, and moonlight. And in the end, we are not allowed conventional movie closure: the survival or demise of the characters, or even whether they made the choice to follow the lead of Meek or of the Indian who has been pressed into service as a guide. Reichardt has flouted so many conventions of the genre that, depending on your willingness to take the film on its own terms, it can be (and has been) described as either gripping or frustrating. She eschews the tendency to turn the American West into a panorama of wide open spaces, instead cramming everything into the old-fashioned Academy ratio for screen framing. She undercuts heroism by never letting us know whether the ostensible hero of the film, Michelle Williams's Emily Tetherow, is right or wrong in her decision to defend the Indian guide against the racist Meek (Bruce Greenwood, hidden behind lots of hair and beard). What we have most of in the film is a sense of being lost, not only physically, in the desert wilds of the far West, but also spiritually, of being cut off from the God the devout members implore so fervently. The isolation is terrifying, especially when the one person who knows the land in which they're wandering doesn't speak their language. We are betrayed by our hope for conventional movie resolutions, and that only makes us feel cut off too.

Carnal Knowledge (Mike Nichols, 1971)

Carnal Knowledge (Mike Nichols, 1971)

Cast: Jack Nicholson, Ann-Margret, Art Garfunkel, Candice Bergen, Rita Moreno, Cynthia O'Neal, Carol Kane. Screenplay: Jules Feiffer. Cinematography: Giuseppe Rotunno. Production design: Richard Sylbert. Film editing: Sam O'Steen.

Carnal Knowledge begins as a light comedy of manners set in the late 1940s, when college students were supposedly less casual and more poorly informed about sex. Jonathan (Jack Nicholson), who claims to be more sexually experienced than his Amherst roommate, Sandy (Art Garfunkel), gives Sandy some advice on how to approach Smith College student Susan (Candice Bergen) at a mixer. The scene has some of the keen ear for awkward attempts at communication found in screenwriter Jules Feiffer's cartoons and in director Mike Nichols's comedy routines with Elaine May. Eventually, Sandy and Susan get together, with Jonathan still coaching Sandy on sex, until Jonathan himself makes his own moves -- unknown to Sandy -- on Susan. He succeeds, in an excruciating scene in which Susan's confusion about the loss of her virginity plays across her face, partly obscured by the grunting Jonathan on top of her. And from then the film becomes increasingly sour, as the years pass and the misogynistic Jonathan continues to meddle in Sandy's life but also makes a mess of his own relationships with women. He takes up with Bobbie, a model played by Ann-Margret, for what begins as a passionate fling and ends in misery. By the end of the film he is being serviced by Louise (Rita Moreno), a prostitute whom he hires to perform a routine -- and abuses when she deviates from it -- designed to give him an erection. It's a sad, rather hopeless film that despite fine performances from all the actors never quite convinces us that its characters are anything but puppets of the writer and director. Jonathan and Sandy seem incapable of change and growth. Something makes me think that Carnal Knowledge would have been a better film if it had been told from the women's point of view, that it would have made a more telling point about the male ego and about the great gulf between the sexes if we had seen Jonathan and Sandy through Susan and Bobbie's eyes. We get glimpses of that, but Susan disappears from the film after she marries Sandy and he, egged on by Jonathan, drifts into mid-life affairs. Bobbie's entrapment into Jonathan's world leads to a failed suicide attempt, after which she, too, vanishes from the story. Feiffer and Nichols never make it clear whether their film is a satire on sex in modern society or just a particularly bleak story about unhappy people.