The Landscape IS The Story: Background As Foreground In Winter's Bone and Meek's Cutoff

Meek's Cutoff

Rather than a protagonist or plot, can the physical setting of a film be the main driving force of a movie?  Can this scrutiny of buildings, trees, cracks in the ground, weathered faces and specific accents, climate and colour; can these things lie at the heart of a film?  Be the reason for it's existence?  Rather than a character's journey or a complex plot?  Two films released in recent times embody this: Debra Granik's Winter's Bone (2010) and Kelly Reichardt's Meek's Cutoff (2011).  Both films engender such a palpable sense of place, their setting seems to envelope their main protagonists.  Interestingly, both films tell their stories through the eyes of female protagonists and are directed by women, but both are coarse, harsh films set in coarse, harsh environments, settings perhaps more associated (in the film world) with the male psyche than the female.  It's also interesting to note that after seeing both films for the first time, although impressed by the power and atmosphere of their mise-en-scene, I felt slightly underwhelmed, felt that their plots never quite reached a climax; I seemed to be waiting for something that never quite happened.  And yet for months after the films played round in my head, haunting me.

The locality in which Winter's Bone takes place got it's hooks into me almost immediately: Granik's adaptation of Daniel Woodrell's novel is set in the Missouri Ozark mountains, depicting a highly rural, highly impoverished area where methamphetamine dealing and addiction is rife.

'There is not one aspect of looking at meth that is mellow or benign: what it does to a human being's body, their faces, their teeth.  Everything about it is so vicious, and so dramatic and so relentless.  There is basically not one bit of solace in that whole depiction of actual reality of it'
-Debora Granik

Ree Dolly and her siblings in Winter's Bone

Granik's highlighting of the visual effects of meth addiction in the above quote is something that's not only visible in the faces of the characters in Winter's Bone but also demonstrates an overall attempt to capture the location as it is in life.  Her comment belies an endeavour to reference a whole strata and way of life in American society that I have never seen portrayed in film before, and it jumped off the screen  and sank into me like a thick illness.  As Ree Dolly (Jennifer Lawrence) attempts to find out what has happened to her father, Jessup, a meth cooker for local crime lord Thump Milton (Ronnie Hall), she slips into a world where methamphetamine addicts live on farms, breed horses and play the banjo, where violence is bubbling away just beneath the surface.  As an outsider this unlikely juxtaposition of the rural with the skittish and pugnacious world of drug dealing transfixed me.  So rooted was the film to a distinct place, that once I understood that it was this aspect of the film that had struck up digs in my mind, returning to the film I no longer felt disappointed at it's conclusion, because I saw the landscape, the environment, the world in which the story unfolds, as it's true subject.

Dale Dickey as Merab Milton in Winter's Bone

This of course includes the people: Teardrop (John Hawkes), Ree's uncle, a violent, taciturn meth-addict, we we warm to as the film plays out; Merab (Dale Dickey) the wife of Thump Milton, who warns Ree away from trying to contact Thump, a woman who's face is sometimes that of a stern mother, at other times that of a violent, vicious beast; and Thump himself, barely in the film, but a presence before we've even met him, who looks like an old cowboy, an incongruous vision for a man who is a drug kingpin of sorts.  These people live in log cabins, dilapidated shacks in scrappy woodland, littered with old caravans and burnt out cars; a strange hinterland of mountain wilderness congealed with the dismal detritus of modernity, and for me this is the films most resonant point.

Meek's Cutoff is a gruelling film; dedicated to palpable experience.  Just watch the first ten minutes: three cattle-drawn wagons, slowly move across an expansive flowing river.  The women fill up on water; who knows when they will come across it again?  Not a word is uttered, we just soak up the solemn grind of the process of journeying across the Oregon desert.  Mainly filmed in long shot, this sequence conjures a stark and powerful sense of the dominating landscape and the silent figures moving through this wasteland.  It is a subtly daring tactic to open a film with as it immediately distances us from the characters; in the mid-shots and close ups we do get, faces are turned away from us, and the wide shots allow us to differentiate the figures only by their different outfits.  The travellers are insignificant, they seem at the mercy of the landscape, and indeed they are.

Throughout the film the travellers debate who to place their trust in, their guide Stephen Meek, who has seemingly got them lost, or a Cayuse Indian who they keep captive in the hope he will lead them to water.  But it is really the landscape whom is in charge, who yields only alkaline water that is undrinkable, offers them steep and dangerous inclines to navigate their wagons down, and is made up of a terrain of hard dry ground and barren mountains.  Much of the discussion of whom to trust and which path to take is told in long shot, the men are a distant group of murmuring figures, we barely catch what they are saying, isolating us from the very plot of the film.  It also emulates the view of the women, primarily Emily Thetherow (Michelle Williams), wife to Soloman Tetherow (Will Patton).  Again, like Winter's Bone, Meek's Cutoff subtly highlights the matriarchal aspect of otherwise male dominated worlds (some have called it a Feminist Western, although I wouldn't like to start attaching labels to a film as oblique and purposefully inscrutable as this).

'Insignificant' settlers in Meek's Cutoff

We are constantly reminded of the all encompassing nothingness of the landscape; shots tracking along cracked desert ground, nothing changing; vast wide frames in which the little stream of wagons, cattle, and people walk, from screen right to screen left; a wailing fiddle echoes around the otherwise bare soundtrack, like a lonely ghost, like a strange desert siren.  The minimalism of the narrative (there are maybe two key turns in the whole film) forces us into surrendering to the landscape.  In this way the Oregon desert subsumes not only the characters, but the plot itself, and the viewer.  The notion of unknowing in this film, the settlers inability to decide whether to trust Meek, to trust the Indian, or their weak reassurances that they will find water soon if they keep going, all seem to act as elements of the impenetrable shroud the location blankets everything with, including the film's themes.

In both these films the landscape is the nucleus.  It is the driving force, the core which everything hangs off, the element which determines the films investigative qualities, the main constituent which the characters are there only to help define.  Whether impoverished backwoods or arid, bare desert, the setting dominates everything that steps into it.