Out west is a place of freedom and lawlessness, of beauty and brutality, and, when you have no escape, of endless stretches of god’s country where one’s mind can begin to fade.
Will (Fred Hechinger), a young Harvard dropout who wants to see more of the country, learns this quickly after he sets out for the Colorado mountains with a small group of buffalo hunters in the latter half of the 19th century. Miller (Nicolas Cage), the group’s leader, takes Will under his wing as they go looking for a bounty of buffalo hide. But soon enough, they find themselves battling the elements, and what was intended as a weekslong hunt keeps them through the winter.
It’s in this stretch, about midway through, that the creeping dread that has somewhat aimlessly coursed through Gabe Polsky’s “Butcher’s Crossing” makes way for something more compelling: psychological drama built around the rotten core of the period’s insatiable westward expansion.
“We don’t belong out here,” Fred (Jeremy Bobb), a hired hand, says grimly at one point. Not on this hunt, not on the Native American burial grounds they’ve heedlessly camped out on, not out here in this land. Stubborn and rapacious, Miller keeps them there.
It’s a mostly well-crafted film with decent visual scope. The film’s greatest flaws are in Cage’s shakily written character: Stroking his shaved head like a cowboy version of Marlon Brando’s Colonel Kurtz from “Apocalypse Now,” he’s a madman that the film halfheartedly positions as an avatar for American greed. As fun as he can be to watch, Cage was the wrong actor to cast in a role that called for a more subtle, weatherworn performance. Hechinger, though, is superb, despite his thinly developed protagonist. He naturally embodies a young man who wants to truly know the country, yet shudders at the festering underside he comes to face.
Butcher’s Crossing
Rated R for language, brief sexual content and some bloody violence. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes. In theaters.
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