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• Travis | June 29, 2011 9:39 AMReply

  Echoing other critics, Leonard Maltin described his viewing of this film a "deep and resonant experience." In reality, it was about as deep as the water levels in the wagon train's depleted barrels. I found this film deeply disappointing. And I'm a sucker for westerns of any ilk, and the less conventional, the better. As Maltin claims, this film is indeed elliptical, but elliptical to the point of madness. Clearly, dropping viewers into a narrative stream already at full-flow, as it were, and then leaving us at the point where it dries up into complete uncertainty, was meant as an existential statement of some kind. The hitch is that genuine existential insights require genuine existential situations or dilemmas (or at least representative ones), and this motley crew of characters is non-representative to the core: they are all dumber than rocks. An indian who can't hide or evade the clumsiest and noisiest trackers on the planet? Pioneers who can't decide whether or not to trust their lives to a trail guide even when he can't tell them anything about the trail? Experienced wilderness travelers who don't know that any large body of alkaline water (the discovery of which surprised the trail guide who supposedly knew this route?) has to be fed somewhere by substantially sized streams or rivers of potable water? If there was ever a group of morons who deserved to perish in the wild, it was this group. So why should we care about them? We shouldn't. What's to be learned from watching this film? Nothing at all. This film doesn't demand "complete concentration" as Maltin argues; it demands complete indulgence. If Reichardt had invested as much effort into writing an intelligent screenplay as in training actors to authentically lead oxen or pack a wagon, then this movie might have deserved the praise critics are giving it. But as it stands, this king simply has no clothes. While it's indeed refreshing to see films with a slow pace and a careful eye to detail and character study, that pace still has to lead somewhere, and the details still have to add up to something. But in this film, none of them do. All the film's tiny virtues leave the viewer exactly where she began: in the middle of nowhere.