Somehow, he has reached the conclusion it’s the damn buffalo who are responsible for his misery, and he won’t be satisfied until he kills all of them. Miller is a man who has no doubt seen and done a lot of things, things you don’t talk about in polite company, and has come to the point where his default mode is bitterness and disillusionment. Nicolas Cage as Miller is a sight to see, with his unkempt beard, his enormous coat made of buffalo pelts, his ever-present pipe and that shiny dome, which he shaves clean with an ominous-looking straight razor. Rich kid Will agrees to finance the operation, and joins Miller’s team, which also includes the good-hearted but slightly addled, whiskey-sipping, one-handed codger Charlie (Xander Berkeley) and the perpetually miserable and complaining but reliable skinner Fred (Jeremy Bobb), who we know is just going to make trouble every difficult step of the way, as we venture in “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre” storytelling territory. Rated R (language, some violence/bloody images and brief sexual content). Saban Films presents a film directed by Gabe Polsky and written by Polsky and Liam Satre-Meloy, based on the novel by John Williams. McDonald scoffs at Will’s softness and his ignorance, warns him that such an undertaking will be the ruin of him - and then proceeds to send him to the tavern to meet a veteran buffalo hunter named Miller (Nicolas Cage), who has long dreamed of making the long and dangerous trek to a near-mythic valley teeming with hundreds if not thousands of buffalo. Will seeks out a crusty old cuss named McDonald (Paul Raci), who stayed with his family for a stretch many years ago. Having dropped out of Harvard, the almost annoyingly optimistic, energetic and naïve young Will Andrews (rising star Fred Hechinger from “Pam and Tommy” and “The White Lotus”) arrives in town with the intention of seeing the West and going out on a buffalo hunt in the “hopes of finding a stronger purpose and more meaning” in his life. You know the place: a few stores scattered around the muddy Main Street a handful of dicey, dangerous types wandering about a hotel with rooms upstairs for weary travelers, a fetching barkeep with a heart of gold who will sleep with you if you have the coin. (Lensing actually took place in Montana). With cinematographer David Gallego shooting breathtaking visuals and the production design and costume teams setting the period-piece tone, “Butcher’s Crossing” is set in and around a fictional frontier town in Kansas. Now Cage is back in the saddle and delivering intense but controlled and powerful work as an obsessive buffalo hunter in Gabe Polsky’s blistering and brutally effective “Butcher’s Crossing.” This is “Moby Dick” meets Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness,” with Cage’s Miller shaving his head and leaning into his growing madness like an 1870s version of Brando in “Apocalypse Now,” which of course was directed by Cage’s uncle Francis Ford Coppala and was loosely inspired by Conrad’s novella. Nicolas Cage was into his fifth decade as an actor and had taken on nearly 100 different roles before we saw him in a Western, namely the quirky and intriguing but even gunslinger/dad movie “The Old Way” from January of this year.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |