for this week’s ‘Tribune’ : THE LAST PICTURE SHOW [10/10], COLD WEATHER [7/10], MEEK’S CUTOFF [4+/10]

Published on: April 14th, 2011

The Last Picture Show
Director : Peter Bogdanovich

Cold Weather
Director : Aaron Katz

Meek’s Cutoff – Oregon 1845
Director : Kelly Reichardt

Rather appropriate that the film of the week – indeed of the month, and probably also the year – just so happens to be almost 40 years old. Because Peter Bogdanovich’s The Last Picture Show, which world-premiered in New York back in October 1971 and is now re-issued to selected UK arthouses, is itself set in, and hankers back to, a time two decades before it was made: Anarene, a (fictional) small north Texas town, in 1951/2.

The movie more than lives up to its exalted reputation as an American masterpiece: achingly beautiful, strikingly confident and piercingly mature – and a class above anything else Bogdanovich achieved in his long, wayward career (many credit his partner, co-scriptwriter Polly Platt, with capturing the specifics of place and ambience.)

Based on Larry McMurtry’s semi-autobiographical 1966 novel, it’s an utterly believable evocation of a surprisingly tiny – pretty much one-street – settlement towards the end of Harry S Truman’s second term. Best friends Sonny (Timothy Bottoms) and Duane (Jeff Bridges) are leaving school and facing up to adult responsibilities. Lacking strong father figures, they turn to mentor Sam (Ben Johnson), who operates three of the town’s main businesses, including the fleapit cinema.

The boys’ friendship is tested when both fall for local beauty Jacy (Shepherd) – Sonny’s relationship with Jacy causes him to neglect his on-off affair with the wife (Cloris Leachman) of his basketball coach. When Sam suddenly dies (off-screen, like many key events) Anarene rapidly hits the skid, its sudden decline symbolised most powerfully by the movie-house’s demise.

First-time viewers of The Last Picture Show are often startled by how late in the day the closure of the cinema actually happens. It comes very suddenly, very near the end of the film, hardly mentioned at all until it’s almost over (as all trivia buffs know, the final projection is of Howard Hawks’ Red River) – and is explicitly the direct result of Sam’s lousy judgement.

He leaves the running of the ‘Royal’ to the old woman who operates the concessions stand, and her lack of cinema-management experience means no-one is surprised when the enterprise goes belly-up soon after. This isn’t the only example of Sam’s blundering – he leaves his pool-hall to Sonny (who proves unable to make it pay) and a considerable sum of money to one of Sonny’s school-mates, who’s very soon disgraced after kidnapping a small girl with apparent paedophile intent.

But Sam’s death, regardless of his will’s disastrous consequences, is clearly the end of an era – and not just for Anarene. It symbolises the death of a noble cinematic tradition – their film is, among many other things, a farewell to the Western genre with which Johnson was so closely associated.

The film can also be interpreted as the flip-side of American Graffiti (1973) George Lucas’s gaudy-neon, energetic blast of rock-fuelled early-sixties Californian nostalgia. Impressive as it is, Lucas’s romp seems adolescent, puny alongside The Last Picture Show, shot in timeless black-and-white by cinematographer Robert Surtees: when Sonny looks over the Anarene skyline by night, clouds hovering in the dark sky, it’s one of the most lyrical landscape shots in American movies.

Time after time, everything comes brilliantly together: the visuals, the remarkable, restrained use of period music, and the performances by the large cast. And despite the strength-in-depth of the ensemble (Johnson and Leachman won Oscars, Ellen Burstyn was nominated, Eileen Brennan steals scenes as a waitress), this is very much Bottoms’ picture – the fact that he never became as big a star as either Bridges or Shepherd (or even Randy Quaid, who pops up in a small part) seems to have resulted in a downplaying of his contribution to Picture Show‘s success and enduring renown.

As it happens, a couple of low-budget “independent” American films arrive on our screens in the same week as The Last Picture Show‘s re-issue. And just as Picture Show was technically Bogdanovich’s third movie – he anonymously supervised the conversion of a Soviet sci-fi romp into Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women (1968), before taking the director’s chair proper for the first time for the superb Targets (1969) – Cold Weather is the third picture by Aaron Katz. Katz’s 65-minute Dance Party, USA (2006) and 78-minute Quiet City (2007) obtained fleeting exposure at the ICA in 2008, but Cold Weather - at 96 minutes, by some way his longest work to date – is getting a more conventional distribution.

And that’s not surprising: whereas writer-director Katz’s first two efforts were plot-light, atmospheric forays into what’s become known as ‘Mumblecore’ (sensitive depictions of over-articulate young urban bohemians), Cold Weather has much more in the way of a conventional storyline. In a rain-soaked Portland, Oregon (Katz’s home town), slackerish twentysomething Doug (Cris Lankenau) works in an ice factory and spends his spare time reading detective novels. A sometime forensics student, Doug’s Sherlock Holmes fantasies get an unexpected real-world workout when his ex-girlfriend “vanishes.”

What results is an amblingly amiable amateur-detective affair which nods back to 1970s precedents like The Late Show, with more than a dash of David Lynch’s Blue Velvet - though in this instance our slightly maladroit hero is never in any serious physical or moral danger. Katz and cinematographer Andrew Reed – who shot both of the director’s previous films – create a believable, alluringly mundane backdrop for a series of interlocking, engaging character-studies, achieving the tricky feat of making us think that these folks’ lives go on beyond the frame, and beyond the confines of the narrative. A narrative which comes to an abrupt halt, but one that’s quite in keeping with the charmingly offbeat, enticingly quirky universe that Cold Weather develops and sustains.

The denouement is even more jarringly sudden in Meek’s Cutoff (full title Meek’s Cutoff – Oregon 1845), fourth feature by writer-director Kelly Reichardt – who has assembled quite an international reputation in the “indie” sphere with her recent efforts Old Joy and Wendy and Lucy. Previously focussed on contemporary subjects, she now shifts back in time to deliver a low-key Frontier Western in which gnarled pathfinder Meek (Bruce Greenwood) – apparently a distant cousin of Jeff Bridges’ growling, dyspeptic Rooster Cogburn from the Coen brothers’ True Grit - guides a band of settlers towards what he describes as “a regular second Eden.”

Unfortunately Meek’s sense of direction proves somewhat deficient (shades of the “fallible leader” allegory to be found in John Hillcoat’s Cormac McCarthy adaptation The Road) and the party end up on a seemingly endless trek through featureless, untenanted terrain – the not-yet-America proving a hostile environment for the hapless pioneers. Among the cast we find “indie” regulars Michelle Williams, Paul Dano and Scotland’s own Shirley Henderson – the latter at least displaying a convincingly “period” look, sound and attitude.

Reichardt evokes the monotonous slog of the travellers’ “progress” (“we’re close, but we don’t know what to”) all too well, so that Meek’s Cutoff becomes almost as arduous to watch as it must have been to navigate. This is cinema as endurance test, and has duly been lauded as some kind of masterpiece by those who equate pointless longueurs with serious artistic intent. In the end, however, Reichardt runs out of steam and ideas – passing off the expiry as a narrative flourish, when really it’s a matter of short-changing the audience’s (reasonable) expectations regarding payoff and closure.

Neil Young
5th April, 2011
(written for the 14th April edition of Tribune magazine)