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. 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.
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. (Lensing actually took place in Montana). 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. 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. Uh-oh.
Will seeks out a crusty old cuss named McDonald (Paul Raci), who stayed with his family for a stretch many years ago. 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.
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.
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. 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.
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. All. Of. Them. (The scenes in which Miller goes after the leader of the herd and then starts systematically picking off one hulking, majestic creature after another are rough and unblinking, and tough to watch.) Even after they’ve collected far more hides than they could possibly transport, Miller insists on continuing with the hunt, telling the increasingly difficult Fred that he’ll keep on skinning the hides — or Miller will shoot him. (Fred is a selfish troublemaker, but he’s also the one who points out to young Will that unlike Miller, who just wants to kill buffalo and sell the pelts, the Native Americans honored their prey and used nearly every part it for food, clothing, tools, jewelry, weapons, even toys.)
With old Charlie drinking heavily and rambling incoherently, Fred grousing that all he wants to do is get paid and retire in St. Louis and Will wondering what in the hell he’s gotten himself into, it appears mutiny is imminent — but then winter hits fast and hits hard, and the men have no choice but to hunker down for months, until the passageway back to the town that seems a million miles away will once again be navigable. This might be give rise to the occasion for Cage to veer off the rails and start putting all kinds of crazy spins on his lines, but he’s playing a more measured and authentic type of unhinged, if that can be a thing, and it’s mesmerizing work.
“Butcher’s Crossing” is a tightly spun, well-acted, beautifully shot and unforgiving slice of Old West madness.
