John Williams’s punishing 1960 western novel Butcher’s Crossing was described by Bret Easton Ellis as “a precursor to what Cormac McCarthy would do with the genre”. It follows Will Andrews, a dreamy 23-year-old Harvard dropout, as he tags along with Miller, a buffalo hunter targeting hidden valleys in the Colorado territory in the late 19th century. Will hopes to learn “more about this country”; what he gets, as the four-man crew shoots and hacks its way through dwindling herds in ever more treacherous conditions, is a lesson in remorseless brutality. Any screen version would need to find a cinematic equivalent for the prose’s tensile strength, and for what critic Leo Robson calls the “regime of methodical close description” from which Williams offers no respite. In this shallow, corner-cutting adaptation, the director and co-writer Gabe Polsky doesn’t come close.
At least he has the casting down pat. The film is well served by Fred Hechinger, one of the cherubic stars of the first season of The White Lotus, who rightly makes us fear for Andrews; ambling off into the wilderness, he looks as out of his depth as a Smurf in Picasso’s Guernica. Nicolas Cage has ample room to kick off as the bearded, bullet-headed Miller, but in fact remains for the most part subdued. One of his wackier moments, when he squats in the moonlit snow drawing an open razor repeatedly across his own bald scalp, is also the movie’s eeriest, its effect weakened only by the antiseptic studio environment.
No matter how nasty things get, the screen stays spick-and-span; clothes appear pressed, skin exfoliated. Even after months in the wild, there is no sense that anyone pongs, the way they do in, say, Kelly Reichardt’s First Cow and Meek’s Cutoff. Grisly sights are paraded before the camera (including a castrated hunter and untold bison gore) but Polsky lacks the visual flair to make the shocks visceral or the suffering anything more than superficial. Data-heavy end titles decrying the plundering of nature suggest that we’ve been watching an environmental polemic all along. More proof that the film doesn’t really know what it is or who it’s for.
• Butcher’s Crossing is released on 1 November on Prime Video.
