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One of the many gifts of the film is its faithfulness to 1845, specifically drawn in the details, that encourage us to transpose the conditions to the present day through the film’s carefully articulated metaphors.

What really amazes me about Meek's Cutoff are its stylistic and formal convictions, carried to the screen in an uncompromising way, albeit in a movie that's highly agnostic about what it means to refuse compromise.

The film remains anchored in uneasy human moods courtesy of the uniformly exceptional cast, including Reichardt's muse Michelle Williams and a wild-haired Bruce Greenwood, but what lingers most is the sense of place. It conjures an inescapable ambiguity that all comes together in one of the greatest endings in the history of cinema, one that radically, hauntingly recontextualizes everything that came before.

Meek's Cutoff does not dwell upon the failings of the men as much as it champions the virtues of the women, so often forgotten or reduced to less flattering archetypes in the western. In this verisimilitudinous world, they are more than capable of taking the reins, as we see when Emily (Michelle Williams) proves herself a good shot with a rifle, but propriety prevents it.

Not since Jim Jarmusch's Dead Man, which ironically foregrounded the genre's ties to romanticism with its William Blake-inspired protagonist, has a western so thoroughly eclipsed the farthest reaches of revisionism and become an all-out attack on both the genre and the troubled reality from which it derives.

It's an extreme exercise on multiple levels, not merely in the depiction of the outsider. Reichardt's undecorated aesthetic is of particular significance; Meek's contains only one interior scene, a conversation between the Teatherows inside their wagon and consisting of a single shot. Every other scene can literally be called undecorated, for Reichardt and her crew have done nothing to affect the landscape, a crackling, rocky, practically treeless terrain that needs no artificial embellishment.

It is a Kelly Reichardt movie. But there is also something new here. Diffidence is no longer the prevailing mood, the murmur no longer the prime mode of address. A stone-cold masterpiece, Meek's Cutoff represents a model evolutionary leap for an artist: the canvas is larger, the ambitions bigger, the movie recognizably and unmistakably the auteur's.

This much can be said of Meek's Cutoff: It conveys what must have been the tedium and the frustration, not to mention the danger, of crossing the not-entirely mapped (or conquered) United States with a vividness and conviction that few films have matched.

Why do I find it nonstop mesmerizing, even on second viewing? Above and beyond the strange tension Reichardt derives from the sheer arduousness of even simple tasks (previously addressed in my TIFF capsule), there's a relaxed vigor to every shot that forestalls inattention, at least in my case.

While neorealism represents as good a theoretical starting point as any when it comes to exploring Reichardt's deceptively slim oeuvre, it can only be hoped that future analyses go on to address the many wider questions of cinematic realism, genre, feminism, politics, and society raised by her work, and how these fit into and influence both the current state of American independent cinema and contemporary cinema as a whole.

Reichardt hones in on intimacy. It's only one way in which she and screenwriter Jon Raymond take a hackneyed genre and strip away the clichés. There are no gunfights, no saloons, no cowboys, and no whorehouses in this Western. Just ordinary folks trying to make a new life for themselves, at the mercy of an indifferent environment and their own doubts.

Given the emphasis screenwriter Jon Raymond places on religious fervor, naivete, and xenophobia, the film makes for an effective allegory about the United States' ongoing misdirection in confronting other cultures. Yet Reichardt keeps this so hypnotic from shot to shot that you can easily get wrapped up in it as a sensory experience. As the title character, Bruce Greenwood gives a fascinating and understated performance.