Butcher’s Crossing Review: Nicolas Cage’s Buffalo-Hunting Western Misses Its Target

Butcher’s Crossing could have been a major addition to the neo-western canon.

Butcher’s Crossing
Photo: Saban Films

Nicolas Cage makes quite the impression when he first rides onto the screen in Gabe Polsky’s Butcher’s Crossing. He comes into view towering over the camera atop a horse that looks 15 feet tall, a thick buffalo hair coat wrapped around him, his head shaven clean and those piercing eyes staring intently out from above a coal-black beard.

It’s the sort of gasp-worthy moment that you only get when a movie star appears in a strange new form, and it immediately makes Cage’s character—a seasoned buffalo hunter named Miller—feel like one of those semi-mythic figures that the legends of the Old West are built on. Sadly, he turns out to be something of an apparition, his mystical aura fading the longer we look at him, and the film consequently finds itself unable to recapture the magic of this first encounter.

Adapted from John Edward Williams’s 1960 novel by Polsky and Liam Satre-Meloy, Butcher’s Crossing begins with a fresh-faced Will Andrews (Fred Hechinger) heading West to join a buffalo hunt. In the letter to his father that provides the film’s opening narration, Will explains his need for a more meaningful form of life than the settled, “civilized” world can provide. This epistolary opening recalls Moby-Dick’s “Call me Ishmael,” as Will exists to guide us to the figure that the story is truly fascinated with: Miller, the mad tyrant who he’ll soon tie his destiny to.

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Will meets Miller in the small Kansas town of Butcher’s Crossing where the men are itching for money and convinces the legendary hunter to take him along on his next expedition. The buffalo herds have started to thin after years of over-hunting, but Miller has a secret: the existence of a herd he found years ago, grown fat and docile in the safety of the mountains.

A wiser man might have questioned why Miller would so readily share such invaluable information with a total stranger or why the only other men he seems able to recruit for such a lucrative operation are Fred, a seedy skinner (Jeremy Bobb) whose incessant shit-talking is barely made up for by his skill with a blade, and Charlie (Xander Berkley), a one-armed old man whose remaining hand is either permanently cupped around a Bible or a bottle. But Will isn’t wise. Rather, he’s a pampered city kid with a sunny disposition and a wallet full of dollar bills which Miller will gladly relieve him of in exchange for a place in the hunting party.

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They set off from Butcher’s Crossing into the harshness of the Old West, shot in great wide shots by cinematographer David Gallego, and delicately illuminated by the daylight. More than anything, the camerawork emphasizes the sheer, galling scale of the place—the huge empty spaces and cragged, towering mountains that separate everything.

Will and Miller’s journey is an arduous one, but it does eventually lead them to those buffalos. They shoot all day and skin all night, quickly piling up thousands of dollars’ worth of hides, but no matter how high the pile rises, Miller is unwilling to stop. The longer the party spends surrounded by nothing but blood and death, the more they start to turn on one another.

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Just like the members of his hunting party, it’s around here that the viewer may begin to realize that Miller wasn’t the man to lead this expedition. It’s easy to see what attracted Cage to the role of Miller. Staring off knowingly into the distance and chomping on a pipe, the actor gets to dole out solemn pronouncements (such as “A man never can tell what a buff is thinking”) that could easily fill a book titled Zen and the Art of Buffalo Hunting.

And if some of it works, it’s because Cage is such a magnetic figure, even if the script makes it nearly impossible for him to fully illuminate the character. Because Miller feels so roughly drawn, his descent into the diabolical leader who’s going to lead them all into destruction feels unmotivated. Captain Ahab was driven by a vengeful fury to wage a war on nature, God, and life itself. Miller, by contrast, is just a guy who seems to like shooting buffalo a bit too much.

It’s a shame because the film sets out with noble ambitions. It was made on land owned by the Blackfeet Nation, whose members have worked tirelessly to restore the buffalo populations that were decimated by hunters, and this work is close to the film’s heart. There’s a lamenting tone to the hunting party’s whole enterprise, the camera lingering on the buffalo skulls that litter their journey. There’s no excitement to what they do—just the dull, grim repetition of Miller firing into a crowd of helpless animals as the camera stares into their deep, dark eyes.

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If its characters were more boldly drawn, Butcher’s Crossing could have been a major addition to the neo-western canon. There are meditative touches throughout, and it sends a clear message about the soul-crushing nature of the slash-and-burn capitalism that the buffalo hunters are engaged in. But without a strong enough hand on the reins, it only manages to lead us strolling around the outside of these ideas rather than driving straight into the heart of them.

Score: 
 Cast: Nicolas Cage, Fred Hechinger, Rachel Keller, Xander Berkeley, Jeremy Bobb, Paul Raci  Director: Gabe Polsky  Screenwriter: Gabe Polsky, Liam Satre-Meloy  Distributor: Saban Films  Running Time: 105 min  Rating: NR  Year: 2022  Buy: Video

Ross McIndoe

Ross McIndoe is a Glasgow-based freelancer who writes about movies and TV for The Quietus, Bright Wall/Dark Room, Wisecrack, and others.

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