‘Butcher’s Crossing’ Review: Nicolas Cage’s Slow-Burn Turn Propels Gabe Polsky’s Grimly Fatalistic Western
variety.comJoe Leydon Film Critic It’s been a bit more than a year since “Butcher’s Crossing” premiered at the Toronto Film Festival, but the timing of its theatrical release could hardly be more propitious.
Director Gabe Polsky’s grimly fatalistic Western has finally arrived at the megaplexes just days after the PBS airing of “The American Buffalo,” Ken Burns’ fascinating (and often infuriating) documentary about how bison were very nearly hunted into extinction in this country before an unlikely group of preservations saved the shaggy beasts.
As Burns emphasizes in his two-part film, and Polsky’s drama duly notes during its end credits, an estimated 60 million bison roamed the American West as late as 1860.
Two decades later, however, the bison population plunged to less than 300. Working from a script he and Liam Satre Meloy adapted from the novel by John Edward Williams, Polsky suggests that this staggering decrease was caused largely by men like Miller, the life-hardened buffalo hunter effectively played by Nicolas Cage with equal measures of seasoned authority and tamped-down menace.
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