Cutter's Way (1981)
3/10
"forgotten" yes..."gem" no...
11 June 2010
I admit I am also very puzzled by the huge predominance of positive reviews given to this movie on this site. The only possible explanation I can see for this is a sort of "virtue by association", since certain features of the film (the presence of actors like Bridges, Heard and Eichhorn; the setting in a seedy milieu with the Vietnam War and Watergate lurking vaguely but potently in the spiritual background) do draw it, superficially, into proximity with masterpieces of 70s cinema like certain films by Bob Rafelson or Arthur Penn. But the proximity is indeed superficial and misleading. "Cutters Way" displays certain stylistic and thematic points in common with the profound, structured, satisfying masterpieces of 70s cinema - but the sad fact is that it is itself neither profound, nor structured, nor - for just these reasons - in the least bit satisfying as a film. We are - or should be - all aware of the dangers of praising "ambiguity" as a meritorious quality in a work of art. I'm sorry, but I'm just not convinced by the implied contention - and in most of the reviews here this contention is indeed only IMPLIED, not frankly asserted and argued for - that Passer somehow made a conscious artistic decision to break with conventional structures of plot and narrative here. The fact that we are left, in the end, radically uncertain whether the man Bridges and Heard are pursuing - and whom Bridges presumably actually kills - committed the crime or not cannot seriously be presented as a dramaturgical or moral strength of the film. The vague piece of empty existentialist piety that some of the reviewers come out with - "the film is not about the need to do any particular thing but rather the need to TAKE ACTION per se" - is one of the most repellently ridiculous things I have ever heard. Does this film seriously propose to us that, since society is vaguely rotten and the true "culprits" of this rotten-ness cannot be reached or even clearly identified, we are morally required to break into the houses of random rich people, who look suspiciously content and well-situated, and murder them? I think we do the director a favour if we choose to classify the utter inconclusiveness of the final scenes as an example of the same narrative confusion and sloppiness as, say, the unexplained vanishing, two-thirds of the way through the movie, of an apparently central character: the victim's sister. I honestly don't see how anyone can fail to get the impression that - far from conveying some deep "symbolic meaning" - the final sequences of the movie were just cobbled together in an attempt to close with as many dramatic and emotional images as possible. Certainly, any psychological coherence that the Cutter character might at some point have had is jettisoned in the last five minutes. After being portrayed for an hour and a half as being doggedly and single-mindedly determined to carefully coordinate the exposure of the Cobb character as a murderer, Cutter's "plan" to do so turns out in the end to consist in nothing more than to go hobbling wildly around the man's house, run away from his bodyguards, jump on a horse he finds in his stables, and then fling himself randomly through some French windows, promptly breaking his own neck. I have no idea whether this scene was present in the original novel, but I must honestly say that this risible spectacle of the hero careening wildly through the garden party - emotionally "beefed up" by some cheap and predictable "subjective camera" shots intended to positively FORCE the viewer to identify with Cutter in a way that his actions themselves make it pretty much impossible to do - seems to me a textbook example of directorial desperation and the frantic attempt to give direction and conclusion, by the sheer illusory spectacle of velocity, to a film that really wasn't going anywhere at all. Sorry, but to even vaguely imply that a messy, confusedly pretentious movie like this can be mentioned in the same breath with 70s classics like "The King of Marvin Gardens" or "Night Moves" is to do grave disservice to the memory of 1970s US cinema.
32 out of 53 found this helpful. Was this review helpful? Sign in to vote.
Permalink

Recently Viewed