Nicolas Cage was into his fifth decade as an actor and had taken on nearly 100 different roles before we saw him in a Western, namely the quirky and intriguing but even gunslinger/dad movie “The Old Way” from January of this year. Now Cage is back in the saddle and delivering intense but controlled and powerful work as an obsessive buffalo hunter in Gabe Polsky’s blistering and brutally effective “Butcher’s Crossing.” This is “Moby Dick” meets Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness,” with Cage’s Miller shaving his head and leaning into his growing madness like an 1870s version of Brando in “Apocalypse Now,” which of course was directed by Cage’s uncle Francis Ford Coppala and was loosely inspired by Conrad’s novella.
With cinematographer David Gallego shooting breathtaking visuals and the production design and costume teams setting the period-piece tone, “Butcher’s Crossing” is set in and around a fictional frontier town in Kansas. (Lensing actually took place in Montana). You know the place: a few stores scattered around the muddy Main Street; a handful of dicey, dangerous types wandering about; a hotel with rooms upstairs for weary travelers, a fetching barkeep with a heart of gold who will sleep with you if you have the coin. Having dropped out of Harvard, the almost annoyingly optimistic, energetic and naïve young Will Andrews (rising star Fred Hechinger from “Pam and Tommy” and “The White Lotus”) arrives in town with the intention of seeing the West and going out on a buffalo hunt in the “hopes of finding a stronger purpose and more meaning” in his life. Uh-oh.
