Cutter's Way

Jamelle Bouie4.5

”He’s responsible. Him and all the motherfuckers like him. They’re all the same. You know why they’re all the same? Because it’s never their ass that’s on the line. It’s always somebody else’s. Always yours, mine, ours.”It feels almost trite to say this is a perfect specimen of post-Vietnam alienation and post-Watergate alienation. It speaks to both of those, yes, but it also speaks to a sense of exhaustion, of living without the hope of a future, of knowing that there’s something better and also knowing you’ll never touch it. There’s Cutter, chewed up by the war. Bone, aimless and resigned to a life without meaning. And Mo (played by a revelatory Lisa Eichhorn) trapped in domestic purgatory, unable to give her love even when she desperately wants to. This is a movie made for a country that is going through the motions, one which can only rouse itself into action in pursuit of a villain who may not even be responsible for the crime it seeks to avenge. It’s a movie that could have been released in 2001 as easily as 1981, and honestly feels most appropriate for 2021.

laird4.5

CUTTER'S WAY opens on the American Dream in the form of a melting pot parade, the procession playing out in slow motion with Jack Nitzche's otherworldly zither and glass harmonica lullaby underlining the word "dream." Later when the three main characters are watching a similar procession, Cutter makes some characteristically offensive, cynical remarks about floats featuring Native Americans and Mexicans. "Look at our glorious past...happy padres, happy Indians. Wiped out in less than 200 years by disease and forced labor. You can still get one to clean your kitchen... they died with Christ's blessing. Happy corpses, each and every one." Maybe Cutter, disfigured physically and mentally in America's most recent imperialist adventure, is getting to the root of it all: America's original sin. That this exchange is not in the book is telling. While Cutter is alternately ranting about the world and lusting after majorettes, a brief cutaway to his poor wife shows her gazing wistfully at a grandmotherly old woman. She wants this for herself. Neither Cutter nor Bone notice.In a movie like CHINATOWN, the big twist is that the powerful rich white man is the culprit. In CUTTER'S WAY, it would be a twist if he wasn't. While it toys with the idea (to a much greater extent than the novel) that Cutter might be paranoid, I think it also suggests that someone as powerful as Cord (an oil tycoon) is probably guilty of *something.* When Bone and Valerie go out on his sailboat (also not in the novel) there's an oil platform prominent in the shot. The idyllic, romantic ocean setting violated by Cord's subtle presence. Not that there's anything romantic going on in the boat anyway... Or anywhere else. The America of CUTTER'S WAY is iced over and done for. The dream was a lie. Characters numb themselves with alcohol and wonder if they've been faking their feelings. In the end Cutter and Bone seek justice and find value in an act heroism. As Valerie asks, though, "Nothing really counts, does it?" And the movie cuts to black without providing an answer.

Sean Fennessey4.0

John Heard gives maybe the greatest going-for-it performance of the 80s. I love this movie and its jet-black heart.