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.Ī 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.

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. 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. 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. 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.Īdapted 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. 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. 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. Nicolas Cage makes quite the impression when he first rides onto the screen in Gabe Polsky’s Butcher’s Crossing.

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