Butcher’s Crossing – TIFF 2022
September 8 to September 18, 2022
Content Advisory: Animal cruelty or animal death
A naive young man joins a grizzled veteran on a Buffalo hunt in Butcher’s Crossing. Will Andrews (Fred Hechinger) is a Harvard dropout who travels to the town of Butcher’s Crossing, Kansas hoping to join in on the booming market for Buffalo pelts. After questioning local trader JD McDonald (Paul Raci), Will comes across Miller (Nicolas Cage), who knows of an untouched valley filled with thousands of Buffalo. Along with Bible-thumper Charlie (Xander Berkeley) and unhinged skinner Fred (Jeremy Bobb), Will joins Miller on a multi-month journey to strike it big.
Butcher’s Crossing is a Western co-written and directed by Gabe Polsky, based on the 1960 novel of the same name by John Williams. The film stars Nicolas Cage, sporting a completely shaved head, as Miller, a somewhat obsessive Buffalo hunter in 1874 Kansas, convinces naive college dropout Will Andrews, played by Fred Hechinger (The White Locust), to fund a hunting trip into a mountainous canyon untouched by settlers. Miller ends up hunting longer than expected, resulting in the hunting party being stuck in the canyon during the winter.
In a bit of hypocritical irony, Butcher’s Crossing ends with titles talking about how Bison were nearly hunted to extinction after watching a 105-minute film about a man so obsessed with Buffalo pelts that he won’t stop hunting them. While Butcher’s Crossing has some decent western visuals, the graphic scenes of Buffalo skinning in the film are enough to make a meat eater go vegan.
