Las Vegas Review of Books

Butcher’s Crossing, directed by Gabe Polsky (Saban Films); adapted from the novel by John Williams.

“This move saved me.” That’s what Nicolas Cage told GQ, in a 2022 interview, about his relocation to Las Vegas in 2006. While he was initially attracted to the absence of state taxes, he came to love the local culture. This city, after all, arguably gave him his greatest success: Leaving Las Vegas, the 1995 film that earned him an Academy Award for Best Actor.

The salvation of Nicolas Cage has become a modern American touchstone. Not long after his move to Vegas, the tabloids began reporting on his disastrous finances. The A-list actor, star of several blockbusters—The Rock (1996), Face/Off (1997), National Treasure (2004)—was becoming known for box-office failures—The Wicker Man (2006), Next (2007), Bangkok Dangerous (2008). Emerging social media platforms spread parodic memes ridiculing Cage’s most ludicrous on-screen moments. Fighting bankruptcy, the actor increased his shooting schedule by starring in forgettable direct-to-video titles: Trespass (2011), The Frozen Ground (2013), Rage (2014).

Cage could have faded away. But in the last half-dozen years, aided by the rising popularity of streaming services, his unusual repertoire—Mandy (2018), Color Out of Space (2019), Pig (2021)—has generated quite a bit of buzz. Cage is now recognized as a brand, a style unto himself—eccentric, flamboyant, outlandish, outrageous, intense and unpredictable—captured in starring roles that seem to be specifically about him, especially The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent (2022) and Dream Scenario (2023). He has become a “risk-taking powerhouse,” according to one article.

And Cage is now the subject of book-length studies—not just biographies but disquisitions upon him as a cultural phenomenon. Lindsay Gibb’s slim National Treasure: Nicolas Cage (ECW Press, 2015) focuses on the unique acting style. Keith Phipps’s Age of Cage: Four Decades of Hollywood through One Singular Career (Henry Holt, 2022) tries to understand the actor’s artistic contribution by attending to work that has been “overshadowed by bear suits and dinosaur skulls.” And in How Coppola Became Cage (Oxford UP, 2023), which limits the focus to the period between his childhood (he was raised by his father, August Coppola, a professor of comparative literature at Cal State Long Beach) and his Oscar winning work in 1995, Zach Schonfeld characterizes the actor as a timeless figure “always out of step with the present.” For Schonfeld, Cage offers “a woozy intensity that dissolves irony and indifference, transcends boundaries of good taste, elevates bad movies, and absorbs peculiar influences like a DustBuster gone berserk.”

The memes would suggest that Cage characters typically lose their shit. Miller, Cage’s role in Butcher’s Crossing, directed by Gabe Polsky, is no exception. “You’re all gonna die!” he screams at one point.

The film—which premiered in September 2022 but wasn’t theatrically released until October 2023—is an adaptation of John Williams’s 1960 novel of the same name. Like Cage, Williams (who passed away in 1994) has been enjoying something of a renaissance. His three major novels—Butcher’s Crossing, Stoner (1965), and the National Book Award-winning Augustus (1972)—were republished to critical acclaim by NYRB Classics between 2006 and 2014. The University of Texas Press published a biography of Williams, The Man Who Wrote the Perfect Novel, by Charles J. Shields, in 2018. And the Library of America then put out its own John Williams volume in 2021.

Butcher’s Crossing follows Will Andrews, a young man who arrives in the fictional Butcher’s Crossing, Kansas, in the 1870s. Andrews is the son of a Unitarian minister in Boston; he has dropped out of Harvard and ventured West to see the real world. Deciding to go on a buffalo hunt, he connects with a hide merchant he’d met some years back in Massachusetts. The merchant tells Andrews to go back home.

But then he meets Miller, played by Cage in the film. Miller is an older hunter, a seasoned veteran who never got his big score. When he hears of Andrews’s eagerness to invest in adventure, he can’t resist relating a dream he’s had for years—of a secret valley he once visited in the faraway Colorado Rockies, teeming with thick-furred bison. It would be a once-in-a-lifetime hunt, he tells the young man. Andrews agrees to finance the expedition, which includes Miller and himself, a disagreeable skinner named Schneider, and an old drunk oxcart driver named Charlie Hoge.

One might assume that Miller will lead them on a wild goose chase—that the mythical valley full of bison is just a dream. But Butcher’s Crossing isn’t quite like that. The valley does exist. The trick is in figuring out what to do next.

The action shots of the buffalo hunt are the highlights of Butcher’s Crossing.

Cage is well-cast in the role, which requires the combination of the jaded elder experienced in all the dangers of his trade and the enthusiastic idealist who can’t give up the dream of finally hitting it big—an interesting blend of terse cowboy and overzealous fortune-seeker. Appearing bald (and dry-shaving his scalp multiple times onscreen), he has said that his performance “could be Michael Jordan meets Marlon Brando in Apocalypse Now.” In any case, he manages to get a few good lines in. (“By god, I got them buffaloed!”)

Jeremy Bobb, who plays Schneider, is also very good. But, by and large, the best acting in the movie comes from the bison. That may be insulting to the humans, but honestly, the herd shots are very impressive. The movie was filmed on Blackfoot land in Montana near Glacier National Park, and the bison were handled by the Blackfeet Tribe Buffalo Program. “Bison Wranglers” are included in the end-credits. The action shots of the buffalo hunt are the highlights of Butcher’s Crossing.

Gabe Polsky’s directing is otherwise poor. There’s far too much fancy work, as if the viewer required constant cinematic diversions: montages, slo-mo, close-ups, drone shots, hallucinations. A more restrained photographic approach would have better suited the material. This should be a story in which the land looms large and the people remain rather small.

That is, after all, what Williams’s story conveys. It’s a naturalistic account of a brutal world that doesn’t easily lend itself to economic success stories. A difficulty with adapting it to the screen is the pacing, as it’s hard to convey an account of human endurance in under two hours. But Polsky’s film does hew quite closely to Williams’s narrative. And this adaptation of Butcher’s Crossing does add one valuable element to the book. In the film, Will Andrews wants to see God—and he does indeed see God—but it turns out to be an Old Testament God, bloody and indifferent, one who giveth and taketh away.