Clearcut

Despite his best efforts, Peter Maguire (Ron Lea), a Toronto lawyer working for a Canadian Native American tribe to stop "clear cut" logging on their tribal lands, is no match for the logging corporation's fleet of top lawyers. Traveling to his clients' reservation to deliver the grim news of his latest loss, he finds that the corporation has already begun operations opposed by Indian protesters. Pouring out his anger and bitterness over his failure to tribal elder Wilf Redwing (Floyd Red Crow Westerman) during a hallucinogenic session in a religious sweat lodge, Peter is later confronted in his motel room by Arthur (Greene).

A stranger whom Peter first encountered at the demonstration, Arthur now proposes a policy of no retreat, no surrender against the lumber company, beginning with the kidnapping and murder of Bud Rickets (Michael Hogan), the local logging plant's foreman. To show he can back up his words, Arthur begins by terrorizing a TV news crew in the room next door whose loud partying has kept Peter awake. Only Peter's intervention prevents Arthur from bashing in the heads of the two men in the room and raping the woman they find. Instead, the tormentors-turned-victims are left tied up while Arthur, with Peter in tow, goes in search of Rickets.

Finding him at a gas station, they kidnap him and take him into the woods. There, Arthur begins torturing Rickets by slowly skinning him alive. He later pays two hunters to go away and leave them alone and kills two policemen. All along, he challenges Peter to stop his rampage by fighting him. When Peter finally is prodded into action, Arthur dives into the river, disappears beneath the surface and is never seen again. Back in civilization, however, Peter spots a distinctive piece of jewelry that belonged to Arthur now around the neck of a child on the reservation.

Under the skilled direction of Richard Bugajski (whose blistering 1982 feature THE INTERROGATION was banned by the Polish government, finally resurfacing to great acclaim at the 1989 Toronto Festival of Festivals), CLEARCUT is as enigmatic as its central character. At different points in the film, Arthur is variously perceived or described as a drifter with a strong sociopathic streak, a terrorist hired by the tribe to make the lumber company more "sympathetic" to their point of view, and not a man at all but a spirit, conjured up by the tribal spiritual leaders to stop the destruction of their forest. It's also possible that he's none of the above. Starting with the motel confrontation, it seems mostly as if Arthur may be a figment of Peter's imagination, a twisted, outsized embodiment of his own impotent rage at slights big and small to which he consistently turns the other cheek out of social conditioning. Only Wilf knows for sure, and he's not saying.

Neither is Bugajski, who presents the tale from Peter's point of view, a questionable point of view at best. In the role, Lea is not the most charismatic of actors, which seems to be the whole idea. He's playing a most uncharismatic character, whose alliance with the Indians has a vaguely patronizing quality to it. He seems angrier at his courtroom setbacks than his Indian clients do despite the fact that the outcome has little or no effect on his own life. His motivation for following Arthur seems therefore unclear. Throughout he seems to be in some sort of dreamlike state, insubstantial and ineffectual, like a man having a nightmare who is unable to wake up. By extension, modern life itself is seen as a waking nightmare in which nothing, from savage confrontational violence to sophisticated legal maneuvering, seems able to prevent the gradual destruction of the planet. The meek may inherit the earth, but they won't hold onto the logging rights.

As CLEARCUT shows, they'll be lucky to hold onto their sanity. If Bugajski has made an absorbing, enigmatic film, Greene (DANCES WITH WOLVES, THUNDERHEART) is clearly the main attraction. His work here is the kind of classic star turn that leaps from the screen and burns itself into the memory despite being anything but a typical star role. Most stars are almost pathologically image-conscious, but his character never explains himself and is never explained by anyone else while he's skinning, shooting and menacing those around him. Although Rob Forsyth's screenplay, based on M.T. Kelly's novel A Dream Like Mine, would have easily accommodated a portrayal of Arthur as a noble savage taking his last stand or a minority driven mad by oppression, Greene seems to have taken the far trickier approach of playing Arthur as Peter's dark side, which is, finally, the most dramatically logical approach to take.

The combined efforts make CLEARCUT a film that is frustrating both as art, for its lack of resolution, and as politics, for its lack of clear villains and heroes and little in the way of a clear message. But echoing Peter's dilemma, it has a dreamlike, or nightmarish, authority that makes it linger in the memory in a way a more forthcoming film may not have. (Extreme violence, profanity, adult situations.) leave a comment