Cutter’s Way (1981)

aka Cutter and Bone

The post-Vietnam, post-Watergate USA. We follow a trio of characters who seem too weary and exhausted by the last decade to have anything like hopes or aspirations anymore. A couple of years later, Richard Bone (Jeff Bridges) would probably aspire to the horrors of yuppiedom (if ever there ever has been a better sign of desperation, I don’t know about it), but as it stands, he’s working at a Santa Barbara yacht club and making a little money on the side via some low-rent gigolo-ing, in his own, generally passive, way. Bone’s most active desire appears to be his pining for Mo Cutter (Lisa Eichhorn). Mo also happens to be the wife of Bone’s closest friend, Alex Cutter (John Heard). Alex came home from Vietnam damaged in mind and body, having traded in an eye, a leg and an arm for a hankering for self-destruction, some casual cruelty, and a big case of alcoholism.

From time to time, there are flashes of the man Cutter must have been, and it is these pieces of him Mo seems still to cling to, loving a man who most probably doesn’t deserve it anymore, and slowly destroying herself in the process. To make matters more complicated, she reciprocates Bone’s feelings for her, at least in part, which closes the circle of these three like a trap.

Instead of continuing to slowly tumble along towards nothing, an outward force is going to push these characters to their extremes and their doom. Bone witnesses how a killer dumps the body of a young woman in a dumpster; the shadow he sees may or may not belong to local rich man J.J. Cord (Stephen Elliott). Given who he is, in the USA in 1981 (or in 2024), this might not even matter.

Once Cutter hears of this, he gets it into his head to take some for of vengeance on Cord as a stand-in for everything he’s bitter about (and perhaps the murdered woman), or blackmail him for money, or both, and he pulls his friends with him, unwilling or not.

Ivan Passer’s Cutter’s Way is what one might call an inconspicuous masterpiece, a film so carefully constructed, one might miss just how great it is exactly for its kind of greatness.

There’s a logic and congruity to the way the plot develops out of the deep flaws of the characters one might miss in its brutal perfection; a precise ugly beauty in Jordan Cronenweth’s photography one might confuse with naturalism; a painful honesty about flawed people in a desperate time – times are always desperate - in Jeffrey Alan FIskin’s script one might not want to face. But the closer you look at Cutter’s Way, the more you see all of these things, how it uses them to embody the quiet desperation of its time and place. It’s no wonder a country would embrace the immoral, anti-human horrors of Reaganism after years of this – at least that way it could pretend to be alive again.

Other elements of the film have grown in importance over the years: the film’s treatment of the unassailability of Power (with a capital letter for sure), of relationships between men and women poisoned by the wounds inflicted in the name of said Power as well as the lies some men have been taught to tell themselves about women (and about themselves), and a sense of anger so strong, acts coming from it will only lead to futile acts of violence bound not to change very much at all.

There’s a deep, painful sense of humanity in here as well, a willingness to show the three protagonists as flawed and broken and often downright shitty (embodied in absolutely perfect performances – especially Eichhorn is a bit of a revelation of complicated nuance) yet still insist on compassion and understanding for them. Well, J.J. Cord never gets that, but then, it is rather the point of Cutter’s Way he’s standing above us mere humans, like the crappy, capitalist godhood we deserve.