Long, earnest, verging on the sugary - but a good film
The most commercially
successful Western so far, made with a budget of $18 million (so expensive that
it became known as ‘Kevin’s Gate’) but grossing over 400 million, this epic won
seven Oscars, including Best Picture, and was nominated for five more. Westerns
don’t normally win Oscars. The first to win Best Picture was Cimarron in
1931. Unforgiven repeated the trick in 1992.
You can understand why it
did so well. The Best Cinematography award for Dean Semler was more than
justified. The film is visually stunning. Shot largely in South Dakota, it has
a wonderful authentic look of the plains, and certain set pieces like the
buffalo hunt or the shots of White Socks, the wolf, remain in the memory. There
are Fordian touches or David Leanisms. It is a motion picture that deserves to
be seen on the very big screen.
Admirable
If there is a criticism of
its visual appeal it might be that the look of it is almost too pretty and has
a romantic sheen. But that applies to the whole movie really. The story and
treatment are earnest, worthy, even noble. Costner’s dismay at seeing the trash
heap, the dead deer in the river, and the friendship he cultivates with the wolf
all establish the movie’s eco-credentials early on, and thenceforth the pro-Indian
theme is very pronounced. All the whites (except Costner) are coarse or mad.
All the Sioux are noble, handsome and dignified.
One of the best actors
Roger Ebert in his review
wrote, “In a sense, "Dances With Wolves" is a
sentimental fantasy, a "what if" movie that imagines a world in which
whites were genuinely interested in learning about a Native American culture
that lived more closely in harmony with the natural world than any other before
or since. But our knowledge of how things turned out - of how the Indians were
driven from their lands by genocide and theft - casts a sad shadow over
everything.” That's right: the hero’s approach is more wishful thinking and
late-20th Century projection onto the past than reality. An 1860s pro-Indian
eco-warrior would have been a rara avis.
For most white Americans, Indians were thieving savages fit only to be shot or
at least confined to a reservation, and the land was there to be exploited for profit.
As for the acting, Mary McDonnell does an
excellent job as the woman who had been captured by the Sioux as a young girl
(Costner’s own daughter plays the child in flashback). She manages the
Lakota-speaking adult trying to recapture her English very convincingly. Graham
Greene - such a good actor - as Kicking Bird and Rodney A Grant as Wind in his
Hair are the leading Sioux and both performances are high class. Wes Studi
(always excellent) is there too.
Fine actors Grant and Greene
In the lesser white-man
parts, Maury Chaykin is entertaining as a mad Union officer
and Robert Pastorelli morbidly amusing as Dunbar's horrible traveling companion.
Viggo Mortensen, later of Appaloosa
fame, was to have played Lt. Dunbar and was apparently billed to play the lead
in a Simon Wincer-directed Dances with Wolves sequel, Holy Road, but that doesn’t appear to
have happened. However, Costner does a good, solid job. It was only his second
Western (after being the energetic kid in Silverado
in 1985). This movie, the later Wyatt Earp, Open Range and Hatfields & McCoys all benefit
from his earnest performances.
Sometimes verges on the sugary-sentimental
The music is appropriate,
though once again sometimes a bit on the romantic side.
A couple of secrets to give
away, culled from the IMDb trivia page: the buffalo charging at the youngster
in the film was actually charging at a pile of its favorite food, Oreo cookies,
and the raw buffalo ‘liver’ offered to Kevin to chew on is actually made of
cranberry Jell-O. Thought you ought to know about some of the more important
aspects of the film.
Costner has been winningly
honest about his nervousness as a first-time director. Actually, though, it's
his uncertainty in front of the camera that is more interesting, as he survives,
copes, then gradually integrates in his new life. Such humor as there is comes
from a classic trope: the tenderfoot out West. Turning the idea on its head,
however, it is the white man blundering about in the Indian camp who is the
greenhorn.
Dean Semler's photography reminds me of Roger Deakins's work in The Assassination...
It’s very long (three
hours) but if you are willing to invest your time in it, it doesn’t drag. It’s also quite
different: while we do have fairly predictable elements – the buffalo hunt, the romance with the Indian girl – as a Western it
is very far from the classic pro-Indian movies of the past it might be compared
with, such as Broken Arrow. One of
the best features of the movie is that the Sioux are played by Native Americans and are allowed to speak their own
tongue. Dances With Wolves is about
as far from the old-style Ug, me big
chief style of Western as it is possible to get. About time too.
Curiously,
perhaps, for such an epic, sweeping, long film, it’s not spectacle but
character development which the film really gives us. All credit to Mr.
Costner. I will admit that I don’t always put this Western in the DVD player with
a song in my heart but that goes for the rather earnest and overlong Wyatt Earp and Hatfields & McCoys too. Silverado and Open Range
were a different story; they are fun. Dances With Wolves isn’t fun but when I do watch it again I always think it’s a damn good film.