I watched Dances With Wolves on television last night, seeing it again for the first time since its release in 1990. I really enjoyed it. This was Kevin Costner’s Directorial Debut, and it won seven Oscars, including best film and best director. The script was developed by Michael Blake from his own novel, and Costner played an important part of the development of both. This is obviously a story that mattered to him, and it shows.
Dances With Wolves tells the story of an American Unionist Officer, Ltn. Dunbar, played by Costner, who after becoming an accidental hero during the Civil War chooses for his reward an isolated Military Post on the Western frontier, somewhere on the Dakota prairies. When Dunbar arrives there he finds that the Post has been abandoned, but he patiently restores it, enjoying the peace, solitude and simplicity.
Initially his only companions are his horse and a curious wolf, but then a Sioux Medicine Man (Kicking Bird) stumbles upon Dunbar. Over long slow months Dunbar gets to know the Sioux, gradually winning their trust and learning some of their language. He is attracted to a white woman, Standing With A Fist, who has lived with the clan since she was child, being the sole survivor of a Pawnee attack on her family. As he gets to know these people he also learns to know himself.
The film is deeply respectful of a way of life that is essentially reverential towards the environment, a practical and spiritual wisdom that is still embodied by many members of the remaining North American First Nations, as I was honoured to discover when I spent some time in British Columbia. However, in the 1860’s the frontier was inexorably moving west and eventually, inevitably, this idyll was disturbed.
The scope and humour, humanity and ambition of the movie, along with its unhurried exploration of character and landscape carried me through the three hour running time. There is a four-hour version, but I think that is not for me.
Does it have faults? Yes. While trying to redress the Western’s typical racism it simply turns Black hats into White and White to Black, making the Sioux uniformly heroic and the Caucasians abhorrent; although the Pawnee are also villainous, led by Wes Studi who later impressed in Michael Mann’s The Last of the Mohicans. But despite Costner’s patent admiration for the Sioux his film really didn’t tell us much about their culture or spirituality, even if they did make him an honorary member of the tribe in thanks for it. It is too much a hippie Boy’s Own Story to be taken wholly seriously, but hey, I rather like hippie Boy’s Own Stories. Like Aaron Sorkin I am a Romantic Idealist.
I really enjoyed the acting. Costner’s characteristic underplaying; Graham Greene as Kicking Bird building a deep and complex character, one you could see why he was the Clan’s Holy Man; Mary McConnell was utterly believable as Stands With A Fist, (I thought the love story was beautifully told). Nathan Lee Chasing His Horse played the young brave ‘Smiles a Lot’, who clearly in love with the Dunbar - now known by the Sioux as Dances With Wolves; and Rodney A Grant impressed as Wind In His Hair, one of the lead Braves - who may also be enamoured of the White interloper. Even in the 1990s it was unusual to have such an ethnic cast, and Costner – who was also a producer - did well to procure it.
For some reason I did not get subtitles on my TV, so I had to intuit a lot of the Sioux talk, but that wasn’t really a problem. The flow of the stately pow-wows was pretty clear, as was the pillow talk of Kicking Bird and his wife.
The Western genre has been described as ‘figures in a landscape’, and both are skillfully photographed, often with just parts of the human figure seen in the foreground to emphasize the epic scale of the landscape. There is much visual beauty here. Dean Selby, the Australian cinematographer, had already shot the 2ndand 3rdMad Max movies and knew how to emphasis and humanize the vastness of the prairie as well as the desert. One exhilarating and extended scene is the Tribe’s Buffalo hunt.
The John Barry score is effective. - maybe too much so - and I kept wondering where I had heard one particular musical phrase before. It was in his Stranger on the Shore. Lazy and distracting.
As for the downbeat ending, that was of course appropriate in historical terms, being set not long before Gen. Custer’s defeat at Little Big Horn, a Pyrrhic victory for the Sioux that sealed their fate, but in terms of film’s particular narrative it makes little logical sense, even if it struck the right emotional tone.
When this film was in production some in Hollywood called it KevinGate, expecting it to crash and burn as the product of an immature star’s inflated ego, as Michael Cimino’s Heavens Gate had done ten years before. They were utterly wrong. This was a remarkable achievement for a first-time director and lead actor. I understand that Costner is a humble and participative worker, always willing to learn from his collaborators. I think he did a lot of learning during the making of Dances With Wolves. He has only directed two more movies since then, but I think this the best of them. The three hours are worth investing.
