Dances With Wolves

Kevin Costner's Dances With Wolves (1990) was the first modern Western to capture the public's imagination. The Western had been largely moribund since the '70s, and the phenomenal success of Dances (including an Oscar for Best Picture) provided it a much-needed shot in the arm, initiating a welcome (if all-too-brief) resurgence in the genre with films like Unforgiven and Tombstone.

Seen twenty years later, Dances With Wolves stands as a good but flawed film. It has the look and feel of classic Western (along with some welcome authenticity) but infuses it with very contemporary liberal values and posturing that prove rather off-putting.

Lieutenant John Dunbar (Kevin Costner) is a Union cavalryman whose suicidal gesture on a Civil War battlefield earns him a posting of his choosing. He picks an isolated frontier post, Fort Sedgwick, which he finds completely abandoned. Dunbar makes contact with a local tribe of Sioux Indians, and after some initial awkwardness Dunbar befriends them. Not only that, but after awhile Dunbar joins with them, shedding his uniform, adopting Indian garb, taking part in a buffalo hunt and romancing Stands With a Fist (Mary McDonnell), a white woman raised by the Sioux. Dunbar's idyllic life is interrupted when a detachment of US Cavalry shows up, putting his newfound friends in imminent danger.

Dances With Wolves constantly gets used as a battering ram against James Cameron's Avatar, but Costner's Indian epic really isn't much more original. From Broken Arrow and Devil's Doorway through Little Big Man and Soldier Blue, the revisionist Indian Western is a well-worn approach to the genre and Dances With Wolves brings little new to the table. Fans of non-Westerns like Lawrence of Arabia and Lord Jim will recognize the basic plot and character dilemmas as well. There's nothing especially wrong with this, but if you're going to throw stones at Cameron, you should save some for Costner.

Costner's film is certainly well-crafted and entertaining. The production is first-rate, with a truly epic look and feel. Dean Semler's majestic photography, Jeffrey Beecroft and William Ladd Skinner's richly-detailed production design, and John Barry's gorgeous score create a movie that's just lovely to watch. The action scenes are thrilling, especially the exhilarating buffalo hunt. The authentic South Dakota and Wyoming locations, the casting of real Indians as Indians (no Jeff Chandler in red-face here), and commendable use of Lakota and Pawnee dialogue adds an admirable air of authenticity to the proceedings. If the movie's a bit long in the tooth, Costner makes sure things are never boring. It has no problem entertaining the audience; its flaws lie elsewhere.

Dances is a hopeless sop to "politically correct" values. The Sioux characters are very well-played but never really rise above the tiresome "Noble Savage" archetype, non-threatening, friendly, environmentally conscious (at least they don't sing Colors of the Wind) and practically perfect in every way. The whites are almost uniformly morons, lunatics or animal-shooting redneck gutter trash in desperate need of extermination. Similarly, for all its deification of the Sioux, Costner has no problem demonizing the Pawnees as bloodthirsty butchers. Costner's obnoxious narration seems like the rhapsody of a '90s bleeding-heart liberal rather than a 19th Century soldier ("I want to see the frontier before it's gone" - gag!).

On other levels, too, the film isn't quite successful. Costner constantly engages in cornball humor that would make John Ford roll his eyes: meeting the Indians for the first time, Dunbar's flag blows back in his face! What a card. The film also asks us to swallow a few whoppers, like that the Sioux can become expert riflemen with no training, and that Dunbar can get brained with a rifle butt every thirty seconds without dying (he must have a cast-iron skull). There's also the questionable expedient of Dunbar's romance with Stands With a Fist, which avoids the messy business of interracial love which even Broken Arrow didn't shy away from forty years prior.

This is not to take away from a film that's an obvious crowd-pleaser: Dances With Wolves is certainly well-made and entertaining, and it's far from the only Western to incorporate modern ideology into a 19th Century setting. However, it's hard to defend the simplistic view of the frontier in such a richly-crafted film. If traditional John Ford Westerns are guilty of demonizing Indians, surely the other extreme is just as bad.

Kevin Costner is adequate, playing Dunbar as a straight-laced, stiff-necked hero in the approved Gary Cooper fashion. Mary McDonnell (Independence Day) is good even if she's none-too-convincing as a "modern woman" in the Old West. The Native American actors are the real highlight: Graham Greene (Die Hard With a Vengeance), Floyd "Red Crow" Westerman (The Doors), Rodney A. Grant (Wild Wild West), Wes Studi (Geronimo: An American Legend) and Tantoo Cardinal (Black Robe) all give richly-layered and vibrant performances, making up for their one-dimensional characterization. The remaining white actors are obnoxiously one-note.

If I seem unduly harsh towards Dances With Wolves, I apologize. There's much to admire and enjoy in the film, which is certainly a rousing epic in its own right, but it's too bad Costner needs to give us a heavy-handed lecture on the ethics of imperialism.