Monday Movie Review: Dances With Wolves

Dances With Wolves (1990) 10/10
Lt. John Dunbar (Kevin Costner) requests a frontier assignment after being commended for heroics during the Civil War. Sent to an abandoned outpost, he encounters a nearby Lakota tribe, and soon befriends them, falling in love with Stands With a Fist (Mary McDonnell), a white woman raised by the tribe. Directed by Kevin Costner.

The “director’s edition” of Dances With Wolves is four hours long. That’s not a movie, that’s a lifestyle. It took me a week to watch this frickin’ movie. But despite the many criticisms the film endures, it was worth it. (FYI, I saw the 180 minute version in the theater when it was new, and this was my first re-viewing.)

The basic criticism, as I understand it, is that DWW is a treacly movie that romanticizes Indians enormously, painting them with a thick coating of Noble Savage, which is dehumanizing and unrealistic. I beg to differ.

First, DWW has a lot to offer above and beyond those criticisms. It is beautiful, and manages to actually show what the American West might have looked like, in a way no other movie has done. Not even John Ford’s Monument Valley filming has conveyed this richness and detail. One could watch Dunbar approach the Lakota village and actually believe one is approaching the real thing. Like Titanic, DWW works on the level of obsessive detail that communicates the experience of living inside a particular moment in time. The authenticity of everything from teepee construction to costume to horsemanship is not an end unto itself, but a way of creating a world.

As to the criticism, first, John Dunbar is himself an intense romantic, and this is clear from the opening scenes. He wants to “see the frontier before it’s gone.” He lives inside his head, as expressed by his journal-keeping, where there is order, propriety, and honor, and the world around disappoints. With Dunbar, it’s not that he sees the Indians as “other,” it’s that he sees the whole world as “other” and sees the Indians, and himself in the process of becoming one of them, as his first hint at someone who isn’t other. I don’t think that the film gives Dunbar’s romanticism a free pass.

Second, I don’t think the Lakota we see fit the standard Noble Savage stereotype. These are people who laugh, screw up, argue with their wives, and in general are fully human. I don’t think we’re used to seeing American Indians with fully-fleshed lives in a Western.

After a while, yes, cracks appear. Mary McDonnell’s role is too convenient by half. All the whites (except McDonnell and Costner, and a general seen for a brief moment in the opening scene) are savage, cruel, cowardly, and/or slovenly. On that level, yes, this movie definitely sides with the Indians as the better and nobler people. Of course, the actual history of the American West supports a view of whites as cruel in regard to Indians. Which is why it needn’t be shown in a heavy-handed way. These are definite flaws, but the movie has such virtues, such a sweeping scope, that it is not worth downgrading, and I stand by my 10.

(Cross-posts with Blogs)