Dances with Wolves

Rating:
Summary: Big as all outdoors
Review: For once I agree with the critics. "Dances with Wolves" is brilliant. I walked out of the cinema after seeing this film and felt like I had gone through a religious revelation. I was glad to live in a world which could make movies such as this.

OK, that sounds a little over the top but that is how I felt at the time. I pity those people who didn't get to see "Dances with Wolves" on a big screen. Video just does not do it justice. I own both the standard three hour wide screen version laser disc of "Dances with Wolves" as well as the special four hour edition. Despite the movie being terrific it is difficult for me to sit down for four straight hours. For that reason I have to split it over two sessions. The original edition is for visitors to watch.

Before I got the longer edition I was curious as to whether it was better or just a watered down version of the first cut. Well it is definitely better. There are so many new scenes that it would be too much effort to list them. The major difference for me though was a section in the middle where Dunbar, (Kevin Costner), has a moment of doubt about his newfound friends. It occurs right before the buffalo hunt when he finds them all celebrating their slaughter of the white buffalo hunters who were responsible for the waste of so many fine animals. Even if it is justice he is not comfortable with their evident joy at such an inherently brutal act. 'Nough said about the differences.

The core story is short but the telling is rich in nuance. We meet the wounded hero, Lieutenant Dunbar, in a American civil war hospital tent. He is about to have his leg amputated. While the doctors are having a smoke break he decides to rejoin his regiment and break a long standing stale mate by riding to his death across the enemy lines. It doesn't go quite as planned however and he ends up being the hero that turned the tide of battle. As a reward, he is given the use of the best doctor and an unlimited choice of duty.

His choice is to go west to the Indian frontier. Unfortunately his superior officer at his eventual posting, Major Fambrough, is mad. Just before his suicide the Major sends Dunbar out to a new base right in the frontier. When he get's there, the camp is deserted and unbeknownst to Dunbar the Major has not filed his final order, meaning that no one knows the whereabouts of Dunbar.

Only a little perturbed, Dunbar decides to clean up the camp and wait for reinforcements. It isn't long before the local Indians turn up to make his life more interesting. Over the course of time he is drawn more and more into their community. Eventually his is forced to take the side of the Indians over that of his fellow soldiers. A situation which leads to his arrest. The only other major factor in the film is his romance with a white woman who has been raised in the tribe since she was a young girl. She is responsible in no small part for Dunbar switching sides.

The message we are left with at the end of the film is that there need not have been any SIDES in the first place.

Rating:
Summary: MYTHOLOGY
Review: Indians are a favorite pet of the liberal establishment. "Dances With Wolves" is a fine movie. Most of them are. Nobody ever said these people are not brilliant. There is no real lie in "Dances" that I can see, but it does seem stylized. The Indians are pictured as peaceful, spiritual conservers of the land. Real-life Indians had every potential of being violent savages without anybody's prompting. Just ask the Mexicans who were systematically robbed by them every harvest until American mountain men with guns were recruited to provide a little security. The soldiers are dumbellionites, as are most of the whites that Kevin Costner "escapes" from in his effort to find the real West. While Indians certainly knew how to preserve the land, an act of necessity for them, they took plenty from it without replenishment. Whites stripped and mined the land, but they also came up with ingenious technologies that re-generated the land.

STEVEN TRAVERS
AUTHOR OF "BARRY BONDS: BASEBALL'S SUPERMAN"
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Rating:
Summary: Dances with Wolves Earns Lawrence Award
Review: Dances with Wolves easily earns a position among the all-time-greatest epic motion pictures. Its story and presentation are fresh, honest, real and breathtaking. "Epic" implies the film takes longer to tell its story than the average movie, and that it does. But consider that the correct measure of the length of any film is to track the number of visits your eyes make to your watch during the film. Thus a three-hour movie may seem shorter than a ninety-minute movie. The character development and interaction of this movie invites us to participate, to be there and feel as our hearts share the emotions of characters even as we feel the pleasure from the eye candy provided by the amazing cinematography that takes us across the massive Northern Plaines of the United States. The movie begins in a dramatic scene in which, Kevin Costner, a lieutenant in the Union Army, crawls off the battlefield surgeons table to save his badly injured leg or foot from amputation. Somewhat delirious he takes actions that lead to victory for his troops and ends a deadly stalemate between the two armies. As the hero of the battle the general's surgeon heals his leg and the lieutenant is offered any post he wants. He chooses the most remote post the army has because he wants to see the unspoiled land before it's too late, and the real story begins. A caution to those who think the white man was portrayed unfairly; read unbiased history, then watch the movie again. This movie undertakes allot and it succeeds. This exciting action, drama, western, love-story shows us a great example of a film that can be so absolutely entertaining and educational at the same time. Dances with Wolves entertains as it shows through historical example the importance and consequences of learning about our own preconceptions and learning the potential benefit we may enjoy from learning to respect and accept other beliefs or points of view, to just learning to understand all that we can before making decisions and drawing conclusions in any matter.
Dances with Wolves does all that any movie could be asked to do.

Rating:
Summary: not a PG-13
Review: I can appreciate the idea that "Dances with Wolves" is an example of cinematic revisionist history, if not an outright case of affirmative action that instantiates the idea of the "noble savage" that once held sway among the European settlers of the New World. But Hollywood has been reinterpreting the Old West in light of changing socio-political beliefs for decades. Just look at the changing story of Custer at the Little Big Horn from "Them Died With Their Boots On" to "Little Big Man" to "Son of the Morning Star." With Kevin Costner's film the Western was elevated to a level that hitherto had not been approached in American cinema.

It is "Little Big Man," along with "A Man Called Horse," that are clearly the cinematic ancestors of "Dances with Wolves." All three deal with a white man who finds a home among a Native American tribe, but where this 1990 film differs is that it is also an epic, at which point we are talking "How the West Was Won" and "Once Upon a Time in the West." Yet "Dances With Wolves" is a significant step beyond all of those films. "Little Big Man" was a black comedy and not an epic, "A Man Called Horse" was about an English aristocrat and not an American soldier, "How the West Was Won" was about Manifest Destiny and not the destruction of an indigenous culture, and "Once Upon a Time in the West" was operatic and not grounded in history, albiet a romanticized one.

Michael Blake's screenplay is based on his novel, and it is the film's prologue that I find most problematic. The idea is to establish Costner's John Dunbar as being someone special from the start, so that the Union soldier who could survive a hail of Confederate bullets becomes the man that could befriend a wild wolf on the Plains. It is also establishes Dunbar as a man who is searching for something, and not merely an alternative to the horrors of war but more importantly a reason for living. Whereas the rest of the film takes its time to develop things this initial part is relatively rushed, but the excuse for putting Dunbar in the middle of the Dakotas on a deserted military post is secondary to what happens once he is there.

The greatest strength of "Dances with Wolves" is that Dunbar's interactions with the Sioux (really the Lakotas, but the film uses the more familiar but erroneous name for these Native Americans), are defined by a series of relationships with clearly defined characters. Although his romance with Stands With A Fist (Mary McDonnell) is a major plot line, and her being a white woman raised by the tribe a useful contrivance for allowing the two sides to communicate, the relationship that really stands out is between Dunbar and Kicking Bird (Graham Greene). This is because the two are kindred spirits, each willing to be open to the other and committed to understanding the other on his own terms. The opposite position is taken by Wind In His Hair (Rodney A. Grant), but even he forges a relationship with the man who is given the Sioux name Dances With Wolves.

Then there are the relationships with both the tribal elders, such as Chief Ten Bears (Floyd Red Crow Westerman), and the youngsters, including Smiles a Lot (Nathan Lee Chasing His Horse). What makes these characters so compelling is that they are utterly devoid of caricature and that the performances seem so real and provide such a sense of dignity. There are moments of warmth and humor throughout the film, both springing from this same source. It is ironic that while the film won seven Oscars, none of them were for acting (Costner, Greene, and McDonnell were all nominated).

Because Dunbar is all alone at his post, he begins keeping a journal. This simple device allows the film to take advantage of Dunbar's narration to advance both the story and the message. What would seem stilted as a monologue works perfectly well in the context of a written journal entry. In the last act of the film the journal becomes part of the story as well, not only as a symbol of the disdain most white men have for the Indians and their culture, but as a testament to what is being lost. Dunbar decides to come West because he wants to see it before it is gone (even though the time frame here is the 1860s and the Civil War), and the final point of the film is that the Sioux were only years away from being herded to reservations. One of the great ironies of the story is that it is Dunbar, the only white man the Sioux have ever known, who gives them their death sentence when he tells them that as many white as there are stars in the sky are coming.

There are two major action sequences in the film, the buffalo hunt and Pawnee attack, but they are really not the most impressive parts of the film. That Dunbar would be invited to go on the hunt or that he would organize the defense of the village, are ultimately more important in the film. Dunbar is heroic because he is, in the best meaning of the term, human. Costner won the Oscar for best director, but clearly his strength is in telling the story and keeping the characters real rather than in coming up with pretty pictures, althought Australian cinematographer Dean Semler comes up with plenty of those, especially when he takes advantage of a brilliant sunset as a backdrop. "Dances with Wolves" is epic in its scope, but it has an attention to detail that few Westerns can rival, which it why it was the first film since "Cimarron" in 1931 to win the Best Picture Oscar.

Rating:
Summary: Dancing at the Oscars
Review: The winner of 7 Academy Awards, Kevin Costner's panoramic frontier epic DANCES WITH WOLVES is a rich and masterful blend of scenery, story, culture, personality, and friendship.

Following an act of interpreted bravery in the Civil War, Lt. John Dunbar is restationed to a deserted and delapidated Army fort, somewhere in the vast expanse of the unsettled Dakotas. He soon encounters a local tribe of Sioux Indians. Though initially distrustful, both sides begin to work, however slowly, at conquering their fears and prejudices. As Dunbar grows closer to the community, he makes efforts to learn their ways: language and dress, buffalo hunts and bonfire dances. His developing romance with a tribal woman blossoms into marriage. The Sioux leaders fear, all the while, that more `whites' are coming, to take and drive them off their lands, and the society's holy man suspects that Dunbar himself knows as much. What is more, the U.S. Army has initiated pursuit of the former lieutenant, branding him a traitor. Eventually, Dunbar must choose between remaining with the Sioux ... or departing from their company, rerouting military parties in order to safeguard Sioux culture and life.

The story is strong; the characters are distinctive and transparent; the script, smart and focused. The costumes, setting, transportation and tools-of-the-day all appear very authentic. Thus, it captures the time period (and location) extremely well. And here, it is all the better, because the movie is about those times, and what happened during them. The mood carefully shifts from a somber quality to soft cheeriness to cautious triumphant score, and back again. The film itself makes excellent use of cinematography, with grand, sweeping shots of the plains and hills, especially during the daytime buffalo chase. Unlike so many other Hollywood movies, first-hand acquaintance with "the girl" does not turn into romance in a few short days or hours. Nearly everything takes SOME time to develop, to change, to grow.

Costner's depictions seem to be largely accurate: the Sioux and many other indigenous societies in the Midwest and elsewhere were being pushed west, captured, or wiped out. However, he does come close to generalizing the `whites' as senseless, brutal, and enormously characteristically savage, almost like a race of monsters. While in fact various numberless persons - at both common and political levels - perpetrated attrocities and relocation efforts that, sadly, came out of westward expansion's predominant attitude of callous disregard for the native peoples and ecosystems of central North America - it would be inaccurate, as well as unfair, to say that such actions (or even attitudes) constituted phenomena universal to the white settlers.

Yet, on the whole, Costner has done a superb job of recreating the era, the peoples (generally), their ways of life, and the ideologies that motivated their actions. He has brought to life and memory the richness and humanity of a people all but forgotten ... and a partial portrayal of events which made, arguably, for the sadest chapter in the two-hundred-plus years of American history.

This film ranks among the very best Westerns made.

DVD Features: Audio Commentary (Kevin Costner, Jim Wilson), theatrical trailers, and scene selection.

Rating:
Summary: The extended version really adds a lot
Review: When Lieutenant John Dunbar (Kevin Costner) steals a cavalry horse named Cisco (played by Plain Justin Bar), he unleashes a chain of events that leads to an accidental victory for the Union troops, and Dunbar becomes a bona fide Civil War hero. Given the outpost of his choosing as well as the Buckskin horse, Dunbar makes friends with a shy wolf called Two Socks (played by Buck and Teddy), and hooks up with a Lakota Sioux tribe where he meets an enigmatic woman named Stands With Fist (Mary McDonnell).

The extended version DVD really adds a lot to the viewing experience -- be sure and listen to Costner's commentary, as it's not only informative but it's funny and is full of good anecdotes.

Staci Layne Wilson
Author of Staci's Guide to Animal Movies


Rating:
Summary: 5 Stars And More - A Masterpiece
Review: A terrific video, a masterpiece. A wonderful 3 hour film. This is one of the ten best films of the last 15 years. I can not believe some of the low ratings given. I welcome the respect given for native americans and their native language. We learn of the culture of the Sioux.

This was the outstanding film of 1990 winning 7 academy awards including best picture, best director, best original score and best cinematography. Where most movies are 2 hours in length, this 3 hour film could not have been any shorter and does not in any way seem long.

Rating:
Summary: The Greatest Movie by far!!!!!
Review: Before I watched this movie I didnt really no if Indians were either the good or the bad. But as teh filmed reached its peak I finally learned the answer. The movie by far again its the greatest ive ever seen even compared to the movies of my generation. It has a beautiful script that no one should miss. I thought it was going to be a very boring movie but it is not. I was very surprised at the end of the movie and how it ended. Its also very sad and a great way to teach anybody about native americans and how much they suffered since the movie shows that. I dont want to kill how the movie is but it all starts with the protagonist John dealing with the flaws of soceity and how some white americans were destructive againts this great human beings the native Americans. It then shows the bad and good sides of how some people were with the native americans. John who matures as his odyssey goes through learns alot from the Indian people and is accepted by the Sioux people who care for him sicne they name him Dances with Wolves. You the reader would have to know why. I dont want to kill the movie anymore. So watch it and try to understand the history part of it cause its very important. Hope this helped. Thanks for reading it.

Rating:
Summary: Dances with Hacks
Review: The sentimentality that this film oozes is just too much to bear at times. Apparently the American public, who is accustomed to such trifling immodesty, swallowed this up when it was first released and hailed Costner as the "new genius of American art films".

Well, since then we've learned two things, that first of all, this film is another foray into the "John Wayne" bias of American dogmatism and secondly Costner is a ham who hasn't scored another big hit in years. The film gives us the once again undefiled view of an idealist who was born in the wrong ethic group. Costner plays a Union troop in the Civil War that is merely a "misunderstood" progeny and suffers physically and spiritually as a result of it. He gets a new command and like a dim witted simpleton he picks the one that is the furthest from civilization. He soon learns that solitude is not an easy thing. One day he encounters a group of Indians in one of the most ridiculous scenes I have ever seen put forth to a group of adults. The film goes down hill from there and fast. One unrealistic example is when he shows his new Indian friends some ground coffee and they react like dumb founded buffoons, it was a fact in history that the Native Americans ground corn, and other seeds so they would in no way be surprised like this exaggerated claim. Why render them childish?

Costner then becomes a part of the tribe, merely walking into it like a new found brother. He learns the dialect, and sits with the chief while exuding pensive thought. Of course, instead of falling in love with an Indian woman, he falls in love with a captured white who mumbles her way through like a drought minded wench. How convenient that the evil Sioux captured an English speaking woman who is both beautiful and robust! Instead of portraying the Indians in a truthful manner, Costner singlehandedly misinterprets their culture as something bordering on vanity and he does so by extinguishing their intelligence and ability to live in harmony with nature.

Also, the scenes that dealt with the Pawnee were merely used for action sequences and in no way understood the vital role that other tribes had in relation to each other. The only decent portrait is of the stupidity and narrowness of the virulent white people who were shooting at everyone and everything. What more is there to say about this lousy film except that it had no 'truth' about it and it wasn't a loving portrayal as some people claim it to be?


Rating:
Summary: A good tool for learning the Lakota language
Review: I am a teacher of Lakota language. While this film is flawed in its accuracy of Lakota culture in many ways, which is why I deducted a star from the rating, and while to the trained ear the Lakota is not spoken well because none of the principle cast was a Lakota speaker, this film..especially the long version..remains one of my best teaching tools for my students. I give Costner a great deal of credit for insisting on using the actual Lakota language rather than having the film all in English as he was pressured to do by Hollywood. Lakota, like many Native languages, is in danger of extinction if more young Lakotas don't take the initiative to learn their language, and this film put that language in the ears of the world. I can nit-pick on the cultural inaccuracies in DWW, but I'd rather concentrate on the fact that this film presented this beautiful language to the world and for that, I am grateful. Wowahwa na wopila. (Peace, and thanks). Cait