The material here has real potential, but the execution leaves something to be desired. It is easy to point out some amateurish flaws in the production -- the obvious wigs, some spotty acting -- but the problems run deeper than these superficial imperfections.
At times the movie is compelling, and it points to some profound issues. But too often, it pulls its punches, opting for a feel-good approach reminiscent of made-for TV movies. It covers the brutality, pain, and loss in its subject matter with a gauze of sentimentality and empty humanism. The inevitable redemption that resolves the troubled, troubling story feels too easy, merely the result of the genre's formula. It doesn't feel true to life.
Notably, the director chooses to try to pull the viewer's heart strings at moments when the script seems instead to be calling attention to hard realities. Thomas's boring tales are treated as though they are genuinely entertaining, when in fact they seem to reflect the oppressive tedium of reservation life, the need to escape its futility, and to shroud the past in fantasy.
Similarly, the characters' fondness for flatbread is portrayed as touching, when it seems more a comment on their grinding poverty -- baked bread is so cheap that to forgo it for homemade bespeaks a perilous level of want. On the other hand, the characters' sense of dispossession and victimhood is overplayed. The script seems to point to a somewhat more problematic sense of Indian identity, matching the overwhelming sense of having been wronged with a concomitant guilty doubt -- something like, "Did my ancestors blow it like some of my other relatives? Why weren't they strong enough to fight the white man off? Why couldn't they provide us a better life than this?" This would seem to tie in with the central theme of the movie, the difficulty of grappling with the absurd, of grappling with the inexplicable, senseless past; the way in which history weighs like a nightmare on the minds of the living; the way history is a nightmare from which we're trying to wake up.
But the movie's impulsive softness pushes this hard element to the periphery. Of course it must be possible to forgive one's father for years of abuse and neglect, and it must be possible to make peace with a culture and people that once tried to eliminate yours, and that still treats you with indifference and casual cruelty. But surely it needs more than flashback accompanied by adult-contemporary guitar for this to happen.
The unfortunate thing about this is that there is an untold story here that screams to be told, that the world needs to know. It deserves a more mature telling than this.
At times the movie is compelling, and it points to some profound issues. But too often, it pulls its punches, opting for a feel-good approach reminiscent of made-for TV movies. It covers the brutality, pain, and loss in its subject matter with a gauze of sentimentality and empty humanism. The inevitable redemption that resolves the troubled, troubling story feels too easy, merely the result of the genre's formula. It doesn't feel true to life.
Notably, the director chooses to try to pull the viewer's heart strings at moments when the script seems instead to be calling attention to hard realities. Thomas's boring tales are treated as though they are genuinely entertaining, when in fact they seem to reflect the oppressive tedium of reservation life, the need to escape its futility, and to shroud the past in fantasy.
Similarly, the characters' fondness for flatbread is portrayed as touching, when it seems more a comment on their grinding poverty -- baked bread is so cheap that to forgo it for homemade bespeaks a perilous level of want. On the other hand, the characters' sense of dispossession and victimhood is overplayed. The script seems to point to a somewhat more problematic sense of Indian identity, matching the overwhelming sense of having been wronged with a concomitant guilty doubt -- something like, "Did my ancestors blow it like some of my other relatives? Why weren't they strong enough to fight the white man off? Why couldn't they provide us a better life than this?" This would seem to tie in with the central theme of the movie, the difficulty of grappling with the absurd, of grappling with the inexplicable, senseless past; the way in which history weighs like a nightmare on the minds of the living; the way history is a nightmare from which we're trying to wake up.
But the movie's impulsive softness pushes this hard element to the periphery. Of course it must be possible to forgive one's father for years of abuse and neglect, and it must be possible to make peace with a culture and people that once tried to eliminate yours, and that still treats you with indifference and casual cruelty. But surely it needs more than flashback accompanied by adult-contemporary guitar for this to happen.
The unfortunate thing about this is that there is an untold story here that screams to be told, that the world needs to know. It deserves a more mature telling than this.