Best Picture: #63
Original Release Date: November 21, 1990
Rating: PG-13
Runtime: 3 hours, 1 minute
Director: Kevin Costner
Quick Impressions:
My sister got trapped in Alaska last week. She and her fiancé took a vacation, then their flight home got cancelled, leaving them stuck in the airport for two days living their own personal remake of The Terminal. That inspired me. “I want to get trapped in Alaska,” I thought enviously, adding that to my list of schemes to avoid reorganizing our disastrously messy house. (Right now, my runner up plan is buy a new house and leave this one as is, using it as a storage locker.) In the margins of notebooks, I keep doodling the word, “Escape.” So when my daughter and I watched Dances with Wolves, I found it easy to identify with protagonist John Dunbar’s desire to experience life on the frontier while he still can.
(“Why do men always want to run away to the frontier?” my daughter complained. “This is like that other movie!” “Which one?” I asked. After a lot of guesses—and a discussion of why she still hates Cimarron—she finally remembered, “Out of Africa,” but later revised, “And every other movie about men.” She has a point.)
Still—though we enjoyed gently mocking Kevin Costner’s character and usually referred to him by the name his Lakota friends first mistakenly called him, John Dumb Bear—I find it disturbingly easy to identify with Lieutenant Dunbar in general. (I’m sure it disturbs no one but me.) When Dunbar finds the fort where he’s been assigned abandoned, he could desert his post himself or return to civilization for modified orders. He could do any number of practical things. But instead, he chooses to start journaling, then invites some Lakota representatives over and makes little horns on his head with his fingers and pretends to be a buffalo because he thinks they might want to talk about buffalo. Or maybe they like coffee grinders. He demonstrates one of those, too, just to be a good host. He continues these awkward efforts to communicate with them for weeks. It’s exactly the sort of thing I would consider a good use of my time. He’s so earnest in his efforts to understand these new friends, their language, their culture, their worldview.
I find it easy to mock Dunbar because he’s so much like me. My superiors would say, “Lieutenant, what have you learned about the natives?” expecting reconnaissance, and I’d answer proudly, “Well, sir, I think they really enjoyed my coffee grinder demonstration, and I have a crazy hunch that buffalo are important to them. When I tried to make them guess the word buffalo, I only had to wiggle my fingers on my head for two hours before they got it!” My superiors would be so mad! Can you imagine what they’d say? “So you’ve learned that the Lakota value the buffalo, huh? You realize, right, that the idea is to kill these people, not workshop your concept for bilingual charades?” (Actually, Dunbar’s superiors would say Sioux not Lakota. I grew up saying Sioux. It was the word I learned in school and from living in Nebraska. The captions of this movie use Sioux, but I think Lakota is preferred now since Sioux was a name bestowed on the people by their enemies.)
Just like Dunbar, I would be looking for commonality, earnestly trying to learn and understand the world from the Lakota point of view. It’s hard not to suspect, though, that what he’s supposed to be looking for are weaknesses to exploit, ways to kill them. (After all, that’s what the other soldiers are looking for when they finally appear.) Dunbar doesn’t want to kill the Lakota. He wants to die with them.
Probably because I can identify with him, John Dunbar really frustrates me. We meet him in such a unique situation. He’s trying to commit suicide because he doesn’t want to lose his leg. (The doctors feel there’s no choice but to amputate. It makes sense. He’s in the Union Army, and he has gangrene. During the Civil War, the surest way to get rid of gangrene was with a bone saw. It’s nothing personal. They did it to everybody.) Dunbar doesn’t want to lose his leg (or even his foot), so he gets up and runs away when they’re not looking (which is what I would do, too! I kept yelling at him, “Walk it off,” a sure recipe for dying of gangrene, I know, but the more practical course of complacency will lose you a leg just as surely. If you’re going to try the “walk it off” idea, better try it first.)
Dunbar would rather die than lose his foot, so he rides out recklessly in front of some Confederate soldiers, drawing enemy fire. His actions have the unforeseen consequence of making him a hero. I can see why he’d be disenchanted with a society that takes his foot because there’s no choice (until he does something to distinguish himself, and it turns out that he just wasn’t considered worthy of medical care before. That reminds me of how Mr. Burns was “transferred to a better hospital where doctors upgraded his condition to ‘alive.’”) Then this same society, with its disordered priorities, declares Dunbar a hero when his intention was to end his own life. Of course, John Dunbar wants to go to the frontier. His society is awful!
Yet there’s something so tragic underlying the entire premise of this story. Dunbar seems to have reached a plateau of misery, so to feel again, he decides to spend some time in a doomed world. (He already feels as bad as he can in his own society, but surely visiting a dying reality will make him feel worse again! There’s really no way to feel better, but if he finds others his awful society has heartlessly destroyed, too, at least he’ll be in good company.) But his decision to live among the Lakota when he knows others like him are coming to wipe them out would vex me less if he chose to warn them of danger much earlier than he does. He could warn them sooner. They keep asking him if other white men are coming, how many, when. He defers honesty (even when pressed) because he’s trying to maximize his time in a society he finds more palatable. That’s gratingly self-serving of him, especially because he doesn’t seem to realize how touristy his behavior is. (In his narration, he keeps insisting that he can’t bear to tell them the truth. They’ll be crushed by the overwhelming horror of it all. But he’s being so dishonest with himself. They already sense that a threat is coming, and when they finally do learn the severity of the threat, they take steps to protect themselves. What he is trying to protect is his luxury of hanging out with them indefinitely, having a vacation from the reality of his awful society.)
How could this story be anything other than tragic, though? The United States government broke every single treaty it made with Native Americans. Every single one. (And there were a lot of them! Long ago, in grad school, I TAed for a professor whose specialty was Native American literature. In his course, he repeatedly stressed that cheerful fact, so easy to believe and terrible to contemplate.) In Dances with Wolves, Dunbar fights on the winning side of the Civil War and realizes that he’s actually lost. In war there are no winners. In response to this trauma, he decides to try out fighting on the losing side of a war for once and goes to live on the frontier (which is being destroyed) with the Lakota (who are also being destroyed). It’s a bleak story. He’s found himself. He’s not an evil destroyer. He’s a good man being destroyed along with other good people. Winning is never an option, so he decides to lose well.
The Good:
We’re introduced to so many characters in this story when they seem to be at the point of suicide. Now admittedly, it is not clear that John Dunbar is trying to die. His main goal is to avoid amputation. But he’s not trying very hard to live (unless he’s an idiot). It’s hard not to interpret his behavior as a botched attempt at suicide by proxy. Then we meet Major Fambrough (a deeply unsettling Maury Chaykin). He also seems suicidal. This is partially disguised by the fact that he appears to be experiencing some kind of psychotic break and is actively delusional, but he gives us a big hint about his intentions when he mentions a journey of his own (and a bigger hint when he shoots himself). Then there’s Stands With A Fist (an increasingly captivating, bafflingly wild-haired Mary McDonnell). It’s unclear to me if she’s attempting to slit her wrists or taking cutting (to alleviate emotional pain) to a dangerous extreme. But clearly she’s overwhelmed by grief to the point that were I concerned friend or relative, I would keep a close eye on her. And there’s also Wind In His Hair (a consistently compelling Rodney A. Grant). Just like Dunbar himself, Wind In His Hair seems to be half hoping for a suicide by proxy outcome when he taunts the lieutenant during one of their earliest interactions. (We gain insight into his behavior later when he opens up to Dunbar about his grief and his feelings at that time.)
Why does Dances With Wolves keep introducing us to these characters on the brink of suicide? One clear message of the movie (that I like) is that when you are pressed to the point at which suicide seems like your only option because you can’t stand to live in your society, a far better choice is to find a society in which you can stand to live, even if you have no chance of winning. The ending of the movie illustrates for us that life is made by moments of connection. Yes, the U.S. army is coming, and yes their numbers are like the stars and can’t be stopped. But you can still keep on living as long as you can in the way that you want. Better to be like the wolf and howl than to be silent. Better to be like Wind In His Hair, screaming defiantly at the top of his lungs, “I’m your friend! We’re friends! Forever,” than to abandon your friends and give up hope. (Those aren’t his exact words, but that’s the gist of it.) If they’re coming to kill you, make them come and kill you. Your enemies will never be satisfied until you’ve breathed your last? Make it hard for them. Keep breathing. My daughter and I experienced the ending of this film like a punch in the gut because we know the protagonists have no chance of winning. Dunbar mentions a need to talk to those who will listen. I kept complaining at the screen, “I promise you, no one will listen.” It’s hard to watch this knowing the awful things that happened to the Lakota (and every other tribe). But there is a bright side. I kept saying, “What hope do they have? They can keep running and fighting and try to stick it out. If they’re lucky, they’ll be able to escape for the rest of their lives, maybe, but after that…”
Then I realized, “Well the rest of your life is as long as you have, anyway. You can’t worry about the forced extermination of entire races and ways of life in the future. Just live every day in the way that you want the best that you can.” Your struggle is your life. If you keep living as you want to, when you die, you’ve won.
For me, this movie is about two things. 1) Wolves and 2) Dancing with them. (Just kidding. That popped into my head, and I couldn’t resist writing it down.) Now that I’ve made that joke, though, I see some truth in it (so I’ve decided that I’m no longer kidding). One point of this story is that life will never stop attacking you. The world is full of predators. If you behave ethically, such predators will seize the opportunity to exploit you. Also, all life ends in death. Resources are limited. What’s asked is everything. Life will never be fair. Life is hard. (This seems like a pretty grim point, but it’s what Lieutenant Dunbar encounters time and again. No matter how far he runs away, reality pursues.) No matter what happens in this story, we (the viewing audience) know that things will not end well for the Lakota. So why do we watch the movie? We watch because its story is compelling even though we know the history and know it has to end in tragedy. From a certain point of view, all stories end in tragedy. From any point of view, all lives end in death. It’s what you do with the limited time you have that matters, not the ultimate outcome. Ultimately, the meaning of our lives can be found in our words and actions, not in our circumstances.
And now the dancing part. Discovering who you are is the other focus of the film. Before you can do anything else (fall in love, fight for what you believe in), you have to know who you are. This is an unusually slow process for John Dunbar because he seems incapable of ordinary self-reflection. He’s bafflingly uncurious about himself. He never questions his motivations. He doesn’t want what most people want. Many people shoot wolves. Others train them. Dunbar dances with them. By giving him the attribute name, the Lakota helpfully tell him who he is. He would never figure it out otherwise! He’s on the frontier in the first place looking for identity, healing, direction. But he doesn’t know how to find it because he’s terrible at articulating his thoughts and never bothers to make sense of them. Fortunately, he dances with everyone. That is, he’s quite eager to find connection and foster communication. Being gifted with an attribute name is crucially important for Dunbar. He has never thought about who he is before. (At least, he gives that appearance.) He’s been told who he is. Previously, he’s answered to his given name and obeyed his orders.
Costner himself is a little bland (as an actor. I have fewer complaints about him as a director). For the most part, the supporting performances are quite captivating, though. Especially good are Graham Greene (as Kicking Bird), Rodney A. Grant (as Wind In His Hair), Floyd “Red Crow” Westerman (as Ten Bears), and Mary McDonnell (as Stands With a Fist). Frankly, I would have watched a film about these characters even if Lieutenant Dunbar never appeared.
I really like the cinematography in the film, too, particularly the way so many shots make use of a bisecting diagonal. Also commendable and engaging is the pervasive use of the Lakota language.
Best Scene:
Though it’s probably not the best scene in the film, I love Stands With A Fist’s explanation of how she got her name. Her story made me want an attribute-based name so much. All your life, your name would tell the story of who you are, such a useful thing to cling to when you lose your way or forget yourself.
Best Scene Visually:
I’m nearly positive I saw this film as a child. (I remember my father has always loved it, while my mom would complain in annoyance, “That movie drags on forever! Kevin Costner is so boring.”) But for some reason all I remembered was the sequence featuring the buffalo. The moment when we see what the buffalo hunters (out for hides and tongues) have done filled me with regret that slowly turned to rage. As a child, I always vaguely thought, “Well that’s the way it used to be in those days.” But as an adult, more and more, such situations fill me with a feeling of, “Why would anyone do that? Why?” The wanton wastefulness is so senseless. True, this film is perhaps guilty of romanticizing and idealizing the Lakota way of life, but it’s pretty hard not to look at the facts and conclude that they’re right about how to maintain the buffalo population. (At the very least, it’s hard not to look at the wastefully slaughtered buffalo and conclude that.)
Best Action Sequence:
When the army finally shows up in the final third of the film, the story seems to start in earnest. My daughter said she was never emotionally invested in Dunbar, but (despite the fact that I couldn’t resist calling him John Dumb Bear), I quickly discovered that I was once he was in mortal peril. There’s a certain vexing blandness and frustrating lack of introspection to Dunbar throughout the film, but once he shows us what he really cares about, he becomes much more appealing. (Granted I sometimes got frustrated during this part of the film, thinking, “We already know the U.S. government treated Native Americans appallingly. Did U.S. soldiers never have the slightest reason for behaving with aggression? Never? They were always just cartoonish agents of evil, huh? This was a completely one-sided conflict, and there were never genuine misunderstandings or instances of aggression toward the United States?” To be clear, I side with the Lakota, but what we get here seems just as simplistic as any black-and-white TV Western, just with the audience’s sympathies reversed. There’s no complexity. The Lakota warriors are good, and the U.S. soldiers are evil.)
Throughout the whole film, I kept thinking, “John Dumb Bear, you are not Lakota. You are living in a fantasy. There is no way this life you’re building can work out for you.” Then I started to hope, “Well maybe it can.” But, of course, it can’t! The army does eventually show up, and they’re not really too interested in pretending to be buffalo or demonstrating coffee grinders. They have purpose-driven goals which they execute with efficient savagery. I truly don’t understand why Dunbar didn’t anticipate this outcome, but he’s so pitiably unprepared for it that I couldn’t help but feel for him.
The effort to rescue him made me cheer. I didn’t feel conflicted about it at all. (And I don’t know why Dunbar does. If you still feel loyalty to the U.S. army, maybe moving into your new friend’s house and marrying his daughter was not done in good faith. So I suppose there is complexity in the story. It’s just trapped within the mind of Dunbar, who articulates it so poorly.)
I also love the moment when Smiles A Lot (Nathan Lee Chasing His Horse) stops smiling. This is like something out of an old Western. It’s a moment you would expect from a Western. When it comes, it’s quite welcome and shows we can still enjoy such moments without insisting that Native Americans are villains.
The Negatives:
One thing I find grating about this movie is the same thing I like about it. (This is not even a case of “a double-edged sword” or “the other side of the coin.”) There’s only one side to this coin. It’s my reaction to that static thing that contains frustrating tension.
John Dunbar hates his society, but then he discovers he’s actually somebody else who is a member of a different society, the one being persecuted. Ten Bears tells him near the end that the man who he was has ceased to exist. When he looks at him, he sees only a member of the tribe named Dances With Wolves. How convenient!
To me, there’s an element of, “I thought I was a murderer, but turns out, I was actually the victim all along,” at play here that just irritates me. Lieutenant John Dunbar is a United States soldier. He is not Lakota. He just wants to be. Now that he has seen (firsthand, that’s what’s key) that the Union army’s method of dealing with inconvenient people is abusive, he’d rather be abused in better company. (That’s an uncharitable reading of his behavior, but sorry, John Dunbar. At least I’m not coming after you with a bone saw!)
A strength of the movie is that John Dunbar discovers he’s actually been Dances With Wolves the entire time. But has he really? Or is he just discovering that’s who he would prefer to have been? Were he really Dances With Wolves, he’d stay with the tribe. He wouldn’t go back to his former society to explain everything and try to make a difference. Were he really a part of the tribe, he wouldn’t take Kicking Bird’s daughter away from the tribe (the one thing she has always feared) to a society where she no longer feels safe. In some ways, this reminds me of hearing John Smith lionized in his own historical accounts of his adventures in Virginia. Instead of the John Smith story by John Smith, we’re getting John Dunbar: a Good Man by John Dunbar.
I don’t blame John Dunbar (the character) from framing himself in his best light. But I do think the movie is being disingenuous here, giving us a fantasy as if it were a deeply insightful worldview. It isn’t John Dunbar who says the old him has ceased to exist. It’s Ten Bears, who appears to be the leader of the tribe, one of its oldest and wisest members. I am not suggesting that screenwriter Michael Blake and director Kevin Costner had anything but the best of intentions. I’m just noting that it’s hard to miss that the movie seems to suggest, “Well what do you know? In the end, the best Lakota of them all was a white man! Listen, the oldest and wisest of the Lakota himself said so.” My parents have talked about playing Cowboys and Indians all the time as children, viewing the cowboys as extremely heroic. As their generation has aged, they’ve noticed they’ve been given some misinformation about our country’s history. So now, wouldn’t you know it, all the time they’ve actually been Indians! Who knew?
I’m not sure I like the suggestion that the solution to John Dunbar’s problems is to run away to a fantasy of the frontier and join another race of people. And I’m positive that it irritates me that he leaves at the end. (If you’re Lakota, stay with the Lakota and find a Lakota solution.) But the real flaw with the movie is not that he decides to leave. It’s that the Lakota beg him to stay, and they tell him that he’s one of them now. (And then he gets to ride off on his horse—with his trusted friend’s daughter—acting like, “I know you’re all begging me to stay, but I’m just too much of a hero to be pinned down. One day you’ll understand.”) (People who seek the romance of the frontier never leave just one society.)
Now in the movie’s defense, I will say that it presents John Dunbar with an irritating lack of self-awareness. So perhaps Kevin Costner is more aware of his flaws than the character is himself, and perhaps (as director) Costner is pointedly making them clear to us.
My daughter hates the romance in the movie (though she did reluctantly warm to it a bit, after a while). I found the romance believable, but I do take exception to Dunbar’s behavior as he’s courting Stands With A Fist. For me the problem is that he’s taken such trouble to establish a relationship of trust with Kicking Bird. Then when Kicking Bird asks Dunbar to watch over his family, Dunbar immediately seduces his daughter. I find this kind of shady behavior. I do think they’re legitimately falling in love. But when she tells him she’s in mourning, his disrespect of their traditions is grating under the circumstances. Obviously I think a woman should have more say in who she’s dating than her father does. But I’m not pretending I’m Lakota. To me, “Watch over my family,” does not mean “please start sleeping with my daughter immediately after the traditions of our people have been explicitly explained to you.” I honestly am baffled that the Lakota continue liking him. Yes, his intentions are honorable—sort of. He intends to do exactly what he wants, as usual.
I don’t care for the way the movie frames Dunbar simply following his own desires as behavior that makes him nobler than the other white Americans and wiser than the Native Americans. Maybe I should also run away to the frontier. I would be the most heroic one there, too, if I were the only one present to witness and record the story.
After watching the movie, my daughter and I had a long discussion about the romance. “I did not believe they were in love!” she insisted.
“I liked her,” I replied. (I did not believe it when I saw someone brushing Stands With A Fist’s hair. How does it get so wild and windblown? My daughter joked, “They should have named her Wind In Her Hair.”)
“Yes, I like her,” my daughter replied, “alone. But the romance doesn’t work. She’s a good character. She’s compelling, but when she’s with him, they don’t seem in love to me. I don’t care. I feel like I’m always critiquing the romances in movies, but they’re poorly executed. It’s not my fault. If they gave me a good romance, I would care. But I know it’s bad when I care more about the wolf than the main relationship of the story.”
“I don’t think the romance is the main relationship of the story,” I said in surprise. “I think Hollywood movies condition us to expect the romance to be the main relationship, but I think he and Kicking Bird had a more significant relationship. And I believed Wind In His Hair loved him. But he said he’s passionate, driven by passion. So it’s easier for me to relate to him.”
Dunbar is like me to a point (mostly in that he behaves in ways I find ridiculous. And, more charitably, he tries to foster genuine exchange of ideas in communication in order to work toward mutual understanding). But the disconnect between his voiceover narration and his behavior on screen vexes me. He never makes the discoveries about himself that the movie invites us to make about him. And no matter what happens to him, he keeps pretty quiet. This isn’t something that would keep Stands With A Fist from falling in love with him, but it is something that keeps me from falling in love with him. Like my daughter, I find Costner’s Dunbar unappealing romantically. (My mom couldn’t stand Costner as a leading man. “He’s so boring!” she would say whenever his name came up. My own feelings are not that strong.)
Part of me wants to defend Dunbar by saying, “He’s just someone who internalizes everything.” But does he? His journal is boring, too, especially given the excitement of everything happening to him. He seems to express his feelings mainly through spontaneous acts of violence. We see who he is based on who he’s attacking or kissing. But does he ever make even half the discoveries about himself that the audience (and the much more observant Lakota) make about him?
At one point, Dunbar says, “I know Kicking Bird is frustrated with me. He always wants to know how many more white people are coming. I tell him that the white people will most likely pass through this country and no more. But I am speaking in half truths.”
My daughter corrected him, “You are speaking in no truths.”
I added, “Shame on you, Lieutenant Dumb Bear.”
She’s right. He’s directly lying to them and to himself. A lie is not a half-truth. His evasion is dangerous, disingenuous, and self-serving.
My daughter added, “When he starts to narrate, I always feel like I should expect a stand-up routine, like it will be the set-up of a joke.” He does kind of sound like Steven Wright. She went on, “Maybe it is funny. I think they find him foolish and comical because they must know he’s not telling them the truth. White people never really just ‘pass through’ do they? He’s not exactly ‘passing through’ himself, is he?”
Laughing, I agreed, “Yeah, he’s just one white person, and he’s moved into their village. Half the time, he’s in their house staring them down as they have sex. As a representative of his race, he’s demonstrating some boundary issues.” (The scene when he stares at Kicking Bird and his wife while they have sex illustrates beautifully that having a cultural boundary/language barrier really helps Dunbar out socially. Someone from his own background would notice, “This guy has some social issues,” a lot more quickly.)
When Dunbar returns from his rescue, I would expect a much more emotional reunion. I want more emotion from him, more words, more acknowledgement that something momentous just happened. But instead he becomes taciturn. It’s in keeping with his character. I just find his character kind of unappealing. Instead of putting in the work to become interesting himself, he finds a group of people with fascinating attributes to be interesting for him and to make observations about him.
In his defense, I will say that he’s extremely good at recognizing the pain he has experienced himself in others, and he truly does seem to want to communicate in order to foster mutual understanding. The character bores me, though. (I do not, however, have as many complaints about Costner as an actor as my mother did.)
Overall:
Dances With Wolves is that rare slow-paced three-hour movie that needs a slow-paced three hours to tell its story properly. My daughter and I enjoyed watching it and would be happy to watch again anytime. It left neither of us with the desire to date Kevin Costner, but to be fair, that was not the goal of the film.