With HBO’s film version of the classic premiering in the midst of the war in Iraq, it may strike a chord once more. “What would you do, Dawes, cut and run?” President Grant (Fred Thompson) asks Henry Dawes (Aidan Quinn) in the new adaptation.
The lingo feels heavy-handed in this epic that really doesn’t need help, either in the storytelling or by drawing modern parallels. (Let’s not even bother with the irony of Thompson’s own presidential aspirations.)
Sen. Dawes of Massachusetts, the friend of the Indian who pushed into law the parceling of Indian land to individual tribe members, had good intentions. He was misguided in hoping for happily converted, Europeanized Indians living in an all-American melting pot in the Dakotas. That well-meaning policies can have tragic results is an ongoing theme.
Another is that, then as now, once he leads the country into a quagmire, the Great White Father in Washington has trouble leaving.
The unrelentingly sorrowful story, premiering at 7 p.m. Sunday on HBO, condenses decades of history from Brown’s encyclopedic book into two hours on screen.
To the dismay of some, it does so by layering a fictional protagonist and a love story -the Sioux hero takes a white wife-on top of the history.
As if this sad chapter of American history needed more juice.
The shameful dislocation and subjugation of the Indians is explored with help from a fictionalized narrative intended to give the story flow. This isn’t intended as a documentary, the producers stress. (For a compelling documentary chronicle, see1993’s “How the West Was Lost,” a collaboration of Gannett and Discovery Channel created by local filmmakers).
HBO’s “Wounded Knee” feels more like an expensive made for-TV movie.
Executive producers Dick Wolf (the “Law & Order” franchise) and Tom Thayer offer a stunning spectacle with a dramatization sure to infuriate careful readers of Brown’s beloved work. They have bracketed the book, subtitled “An Indian History of the American West,” with a white point of entry.
And you thought television had finished with that kind of revisionism when “Roots” added white characters to the early hours of the 1977 production of Alex Haley’s book in order to put primetime audiences a tease. Thirty years later, they’re still salting the scripts with “safe” mainstream faces.
Historians may quibble over whether this Hollywood-ization of “Wounded Knee” is ultimately helpful as a teaching tool. They agree that the hero of the film, the real-life Charles Eastman né Ohiyesa (played by Adam Beach), has been given a fictionalized life story to place him, Zelig-like, in key places at key moments. Eastman, the shining example of Indian assimilation into white culture, was part Sioux and educated at boarding schools, becoming a doctor at Boston University. In the film, Eastman was present at Little Bighorn; in reality he was a kid in grade school in Nebraska at the time.
The film interweaves Eastman’s story with two others: Sitting Bull (August Schellenberg), the proud Lakota medicine man who refuses to submit to U.S. government policies designed to steal his people’s sacred land, the goldrich Black Hills; and Dawes, an architect of the government policy on Indian affairs.
Taking history to a deeply personal level, the thread that ultimately ties the stories together is Eastman’s feeling of betrayal by the whites and his recognition of his own status as an outsider, belonging to neither group.
Amazing aerial photography beautifully captures streams of Indians and U.S. soldiers, herds of bison and camps of teepees dotting the endless open spaces. Taut performances by Beach, Schellenberg and Quinn are superb.
Screenwriter Daniel Giat tries almost too hard to rescue viewers from a dry account, yet he turns in a heart-rending film. The fact is, more millions are likely to learn about the American West- about Sitting Bull, Red Cloud, Crazy Horse, ghost dancers and more – from these two hours than will pick up the book in coming generations.
TV critic Joanne Ostrow can be reached at 303-954-1830 or jostrow@denverpost.com
