Yet, Costner’s self-proclaimed “love letter to the past” caught on with audiences and critics, who appreciated the film’s humanism and broad, classical scope at a time when American cinema was becoming more and more overrun with shallow, violent blockbusters. At the dawn of the postmodern ’90s, Dances With Wolves harkened back to an earlier cinematic era even as it was clearly positioned as a rebuke to the classic western’s tendency to paint the conflict between white settlers and Native Americans in broad strokes of good and evil. The film’s revisionism was nothing new--both Ralph Nelson and Arthur Penn had turned the tables on western clichés back in 1970 with Soldier Blue and Little Big Man, respectively--but Costner and screenwriter Michael Blake (who adapted his own 1987 novel) reinvigorate the argument with depth of character and a narrative scope that allows for various shades of gray across all perspectives. At one point, Costner’s character concludes that everything he has been told about Native Americans was wrong, a point that is writ large in the film itself. Although often accused of being “simplistic” or “naïve” in its treatment of Native American culture and its destruction by the U.S. Army (Pauline Kael wittily accused Costner of having feathers in his hair and feathers in his head), Dances With Wolves is a nuanced and thoughtful portrayal of cultures both clashing and finding common ground.

Donning hats as director, co-producer, and lead actor (a daring triumvirate that has destroyed better men), Costner plays Lieutenant John J. Dunbar, a veteran of the Civil War who is determined to experience the American frontier before it fully disappears. He is posted to a remote fort in South Dakota, where he eventually comes into contact with a neighboring tribe of Sioux Indians. The Sioux are understandably wary of this lone white man encroaching on their land, and he is cautions, as well, having been filled with stories about Indians being beggars and thieves at best, bogeymen at worst. Yet, despite their radically different cultures and long-standing (and well-founded) suspicions, both Dunbar and the Sioux cannot resist their curiosities about each other, and through increasing contact and fumbling attempts at communication, they develop a mutual respect that grows into a strong bond of friendship. Dunbar’s primary contact is Kicking Bird (Graham Greene), the tribe’s medicine man who rejects the desire of the tribe’s aggressive warriors, particularly Wind In His Hair (Rodney A. Grant), to respond to Dunbar’s presence with violence. Kicking Bird senses in Dunbar a good heart and a desire to communicate, rather than fight. Said communication is difficult, given their language barriers, but it is eventually bridged by the presence of Stands With a Fist (Mary McDonnell), a white woman who grew up in the tribe after her family was killed by Pawnee, the Sioux’s primary enemies in the region (Costner would again take up Dances With Wolves’ themes about the nature of communication and its break-down in his disastrous post-apocalyptic western The Postman seven years later).

The fact that Dunbar eventually sheds his own culture in favor of the Sioux--he “turns Injun,” as a soldier later accuses him--has been often read as a wholesale rejection of the American project of westward expansion, the country’s “Manifest Destiny” that necessarily entailed the violent removal of native peoples. The film’s title is the Sioux name that is given to Dunbar, and he tells us in voice-over narration that he never knew who he was until he was fully immersed in the Sioux culture, fighting alongside them as one of them. And the manner in which Costner depicts the third act return of the U.S. Army to the fort he fully deserted to live with the Sioux is harshly critical of both the country’s political project of stretching from coast to coast and the kinds of men who were enlisted to do it. In short, the Indian warriors have some sense of integrity and honor, while the U.S. soldiers are illiterate cutthroats and bullies who at one point literally wipe their ass with Dunbar’s written proclamation of his love for Stands With a Fist (and, by extension, his love of the Sioux and their way of life).

Yet, as boldly as Costner’s film proclaims its appreciation of the long-gone traditions of the horse culture of the northern plains, it is never as one-sided or as simplistic as many have suggested. The Sioux Indians are depicted with dignity and humanity, but never to the point of simple lionization. They, too, are subject to petty arguments, misunderstanding, prejudice, and anger. While Dunbar is clearly enraptured with their way of life, proclaiming in his journal that he has never known a people so dedicated to family (one of the greatest of American virtues), the film does not shy away from depicting elements of their culture that Dunbar cannot quite embrace. Most direct is the scene in which Dunbar realizes that the Sioux have not only tracked down and killed a group of white hunters who have slaughtered dozens of buffalo and left their carcasses rotting on the plains, but are wildly celebrating the kill by hoisting aloft scalps and severed hands, a brutal and grotesque display that Dunbar cannot join. On the other end, Costner leavens his negative portrayal of the U.S. Army, whose indiscriminate and thoughtless use of violence is made both metaphorically and emotionally devastating when they train their rifles on Two Socks, the scrawny wolf who has become Dunbar’s companion, with the presence of Lieutenant Elgin (Charles Rocket), who is a clearly decent man torn between his military obligations and what he knows is fundamentally wrong. We sense that, if he and Dunbar changed places, they would behave exactly the same. Dunbar is certainly portrayed as a hero of great standing; having already associated himself with baseball and Elliot Ness, Costner’s star persona was almost too perfectly attuned to such a character. Yet, he has his flaws, most of which are borne out of his naivety (we realize with great pain that Two Socks’s falling prey to the soldiers is largely Dunbar’s fault since he encouraged the wolf to disregard its natural wariness and trust human beings).

However you read the film’s political ideology, it is impossible to deny is beauty. Shot by veteran Australian cinematographer Dean Semler (The Road Warrior, Dead Calm), Dances With Wolves features some of the most extraordinary footage of the open plains since Terence Malick’s Days of Heaven (1978). Costner is as enraptured with the open frontier as his screen character, and he fills with the frame with gorgeous vistas that emphasize the literal and spiritual openness of the world. He stages several exhilarating setpieces, most notably a buffalo hunt that employed 3,500 stampeding buffalo, which creates a sense of physical weight and presence that even the best digital effects cannot replicate (for comparison, see the cartoonish cattle stampede in Baz Luhrman’s Australia). That grandiosity, however, is balanced with Costner’s acute sense of how to use close-ups to convey wordless communication; so much that passes between characters in the film comes through looks and body language, and it is here more than anywhere that we sense the actor behind the camera.

Costner also displays an inherent sense of how physicality can be rendered on film, a dimension of Dances With Wolves that is rarely mentioned. From the wince-inducing gore of the film’s opening sequence that finds Dunbar wounded with shrapnel during a Civil War battle, to the close attention paid to the horrible ways in which arrows and spears pierce the human body, this is an intensely physical, bloody film whose unwillingness to pull punches belies its PG-13 rating. That full-bloodedness is central to the film’s impact, as it balances some of its loftier platitudes with a sense of realness that even the best filmmakers rarely achieve. Both visually and thematically, Dances With Wolves is a beautiful, soul-stirring film, one that wears its humanity on its sleeve and asks us to do the same.

Copyright ©2010 James Kendrick

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