93) Dances With Wolves

Dances With Wolves (1990)

Director: Kevin Costner

Starring: Kevin Costner, Mary McDonnell, Graham Greene, Rodney A. Grant, Floyd 'Red Crow' Westerman, Nathan Lee Chasing His Horse

There are a number of films that I really want to see but have always been put off by exorbitant running times. One of those films was Dances With Wolves. I have a real soft spot for a good Western and it won a bag of Oscars so I was keen to see it, but the Special Edition version I have on DVD has a run time of 227mins. You don't watch a film that is just under 4hrs long on a whim, you kind of have to build your day around it. But with Kate away, and me having an afternoon to myself I figured this was just the kind of day I could build around it.

Civil War hero, Lt. John Dunbar (Costner), is granted his request for a post on the Western frontier. He finds Fort Sedgwick abandoned, but chooses to set up camp there anyway and go about his duties. Initially kept company by his trusty steed Cisco and a curious wolf who he names Two Socks, Dunbar soon discovers a local Sioux Indian tribe are keeping an eye on him. Dunbar seeks to open communication with the Sioux and finds an equally curious party in holy man Kicking Bird (Greene). Communication is difficult and slow until Kicking Bird convinces Stands With A Fist (McDonnell) a white woman who has lived with the tribe since childhood to act as a translator. Dunbar grows closer and closer to not only the Sioux people, who give him the Sioux name, Dances With Wolves, but to Stands With A Fist as well. When more soldiers show up at Fort Sedgwick, Dunbar must decide whose side he now stands on.

When Costner's film was in production, many critics and industry insiders dismissively dubbed the film "Kevin's Gate". This was in reference to Michael Cimino's 1980 film Heaven's Gate, an equally ambitious epic Western which cost $42 million to produce and took less than $3 million at the box office, leading to the collapse of United Artists. Part of the reason so many critics and industry insiders saw Dances With Wolves as an enormous gamble was because it was a Western. The Western is the most American of film genres with a very proud tradition, but by the beginning of the 1990s Westerns had become very unfashionable. So for Costner to choose to make his directorial debut with a very ambitious, epic scale Western just seemed ludicrous. But Dances With Wolves was to be no ordinary Western. Costner seemed determined to make amends for the hundreds of small-minded and racist Westerns that had been made over the years. Costner's film imagines what things could have been like if the white settlers had a genuine interest in learning about Native American culture. Not only does he show the Sioux culture and people in an overwhelmingly positive light ("I had never known a people so eager to laugh, so devoted to family, so dedicated to each other. And the only word that came to mind was harmony."), he allows them to speak in their own language with significant portions of the film being in Sioux with English subtitles. Just how effectively Costner alters previous cinematic perceptions can be shown in the films final battle scene. What looks to be a fairly conventional battle between machete and bow and arrow wielding Indians and rifle carrying Blue Coats is transformed by the audiences altered perspective, seeing the Blue Coats, not the Indians, as the savages. Costner's decision to make a Western was a bold movie, but it paid off with Dances With Wolves becoming the first Western to win the Best Picture Oscar since Cimarron in 1931.

Dances With Wolves definitely has an epic scope. It is just a big, grand feeling movie, in which Costner shows his love for the lost American Frontier. A lot of screen time is given to the landscape. Rather than just using wide shots to establish a scene, Costner really wants us to appreciate the beauty of the place so the film is packed with long, breathtaking pictures of the prairies. The stunning cinematography was shot by Australian Dean Semler. He originally rose to prominence though as the cinematographer on Mad Max 2 and Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome, which when you think about it, were the perfect preparation for a film like Dances With Wolves as they're all about landscape with explosions of action. Semler has gone on to have a very fruitful Hollywood career as a cinematographer working on larger scale adventures and dramas; 2012, Apocalypto, We Were Soldiers and Waterworld, and surprisingly also on comedies; Date Night, Get Smart, Bruce Almighty and City Slickers (an interesting combination of both).

The film is obviously long and it is quite slowly paced, taking time to explore events and emotions in detail, but to Costner's credit it never gets tedious. I've watched much shorter films which have felt much longer. What I did feel the film was lacking though was a build to some sort of dramatic climax. Rather than taking you on an emotional roller coaster ride, the tone of this film is very level, very consistent. There is no build to a critical moment and thus the film feels a bit like it just ends. There is a logical moment at which the film ends, but that moment is no more climactic than any number of moments that had occurred earlier in the film and as such does not feel like it closes the story.

Dances With Wolves harks back to a bygone era. I'm not talking about Frontier America, I'm talking about the era in which Kevin Costner was a big star. In the late 1980s and early 1990s they didn't come much bigger. He was in a string of very good films, including The Untouchables, Bull Durham, Field of Dreams, Dances With Wolves and JFK as well as blockbuster star vehicles like Robin Hood: Prince of Theives and The Bodyguard. However things kind of came crashing down for him with Waterworld and The Postman being high profile flops in the mid-late 1990s. He's continued to work pretty solidly since then but has never managed to regain the position in the industry he once held. I've seen him in a number of things, and kind of like him but find his massive fame in the early 1990s a bit perplexing. He's shown, particularly with Dances With Wolves, that he's a reasonably talented guy, but he's not talented enough to have the artistic prestige that gets associated with a Leonardo DiCaprio, likewise he's handsome enough but doesn't seem to have the charisma you associate with a big time movie star like a George Clooney.

For some reason I came into this film expecting to be underwhelmed. I think because the film is so inextricably linked to Kevin Costner, a figure whose star has fallen significantly in the last 20 years, that it would not retain the lustre that it had on its release. Thanks to that lowered expectation I ended up being pleasantly surprised. Dances With Wolves is an absolutely beautiful picture. It looks amazing. The story is carefully and lovingly told, and time is taken to explore subtle detail. The excessive run time is always going to be an issue, but if you've broken your leg or if you're sick or the family has gone away or if you have any similar excuse to justify spending 4hrs on the couch it's definitely one to watch.