It is a performances centric movie

hyped garbage

As Good As It Gets

One of the worst ways to make a cult movie is to set out to make a cult movie.

I recently found this movie in searching for Dee Brown's book at the local public library. I recall reading the book when it first came out, decades ago, and I was fascinated--a history book that I could not put down, just like The Exorcist (the book) when I first read it. Dee Brown's book was also a horror story, and the major horror was that it was real.So knowing absolutely nothing about the movie, I borrowed it, thinking that it would be essentially a documentary. Was I wrong! I should have just checked out the book and read it again. Historic atrocities can only be properly dramatized by extraordinarily gifted filmmakers. Anything else is a reduction. But perhaps it is better if someone stumbles upon the Native American genocide done up as a popcorn movie, than never to have any idea at all.The NY Times review complained of some rather obvious analogies to Iraq and Afghanistan. That further illustrates the reduction--would anyone dare use the Holocaust as an analogy for anything else? I don't fault the production, which was polished and accomplished. But HBO should have passed on this.

When the government of America's European settlers defeated the indigenous population, they didn't directly massacre or enslave them (at least, not in every case). The signed a treaty with the defeated Sioux that granted them land, and when they wanted some of this back, offered to pay for it. Senator Henry Dawes, architect of this deal, saw himself as a great friend on the Indians (as opposed to those who considered them sub-human); he was offering them civilisation. However, anthropologist Marvin Harris has suggested that the process of civilisation is not so much progress as a necessary adaptation to shortages of natural resources, especially land, and the truth of this is apparent when considering the Sioux; regardless of whether civilisation was truly in their interests, it was necessary to release their land to those who wished to exploit it. 'Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee' tells the story of this period, and the truth is grim and fascinating; but unfortunately, this is heavy-handed stuff, whose sympathies are always apparent, and marred by wooden acting and lumbering dialogue. In place of naturalism, almost every scene seems specially constructed to demonstrate a specific point of the history; and bizarrely, the story's natural climax is told, not as it happens, but in flashback, squandering the dramatic tension that should have been apparent. Yet in spite of its clumsiness, the film left me wanting to know more of the real history; in that at least it succeeds.

The Wounded Knee Massacre (aka The Battle at Wounded Knee Creek) was the last major armed conflict of what Americans term the "Indian Wars" of the late nineteenth century. Movie opens with a recreation of soldiers taking pictures of "Big Foot in Death," one of the disturbing actual pictures in the book, taken on the Wounded Knee battlefield in 1890.When I read Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee over a decade ago, I would never have believed that White America would have the gall to turn it into a film – and if it was made into a movie, it would be diluted as a trail of tears… The latter has come to pass.Screenwriter Daniel Giat and director Yves Simoneau deliver a film as watery as any American beer. Though it is supposedly a tribute to the indomitable spirit of the Native Americans, it is yet another White-Perspective slur-fest that dishonors that wild race with every bigoted frame. How could any movie on Earth convey the inhuman horrors of Custer's men playing soccer with the heads of Native American children? The movie opens with General Custer's gruesome defeat at Little Big Horn in 1876 by combined Lakota and Northern Cheyenne Native Americans – but we don't see the heads that were just a part of the reason why the slaughter was inevitable and well-deserved. The movie ends with the grisly massacre of Lakota Sioux men, women and children at Wounded Knee in 1890. Almost as if the "Indians" got their just desserts for killing them nice soldier boys.I rest my case.(By the way, "Indians" is the White Eyes' name for the Native American races. The Native peoples refer to themselves either as Native Americans or their tribe name. When the Natives in this movie call themselves Indians so offhandedly, we realize the film-makers did all their research on Wikipedia.) It was not bad enough to kill off the Native Americans 150 years ago, now a movie is made about that inhuman era – not to honor the Natives, but to MAKE MONEY for HBO; to pretend a spirituality, tolerance and political correctness modern Americans have not the depth to comprehend.Before we continue, let us establish that Dee Brown's 1970 book is a disturbing, thought-provoking, well-researched masterpiece; a towering indictment of frontier America of the 1800s; a history lesson from the people who lived it, not the ones who re-wrote it. Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee is a book that scarred the self-aggrandizing perspective of a nation; recounting Native Americans' extermination at the hands of the White Eyes and their broken promises, cowardly massacres and bloody betrayals; every single treaty between the two factions dishonored by the scoundrels who claimed birthright to a country that they knew was not theirs.Though this gutless filmic re-imagining of Brown's book tries hard to be compelling, it is merely a thin marketing gimmick for whatever Native American fever was doing the rounds in Hollywood at the time.The actors do what they can with the clichéd characters they're assigned: Aidan Quinn as the Good White Man, empowered to carve up land and herd the Native Americans out; the majestic Wes Studi, an old-school agitator; August Schellenberg perfectly cast as Sitting Bull, "the greatest living Indian"; Eric Schweig doing his Steven Segal impersonation; the magnificent Adam Beach (Flags of Our Fathers), one step closer to some kind of acting award; Nathan Lee Chasing His Horse (evocative name, no? – he played the young Smiles A Lot in Dances With Wolves) is Sitting Bull's son; and playing the president better than he ever could in real life, Fred Thompson as Ulysses S. Grant.At first, the White Eyes' grasping at real estate looks like provincialism and ignorance of different cultures ("I still believe that setting the Indians on the course to civilization best serves him") but the Illegal Aliens (i.e. American settlers) knew full well that they wanted the LAND under the PRETENSE of doing a good deed for the Natives – doublespeaking it as mendaciously as that Great World Terrorist of the 2000s, George W. Bush ("We're spreading democracy (so we're killing them for their energy resources)"). Of course, this proud, iron-skinned people, their faces etched like rocks of ages, knew better - and also knew inherent grand truths that their White Eyes scourges could never grasp: that the LAND belongs to no one, that we are all a PART OF the land. Unfortunately, there is something stronger than pride – genocide.Not all the stupidities in this movie are the film-makers' or the early settlers' fault, though. We easily criticize the film for all the Natives conveniently speaking English in current American vernacular and ooga-booga accent, which simply screams "Made For Television," but other silliness can be attributed to the Native Americans and their own bogus "spirituality": Wes Studi preaches that if they all do The Dance they will live forever.. uh, ooookay. And I know a modern Native friend who still fasts for a week and nails himself to a tree every Tree-Nailing Season and then swears he has "visions" – of COURSE you have visions! You're hallucinating from food deprivation and blood loss! Our only hope is that viewers of this vapid HBO movie will be encouraged to read Brown's book and perform true-hearted research into the buried heritage that the White Eyes are still working so hard to pretend to forget.

The only reason I'm giving this movie 3 stars is because of the casting and the acting. Both were well done. The movie, however, is a disappointment.I first read Dee Brown's book, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, when I was 10 years old and found out that I was part Cherokee. It struck a cord with me that continues to resonate today, 30 some years later. Expecting a long overdue movie that would capture the eloquent and heart-breaking words and stories of the book, I was disappointed to find the movie barely resembled the book at all. As a college lecturer who frequently refers to the book in my classes, I am quite familiar with its contents. The movie version was barely recognizable.Indian heroes such as Sitting Bull and Red Cloud come across as arrogant and foolish in this movie. They are not characters that we can sympathize with; in fact, no one in this movie is. While the story of Charles Eastman is worth telling, it is not part of the book and is sloppily woven into the storyline of the Sioux resistance at the Battle of the Little Bighorn to the massacre at Wounded Knee. That the Wounded Knee massacre should be told in flashbacks rather than as direct action is appalling.So much has been left out of this movie that it does nothing more than commit a great injustice to both the book and the people whose stories are being told. Hasn't America taken enough away from the Indian? Must another Hollywood movie strip Indian people of yet another aspect of their culture, namely their stories, their history, and their heroes? In this movie, it does all three.