Dances with Wolves (1990) Review

A Union lieutenant rides a horse along a Confederate line expecting to be shot and isn’t. He’s given a posting of his own choosing and asks for the frontier. He arrives at an abandoned fort, alone, and starts keeping a journal.

The 7 is for a film with two real achievements and one structural problem it never solves. The achievements are the language and the first hour of solitude. The problem is that the film is about a white man’s education and knows it and can’t escape it.

I admire this film more than I love it. The first hour, alone at the fort with the journal and the wolf, is the part I’d go back to, and the Lakota dialogue still impresses me. What holds it at a 7 is Dunbar himself, a dull hero parked at the center of a story that keeps showing me more interesting people.

It also won seven awards including Picture and Director over Goodfellas, and that’s the result this page is about instead of the film’s own merit.

The Language Decision

Roughly a third of the dialogue is in Lakota with English subtitles, in a mainstream American studio release in 1990, and that was a difficult thing to get financed.

The effect is the film’s most consequential choice. Once the Lakota speak to each other in their own language without translation for the audience’s convenience, they become people having conversations instead of figures being observed.

That choice is the one I’d point to if anybody asked what Costner got right. Hearing the Lakota argue with each other in their own language, without the film stopping to translate for my comfort, does more for them than any speech about respect could.

The specificity extends further than the language. The film distinguishes between Lakota and Pawnee, gives the Lakota a political structure with disagreements, and stages a council in which several people hold different positions about the newcomer.

The Pawnee are also the film’s weakest decision. They’re given no interiority at all, function purely as a threat, and the picture that argued the genre had been telling the story wrong repeats the error one tribe over. Doris Leader Charge taught the cast and appears in the film, and the Lakota community’s involvement was major. The result is imperfect and was criticized on accuracy grounds, including for using the feminine form of the language throughout, and it remains a considerable distance ahead of what the genre had been doing. The feminine-form criticism is worth stating carefully because it’s the kind of thing a production either checks or doesn’t. Leader Charge taught what she taught and the cast learned it, and nobody above her appears to have asked the question.

The First Hour Is Superb

Dunbar arrives at an empty fort and is alone for a considerable stretch, and the film is at its best with nobody in it. The material is entirely practical. He repairs a structure, digs a latrine, catalogues supplies, writes a journal, and establishes a routine, and the film is content to watch a man work for twenty minutes.

The supply wagon that brought him also never returns, and the film establishes early that the man who drove it was killed on the way back. Dunbar’s isolation is an accident of paperwork instead of a choice anybody made.

The wolf is the mechanism for measuring his isolation. It appears at a distance, comes closer over weeks, and the relationship is established without a word of narration about loneliness.

Two Socks also dies, shot by soldiers for amusement, and the film places that before the human violence in the third act. The animal is the audience’s measure and the film removes it deliberately at the point the stakes change.

The death of Two Socks upsets me more than anything the soldiers do to people later. I think that’s exactly what the film intends, and it’s the smartest piece of plotting in the whole three hours. The journal is the other device and it’s doing the film’s exposition without anybody speaking. Dunbar writes, the audience hears it, and the film can convey a month passing in two sentences without a montage.

It also becomes a plot object at the end. Soldiers find it, can’t read it, and a Lakota man returns it, and the film turns its own narrative device into evidence and then into a rescue.

Dean Semler won Best Cinematography and the plains material is the reason. The horizon is used as a fact and not as beauty, and the film repeatedly places a single figure against an amount of space that explains the whole premise. The buffalo hunt is the other technical achievement and it was shot with a real herd of around three thousand animals in South Dakota, with mechanical stand-ins only for the kills. Nothing in it is composited and the sequence is the reason the film needed the budget it did.

The Problem It Cannot Solve

The film is a white protagonist’s moral education conducted among people who exist to provide it. That’s the structure the page’s argument rests on.

That’s not a failure of intention. The film gives the Lakota characters interiority, humor, competence and disagreement, and Graham Greene’s Kicking Bird and Rodney Grant’s Wind In His Hair are both people instead of functions. The structural fact remains. The film opens with Dunbar, closes with Dunbar, uses Dunbar’s journal as its narration, and delivers the Lakota’s fate as a caption after he leaves.

The version that solves this isn’t available within the film’s own premise. A story about a man joining a community is necessarily his story, and the only fix is to make it somebody else’s film entirely.

Goodfellas

Best Picture and Best Director went to this. Goodfellas won one award, for Joe Pesci.

The formal argument is the one the page makes and it’s correct. Scorsese’s camera is an instrument of precise intelligence, the Copa shot, the narration that contradicts the images, the freeze frames, and Costner’s direction is handsome and invisible. The Academy has a documented preference for invisible direction and this is the cleanest example of it.

The other factor is scale and difficulty. Costner mounted a three-hour Western in Lakota with a buffalo hunt and a large second unit, on a budget that ran over, having never directed before, and the industry regards that kind of undertaking as evidence. Scorsese made a film about people he had been making films about for fifteen years. The Academy also gave Costner nothing for acting. That’s the real reading of his own contribution. He was nominated and didn’t win, and Dunbar is the least interesting person in his own film.

What’s worth stating is that Costner’s achievement is real. It was a difficult production, nobody wanted to finance it, and the language decision was brave, and none of that makes it the better film.

Goodfellas should have won both awards, and I don’t find the question close. I can respect what it took to get Costner’s film made and still think the Academy rewarded the effort over the movie.

There’s a four-hour version released later which adds a considerable amount and is better on the Lakota material and worse on pace. Anybody who liked the theatrical cut should see it and nobody else should.

What Happened to the Western

The film’s commercial result is the reason the Western briefly returned. Four hundred million dollars against a budget around twenty-two, in a genre that had been commercially dead for fifteen years. Unforgiven followed two years later and also won Best Picture, and Tombstone, Wyatt Earp, The Quick and the Dead and Geronimo all arrived within four years. Silverado on this site had tried the same revival in 1985 and failed. John Barry’s score is the other element that carried the revival. It was widely imitated for a decade, is the sound most people now associate with the genre’s late period, and won the film one of its seven awards.

That score moves me. Barry’s theme does half the emotional work on the plains, and I’d put it near the top of my reasons to watch the film at all.

That’s the difference between the two attempts and it’s instructive. Silverado argued that the genre was fun and this film argued that it had been telling the story wrong, and only one of those is a reason to return to a form.

The revival didn’t last. That’s the other half. By 1995 the cycle was over, and what survived is Unforgiven and this, both of which are revisionist and neither of which is a Western in the sense the form originally meant.

Should you watch Dances with Wolves?

Yes, and it’s better than its reputation as an Oscar argument. A third of the dialogue in Lakota with subtitles in 1990, twenty minutes of a man digging a latrine and writing a journal, a wolf that measures his isolation, and John Barry’s score are why I give it a 7. It’d be higher if the film could stop being about Dunbar, and it can’t, because the problem is built into the premise.

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