Before watching Dances with Wolves, I read three reviews from Roger Ebert, Peter Travers (Rolling Stone) and Vincent Canby (The New York Times). The links are below.
Here are three of my expectations for this film (made in 1990) based on reading these reviews:
1. The cinematography will be stunning.
“is like a vacation in the Rockies” (Canby)
“magical” (Travers)
2. Like many epics, this is a kind of historical fantasy whose narrative will swing between genuine, trustworthy authenticity and highly questionable distortions of real encounters between whites and Native Americans. As a “sentimental fantasy” (Ebert), it must be taken with a grain of salt.
“The movie makes amends, of a sort, for hundreds of racist and small-minded Westerns that went before it.” (Ebert)
“[it] teeters on the edge of Boy’s Life literature, that is, on the brink of earnest silliness.” (Canby)
“[Costner’s] expansive style shows a genuine feel for the muscular poetry of the landscape and the Sioux’s language” (Travers)
3. I will probably get frustrated or bored with the extreme attention to detail and length (4 hours)
While Travers praises its “economy, grace and authenticity,” and Ebert seems to love the details, Canby finds them a little dry: “Though the details are specific …they are presented in the perfunctory way of generalized statements in guidebooks…Its triumph is that it is never exactly boring, only dulled. It’s a movie in acute need of sharpening.”
After watching this film I have to agree with Peter Travers’ characterization of this film as “en epic that breathes.” I didn’t really understand what this phrase meant until having finished this movie. I find it interesting that Travers was able to both say it needed “sharpening” and that it “breathes.” I tend to be more moved by shorter, more tightly-packed works of art, but I never felt the boredom I anticipated feeling. This may be the first epic film to convince me that length alone allows for character development in a way that a half hour or even two hour film cannot. Yes, I did end up needing that handful of salt: more than once I found it hard to move past the incredibly problematic casting of the Sioux as “noble savage.” I always find it problematic when war is glorified in films, and I was struck by the fact that this story managed to uphold so many romantic ideals of masculinity and stereotypes about Native Americans while also at times complicating these notions of battlefield glory and problematizing ideas of racial prejudice. I think Canby’s snarky review was a little unwarranted. There is a lot to be critical of, but if you boil it down to the story told, I was completely drawn in (yes, I cried when the wolf was shot and when Wind In His Hair, skeptical of Dunbar from the beginning, shouted his friendship to him as he set off at the end of the movie).
Its hard to talk about the idea of a historical “fantasy” epic that tells the narrative that was not the predominate one acted out by white settlers. Are we allowed to suspend disbelief if we are re-writing over a troubling history? The cinematography certainly was stunning, and this can help in suspending disbelief. That said, there were moments which make the audience confront history, such as when the Sioux come across a tribe of buffalo wiped out by whites and left to rot (this waste is a powerful motif throughout the movie). I came to appreciate how Costner really took time with each shot, letting it breathe, so to speak. A word that often comes up in describing epic is grandiose, suggesting over-the-top. But Costner certainly was economical, as Travers pointed out–sometimes this meant a split-second shot of a sunset was pared down to allow for a five-minute sweep over a buffalo massacre, as a young calf ran in confused circles. This film showed me how an epic can be sweeping and have a kind of rhythm (or breath) of its own, but not necessarily be extravagant.
http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/dances-with-wolves-1990
http://www.rollingstone.com/movies/reviews/dances-with-wolves-19901121
http://www.nytimes.com/movie/review?res=9C0CE6DB1338F93AA35752C1A966958260