![]() ![]() The folks they meet aren't that surprising, nor is the lesson they take from the meetings, which is that there's still a lot of racism in this country. He can't stop talking long enough to play the Big Bad Indian game, and with his buckteeth and big square glasses like something Elton John would wear, he looks more as if he'd hug you than scalp you. Poor Thomas: His brilliant, firecracker mind keeps fixating on ideas, images and stories. Though Coeur d'Alene were fishermen, he tries to counsel the younger man on how to achieve that stoic, fierce face on the nickel, that look that seems the appropriate mask of a horseback buffalo slayer or Seventh Cavalry vanquisher. ![]() Like travelers in movies and books (but hardly ever in real life), they meet fascinating people, while the more orthodox and stoic Victor tries to teach the irrepressibly callow but optimistic Thomas how to be an Indian. Its two heroes, Victor (Adam Beach) and his pal, punching bag and traveling companion Thomas Builds-the-Fire (Evan Adams), are a superb duo the two young actors have reflexive comic timing between them as they leave the reservation on a melancholy errand, a bus trip to Phoenix to retrieve the ashes of Arnold Joseph, who abandoned his wife and son 10 years earlier. So it is with Victor Joseph and his father, Arnold, and the usual things between them: love and fear and hatred and violence and the final estrangement. There's not much going on there a running gag shows a reservation radio station traffic reporter lounging by the side of a barren highway and calling in, "Nope, no traffic yet" and life on what amounts to a federal dole has worked out predictably: a vicious cycle of hopelessness, alcoholism and abuse. It's really the oldest and most primal story forms, the one about the old man and the boy.īoth old man and boy are Coeur d'Alene, whose lives are bounded by the bleak reservation fences in northern Idaho. And that's the surprise of the movie, beyond even the humor and humanity of its inside look at contemporary American Indian culture. What makes it good is that the coded communications in "Smoke Signals" don't come from the tribal council, the wickiups, the medicine lodges or even the reservation: They come from the heart. "Smoke Signals" has already established an identity as the first Indian film that is, the first film written by, performed by and directed by American Indians. An interview with writer-director Sherman AlexieĮvan Adams plays against stereotypes of Native Americans in "Smoke Signals."Įmotional intensity and the suggestion of violence. ![]()
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