War Party

Probably I've watched this movie half-a-dozen times, once with a white theatre audience close to the rez and the rest on tape with Blackfeet high school students. The student attitude was summed up by a handsome young man who sighed and remarked, "The first time you see it, it seems pretty good, but after about the third time, it just falls apart." The theatre audience just didn't like it, period.

It was fun to see friends and neighbors in a movie. Locals grew fond of the actors while they were in town. But the whole line of argument that drove the plot meant nothing to the people it was supposed to be about. Sure, there's racism -- but it comes to us as job discrimination or court systems or broken families or drug peddlers. Renegade kids are not romantically pursued over the landscape by caricature bad guys. (What the heck was the idea of Rodney Grant's character, anyway?) They just get picked up speeding or something -- by officers who are Indian -- and end up quietly taken to jail.

I hated the faux samurai ending, romanticizing death in a place where suicide is a problem. Plainly this was a movie written by people who didn't want to know anything about reality and didn't care what impact their movie had on the people to whom they were supposed to be sympathetic. It's a projection of themselves, a continuing problem for Native American films and one that has mostly been solved so far by Indians making their own movies.