Comments on Dances With Wolves
Comments on Dances With Wolves
It’s hard for me to believe that fourteen years have passed since I first saw this movie. At the time I was almost 20, a junior English major. This was the first American movie I ever saw that was both an eye-filling and a mind-filling spectacle. This movie probably disappoints viewers who are looking for sheer entertainment. It’s a quiet, thoughtful story. Although there is action in it, the focus is on how the action transforms the characters (particularly Dunbar) rather than on the action itself. It’s touching, it’s timeless and it’s downright beautiful. It is a film that will never bore you no matter how often you watch it. I think it deserves every single Oscar award it got. Although many people complained about the length of the film, I believe cutting even a second out of it would seem, at least to me, like a horrible crime. It is
Dances With Wolves was honored with twelve nominations and seven Oscar wins --- Best Picture (Costner), Best Director (for Costner’s directorial debut film), Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Cinematography, Best Sound, Best Original Score (sentimental without being schmaltzy, noble without being pretentious), and Best Film Editing. However, the three-hour epic and revisionistic western film was an anomaly（异常的人或物） win in Oscar history - it was only the second time that a western genre film won the Best Picture Oscar. (The first Best Picture western film was Cimarron (1930-31), sixty years earlier). However, some argued that Costner’s (another actor-turned-director) romantic-epic film shouldn’t have been categorized as a Western.
“Dances With Wolves” thrilled audiences in 1990 and made so much money because people had forgotten the pleasures of the long narrative, the Western genre, and movies that were not filled with poor-quality special effects. This was a revolutionary motion picture at its time, never had a story about the American Indians ever been told with such emotion and grace. The film contained long portions of the Sioux-Lakota language and detailed the Native American culture. The film retold the story of the Wild West from the viewpoint of Native Americans.
The visually-impressive film told the saga （传奇） of a Civil War Union officer, Lt. John W. Dunbar, who became disillusioned and headed west. Deserted alone in the fort, He decided to try to get to know the local Sioux tribe (Lakota) and eventually became one of them. In finding a place in Lakota society, he found himself. He eventually found peace away from white civilization with nature and the Lakota Sioux.
Some people say Dances with Wolves is an anti-white movie because it tells the true story of the cruelty of the white people the way few films have done before. Some white people don’t want to admit this movie is a true telling of the way white people treat other races and nature. It is a hard movie to digest. It is a hard movie to admit the truth. But, I have to say a few words in justification for the whites here. I don’t think the whites should be completely responsible for the destruction of Indian Culture. It was not the goal of the American whites. It is merely a consequence of the idea of Manifest Destiny. The Sioux are a magnificent people. What has happened to them could be summed up in one word: tragedy.
This movie’s depiction of Native Americans is hardly as politically correct as it may seem to those who watch it only once or only at a superficial level. In the very first scene depicting Indians, in fact, a Pawnee brave shoots the white peasant dead, full of arrows, and then scalps him. Even the most sympathetic Indian character in the movie, Kicking Bird, is not kind to Dunbar merely to be friendly but because he believes he can get useful information out of the white soldier about the other whites who are encroaching on Sioux territory. The interaction between Dunbar and the Sioux is powerfully effective precisely because the Sioux remain true to themselves. They are not cartoonishly hostile like the Indians depicted in old Westerns, but they are not soft or naïve either.
The end of the film is heartbreaking where it says on screen that the Indians and the Horse culture were “passed into history”. In the gloomy ending, Lt. John Dunbar left his adoptive Sioux tribe with Stands With a Fist, because of the threat he posed living with them, and the epilogue （结语，尾声） in which a placard （布告）revealed that in the next 13 years, all of the Sioux were either wiped out or put on reservations.
