Webblog

This 1992 film is a well-intentioned but seriously flawed dramatization of events on the Pine Ridge Oglala Sioux reservation in the mid-1970s. One of the main problems with the film is that it attempts to deal with too many issues, stretching the plot beyond the bounds of plausibility and coherence. In fact, the storyline seems little more than a vehicle for a political statement about, well, let’s see: the Wounded Knee massacre, uranium mining, the Anna Mae Aquash assassination, the Leonard Peltier case, tribal chairman Dick Wilson and his GOONs, FBI complicity with death squads, racial reawakening, colonialism, Native spirituality, and perhaps more. Despite strong performances from John Trudell, Graham Greene, and other Native actors, the film comes off as rather muddled romantic nonsense. Greene’s role as an ununiformed tribal cop sympathetic to AIM (ARM in the film) and apparently independent of tribal and federal government is particularly confusing historically.

Val Kilmer plays Ray Lavoi, a half-Lakota FBI agent confused about his identity and liable to pull a gun on anyone that crosses him. Initially, Levoi is happy to cover up evidence that contradicts the case against a tribal activist for murder, but he later stumbles across evidence that an FBI infiltrator carried out the killing at the instigation of Levoi’s supervisor, played rather convincingly by Sam Shepard. Paraphrasing a famous quote by Norman Zigrossi, the actual special agent in charge of the FBI in Pine Ridge, Shepard’s character describes the Lakota as a “conquered people” whose destiny is now in the hands of their enemies. When Levoi is nearly killed by a tribal goon squad that shoots up the house of a female activist he is questioning, it begins to dawn on the FBI agent that he may be on the wrong side of the conflict. At Wounded Knee, Levoi sees visions of women and children fleeing a soldier on horseback, later learning that one of his ancestors was killed in that massacre. A tribal elder tells him that he has inherited the spirit of his ancestor, Thunderheart, so Levoi reveals the truth of the murder and takes tribal and federal police on a car chase with a typical Hollywood ending.

The most frustrating aspect of this film is that its director, Michael Apted, should know better. As director of Incident at Oglala, an excellent documentary on the Leonard Peltier case, he is certainly well aware of the general dynamics of the situation on Pine Ridge. It is unfortunate that he felt compelled to cram cursory treatments of multiple issues into such a weak supporting framework.

Jeff Armstrong