Dances with Wolves (1990)

The film begins on a scene of Stephen Crane-ish Civil War grisliness, as First Lieutenant John J. Dunbar (Costner) is prepped to lose his foot to a surgeon's saw in a blood-spattered operating tent. When the medics slip out for coffee, Dunbar—prepared to die in a suicidal blaze of glory—steals a horse and rides across the battlefield toward the Confederate lines, inadvertently leading a charge that breaks the stalemate and wins the battle for the North. His supposed heroism nets him a medal and an even greater boon—a station at any Army outpost of his choosing. He picks Fort Sedgwick, an isolated post at the far edge of the western frontier—which Dunbar wants to see "before it's gone"—but when he arrives, the fort is utterly deserted. Instead of turning back—which any sane 19th century person would do—Dunbar decides to make this dilapidated camp his hermitage. We know next to nothing about his past, but this is clearly a man who has had his share of civilization and found it lacking. Alone, but not lonely, he documents his time in a diary—which Costner reads in a somewhat stolid voiceover narration—befriends a wolf, and keeps a wary but curious watch on the Sioux tribesmen who obviously drove out his predecessors.

They're eyeing him suspiciously as well. What's a white guy doing all alone way out in the middle of nowhere? Is he crazy? Is he some sort of medicine man? Is he a threat? Fierce warrior Wind In His Hair (Rodney A. Grant) wants to ride in and fill Dunbar full of arrows, but holy man Kicking Bird (Graham Greene)—the clear-eyed old soul of the film—sees an opportunity to learn more about this peculiar white man and, by extension, all white men. In a series of cautious encounters, they attempt to communicate—their mutual good intentions made clear through some good old fashioned reciprocal gift giving—and soon enough Dunbar is spending most of his time at the Sioux encampment, learning their ways, tentatively speaking their language, and aiding them in their hunt for buffalo, scarce now that fur traders are slaughtering the noble beasts for their pelts and leaving their carcasses to rot out on the plains by the thousands. Of course, it's unavoidable that Dunbar will fall in love with Stands with a Fist (Mary McDonnell), a white woman who was captured as a child during a raiding party and raised as a Sioux. Other inevitabilities also present themselves—a battle with the neighboring Pawnee tribe, a skirmish with the military, and Dunbar earning his honorary Sioux name, yes, Dances With Wolves.

By Hollywood logic, the film shouldn't have been a seven-Academy-Award-winning success. It was directed by a young actor—and, come on, Kevin Costner is no Orson Welles—and it dared to be a three-hour long Western at a time when the genre was on the rocks. Not only that, but much of the dialogue is spoken in the Lakota dialect and subtitled in English, which, let's face it, is a test of patience for an American moviegoing populace whose collective attitude is "if I wanted to read, I'd pick up a book." Dances with Wolves works, however, precisely because, at the time, it's not what you would've expected from an American epic. Even today, it stands outside the canon of supposedly stirring, cheesily patriotic dude films in which it's usually lumped—Braveheart, The Patriot, etc.—for the sheer restraint and uncommon specificity that it shows. John Dunbar is no uber-masculine, nation-loving hero; like the film itself, he's quiet, warm-hearted, and a little naïve—traits that Kevin Costner exemplifies well. The actor-turned-director has had his share of misses in the intervening years—we need not mention Waterworld —but here he shows visual acuity for the landscape of the West and a strong grasp of what makes a story resonate with an audience.

In this case, it's pretty simple. Costner gives us well-developed characters that we can care about, and he casts their actions in a meaningful historical context. The film harkens back to the old Romantic notion that man is at his best when he's at one with the natural world—although it's less hippy-ish than the almost comically New Age-y Avatar—but it's also honest about the realities of human nature, specifically man's capacity for violence as a knee-jerk response to the fear of the unknown. While the movie is in some sense a revisionist western, sympathizing with the plight of the Native Americans, it shows both "sides," if you will, the Sioux and the encroaching white civilization, as inherently afraid of—and brutal towards—one another. Dunbar and Kicking Bird, then, are presented as almost idealized human beings, capable of seeing past their respective cultures' ingrained prejudices. Their relationship—not the romance between Dunbar and Stands With A Fist, which I've always felt is the movie's weakest link—is the real backbone of the film.

This Blu-ray release of Dances with Wolves contains only the Director's Cut, which runs six minutes shy of four hours long. It's unfortunate that the shorter—and better—theatrical cut couldn't also have been included via seamless branching, as the 55 minutes of added material slows down the picture dramatically and heightens some of the film's flaws, like Costner's tendency to linger unnecessarily on shots of wagons passing through the barren countryside or the script's good-natured but occasionally cornball sentimentality. Still, this extended version does give the director opportunity to immerse us in Dunbar's isolation and—when our protagonist finally finds a home amongst the Sioux—give us the sense that we're making this journey into the wild with him.