12/15/14 (Part Two): In the Kingdom of the Crow

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absentee father, bad schools, Best of 2014, Brandon Oakes, Canadian films, cinema, Cody Bird, coming of age, crooked government officials, death of a child, dramas, drug dealers, dysfunctional family, father-daughter relationships, favorite films, feature-film debut, film reviews, films, ghosts, Glen Gould, heist films, Indian agents, Indian Residential School, Jeff Barnaby, Kawennáhere Devery Jacobs, Mark Antony Krupa, Michel St. Martin, mother-daughter relationships, Movies, Nathan Alexis, Native Americans, Red Crow Indian Reservation, Rhymes For Young Ghouls, Roseanne Supernault, set in Canada, set in the 1970s, stolen money, strong female character, suicide, the Mi'kmaq, truancy officer, writer-director-editor

Every once in a while, a film comes completely out of nowhere and knocks me on my ass like a ghost train ripping through grand-pa’s house. It could be something I’ve never heard of, something that I’m not expecting to like or something that just completely blew away my expectations. While this has already been a pretty great year for film (compiling my Best of…lists has been harder than ever), leave it to one of the underdogs to sneak up and slap the complacency right off my stupid face. In this case, I’m talking about writer-director Jeff Barnaby’s feature-debut, the instantly classic Rhymes For Young Ghouls (2014). Only time will tell but, once the dust has settled, this may very well end up being in my Top Five of the year. Hell…it might even end up leading the parade.

Beginning in 1969 before jumping forward seven years, we find ourselves on the Red Crow Indian Reservation, in Canada. We first meet our hero, Aila, as a young girl (played by Miika Whiskeyjack). While her family life may not be the most conventional (her parents, Joseph (Glen Gould) and Anna (Roseanne Supernault), grow and sell marijuana with the help of Aila’s uncle, Burner (Brandon Oakes)), they seem like a loving family. After a night of drinking leads to a terrible tragedy, however, Aila’s life is torn asunder: with her brother dead, her father in prison and her mother a suicide victim, the poor girl’s life seems over before it begins.

Or it would, if Aila wasn’t such a completely kick-ass, resilient person. When we meet her seven years later, at the ripe-old age of 16 (played by the absolutely amazing Kawennahere Devery Jacobs), Aila is now running the grow operation on her own, with the able assistance of Burner and her friends, Sholo (Cody Bird) and Angus (Nathan Alexis). Completely self-assured and wise beyond her years, Aila is the glue that holds everything together, especially since her uncle is such a pothead wastoid. She’s a problem solver, a no-nonsense adult trapped in a teen’s body and she’s always quite the sight whenever she’s wearing her gas-mask and rolling her specialty blunts.

Along with running the operation, Aila and the others must also be wary of the odious, corrupt and infinitely shit-headed Indian agent, Popper (Mark Antony Krupa), who actually went to Catholic school with her now-imprisoned father. Popper runs the local “Indian Residential School,” a terrible place that’s more prison than educational establishment and where the kids are beaten and placed in solitary confinement at regular intervals. As we’re told at the beginning of the film, all Native American children between the ages of 5 and 16 are required to go to the school: truant officers (such as Popper) are authorized to use “whatever force is necessary” to get wayward kids back to school, including beating them senseless. The truant officers are also able to arrest, without warrant, any guardians who don’t make sure their kids go to school.

There’s always a loophole, however, especially when government officials are as evil and corrupt as the Indian agents: for a regular fee (a “truancy tax”), the truant officers will look the other way, allowing any kids who can pay the opportunity to run free. Thanks to her successful grow operation, Alia has always had plenty of money to pay the “taxes” for her and the others. When they end up losing all of their money in a trumped-up raid by Popper and his men, however, Alia is now facing the terrifying prospect of losing her freedom and individuality, all in one fell swoop. Things get even more chaotic when her father is finally released from prison and returns home, intent on being the father that he couldn’t be before. As he surveys the mass of drunk, stoned people crashing all over their house, however, the disappointment in Joseph’s voice is unmistakable: “How long has this been going on?,” he asks Alia. “About seven years,” she snaps back and the point is clear: if “dad” is expecting a Hallmark-style reunion, he better lose elsewhere.

With a host of outside forces closing in on her, Alia also must deal with her increasing nightmares, nightmares which feature her mother as a rotting zombie: since suicides are buried without grave markers, her mother is now “nameless” and stuck between the world of the dead and the world of the living. Facing pressure from all sides, Alia must do everything she can to avoid cracking and preserve the unity of her family. Popper won’t make any of it easy, however, which is just fine by her: as Alia learned long ago, sometimes the only thing you can do is put your head and charge forward, victory be damned. In the Kingdom of the Crow, no one is safe…least of all, the young.

Watching the film, I was frequently reminded of another showstopping dark-horse, Debra Granik’s stunning Winter’s Bone (2010), the film that first introduced the world to Jennifer Lawrence. Fitting, in a way, since Rhymes For Young Ghouls should serve to introduce us to yet another amazing young actor: Kawennahere Devery Jacobs. I don’t have praise enough for her performance but will say that I was completely and absolutely blown-away by her. If she’s not a huge star in 5 years or so, I’ll buy a haberdashery and eat every damn hat in the place.

Part of the sheer joy of the film is how completely unpredictable it is, so I’ll say as little about specifics as possible. Suffice to say that Barnaby’s killer script manages to seamlessly work in a heist subplot, as well as a beautifully-realized moment where Alia’s “grandmother” tells her a story and we see it visualized in a graphic-novel style. The film is in constant motion and is endlessly inventive, never dull or tedious. There’s also no sense of being force-fed emotional pabulum: the film deals with some very big issues (the stability of families; children caring for their parents; the suicide of a parent; institutionalized racism; class-warfare; traditional Native American ways versus the “modern world;” children working…it goes on and on, to be honest. Rhymes For Young Ghouls is one of the few films I’ve seen lately that actually feels important: these are issues that folks should be discussing and Barnaby’s film doesn’t shy from any of them.

From a filmmaking standpoint, Rhymes For Young Ghouls is nothing short of astounding. In fact, I daresay that a handful of sequences reminded me of nothing less than some of Scorcese’s best work: the opening slo-mo raid, in particular, was so fabulously “Scorcese” that I’m pretty sure I squealed in joy. There’s a synthesis of music and image that’s both flawless and extremely effective: one of the best, most subtle moments is the one where an angelic choir underscores a decidedly devious scene. Barnaby also traffics in a kind of magical-realism that can be pretty head-spinning: there were at least a few points in the film where I questioned the reality of what was happening, thanks to a combination of tricky camera-work and forced perspectives. Even divorced from its amazing cast and excellent script, Rhymes For Young Ghouls is one of the best looking, most well-realized film I’ve seen in ages.

At this point, all I can realistically continue to do is praise the film endlessly, so let me wrap it up thusly: Rhymes For Young Ghouls is a nearly perfect film, one that I absolutely can’t get out of my head after seeing it. While there are a handful of very minor issues spread throughout the film, overall, I absolutely adored it. This, as far as I’m concerned, is the reason we should all keep going to the movies and supporting strong, individualistic filmmakers. It’s almost impossible for me to believe that this is Barnaby’s debut, since it’s so self-assured and impressive. There’s not much time left in this year and I still have quite a few films to see but, if you’re a betting person, I’d wager money that you’ll see Rhymes For Young Ghouls on top of at least one of my lists. Watch the movie and I’m willing to bet that it’ll top your lists, too.

10/17/14 (Part One): And To Dirt You Shall Return

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31 Days of Halloween, auteur theory, cinema, Clancy Brown, Doug Hutchison, favorite films, Film auteurs, film reviews, films, Galen Hutchison, horror, horror movies, horror westerns, J.T. Petty, Jocelin Donahue, Karl Geary, Laura Leighton, Movies, Native Americans, Sean Patrick Thomas, set in the 1870s, The Burrowers, the Dakota Territories, the Old West, U.S. military vs Native Americans, William Mapother, writer-director

There’s something inherently mournful and haunted about the American West: those wide open spaces…the harsh, unforgiving environment…the long history of bloodshed and genocide, land wars and gold rushes…the West may have been subsumed by the inevitable march of time and progress but there’s a dark, untamed and feral power that’s always laid just below the soil, just waiting for folks to dig deep enough to find it. Despite generations of “white hats vs black hats” in Saturday morning Western matinees, the true legacy of the West is as grim as that of the Arctic void: it’s Death, plain and simple, stretching out before the eye like so many miles of sun-baked nothingness, like the burned-out villages that signaled a new way of life for the natives who were already here or the hollowed-out stomachs of the settlers who would make it theirs, if they could only survive the winter.

Writer-director J.T. Petty’s outstanding Western-horror film, The Burrowers (2008), is a film as sad and mournful as the Old West. Nominally a “monster movie,” The Burrowers is more about the ways in which the inhabitants of the American West fell short of the promise of a “new way of life,” falling back into the same patterns of violence, racism and fear that dogged the industrialized metropolises of the East. It’s a sad film because it offers no glossy aphorisms or false hopes: the downfall of humanity will always be humanity…we are our own worst monsters.

The film takes place in the Dakota Territories, at the tail-end of summer, in 1879. Our protagonist, Fergus Coffey (Karl Geary), a hard-working Irish immigrant, has just got up the nerve to propose to his beloved, Maryanne (Jocelin Donahue). When he travels to her family’s homestead, however, he comes upon a terrible scene: Maryanne’s farm and the surrounding farms have all been attacked and burned to the ground, with survivors nowhere to be found. Fergus gets together with Will Parcher (William Mapother), who appears to be the Old West version of William Peterson’s Gil Grissom from CSI. Fergus and Will, along with Dobie (Galen Hutchison), the young son of Will’s girlfriend, head out to look for the missing families. Their little group is complete when they connect with a take-no-nonsense preacher, Clay (Clancy Brown) and Walnut Callaghan (Sean Patrick Thomas), a black soldier who becomes fast friends with Fergus.

Despite the presence of strange wounds on the bodies and large holes in the surrounding ground, the prevailing belief seems to be that “the Indians did it.” This gets driven home when the odious Captain Henry Victor (Doug Hutchison) and his U.S. cavalry unit show up: Victor, a belligerent, boorish and detestable racist, just wants to know what natives to kill…he seems to have previous little interest in recovering anyone, as long as he gets a pound of flesh. To that end, he believes that the captives are being held at the nearby reservation, although Clay and Will both know that’s a completely stupid assumption. With Captain Victor in charge, however, there’s no time for rational thought, only heated action.

The plot thickens, as it were, when the cavalry manages to capture one of the dreaded “Indians”: Victor promptly gets to torturing him, figuring that he’ll spill the beans when he’s in enough pain. Will isn’t so sure, however, especially once he starts to talk about the mysterious “Burrowers”: everyone assumes they’re just some heretofore unknown tribe but Will points out that “Men mine, animals burrow.” He’ll be proven right, of course, as the group begins to get more and more clues that something much different from kidnapping has occurred. When the group comes upon a still-living young woman buried in the ground, however, the full truth of their situation becomes evident. Fergus, Will, Clay and the others have stumbled into the hunting grounds of something older than mankind, something which lived on the buffalo until we hunted them to extinction. It will be the fight of their lives as they battle the creatures, each other and the evil, merciless Captain Victor, their humanity blowing away with each new atrocity, like so many tumbleweeds on the plain.

Quite simply, The Burrowers is one of my all-time favorite films: it’s beautifully made, intelligent, thrilling, has great effects, real emotional depth, fully developed characters and a knockout central idea. The mythology behind the creatures is strong and rather unique (I dearly love the idea of an ancient predator running out of its food source and opting to upgrade to people) and the film never panders to its audience. Indeed, The Burrowers often seems just as much a straight-up dramatic Western as it does a horror film, even though the horror elements are strong and up-front for the entire film. This has a lot to do with Petty’s script, which is excellent: he tackles some big ideas but never allows the material to get away from him or lets the whole thing get bogged down into didactics. It’s made explicitly clear from the get-go how villainous Victor and his men are, yet Petty lets much of this arise organically, via Victor’s awful personality, rather than as merely an accepted point regarding the U.S. military’s patently awful history with Native Americans.

One of the most interesting elements of the film ends up being the balanced depiction of Native Americans: rather than existing simply as “noble savages” or defacto bad guys, as has been the norm for Westerns for some time, the Native characters are just as varied and fully formed as the white settlers, even if they don’t get quite the same amount of screen time. The scene where Fergus panics and fires on the friendly Sioux scouts is a bracing one, precisely because it upends our usual expectations in such situations (from a traditional Hollywood viewpoint, at least): the Native Americans were friendly and eager to help, until they got unceremoniously attacked. Despite all of Victor’s vitriol, here’s proof positive that the dreaded “other” is just like “us”…and then we go ahead and take a fucking shot at them, just to add a cherry to the sundae. It kind of belies the whole idea of “savages”: anybody would get “savage” if some asshole was shooting at them for no reason.

By contrast, the scene with the Ute warriors upends expectations in the other direction: after the conflict with the once-friendly Sioux, the Utes offer of assistance seems like a no-brainer. When they end up being just as treacherous as Captain Victor, however, it makes the obvious connection pretty plain: just like the white settlers, there were good and bad Native Americans. The difference, of course, ends up being the position of power and authority assumed by troglodytes like Captain Victor: when evil wears the crown, evil things tend to happen, regardless of the best efforts of good people.

There’s a lot to chew on in The Burrowers but the film never feels overly complex or convoluted: it’s fast-paced from the jump, although the film still takes care to spin out and establish its atmosphere at every opportunity. The droning, atonal score helps with this immensely: when combined with the desolate, wide-open imagery, there’s a peculiar sense of paranoia and claustrophobia that settles on the viewer. It’s a feeling as if one is trapped beneath a boundless sky that is, nonetheless, slowly pressing down and crushing you, millimeter by millimeter.

Acting-wise, The Burrowers is similarly top-notch. Karl Geary cuts a very sympathetic character as the anguished Fergus, even when he’s doing something fundamentally stupid like firing on the friendly Sioux. William Mapother is fantastic as Will, his likable character put to the screws once he starts making some very terrible decisions and it’s always great to see character-actor Clancy Brown in anything: his Clay is another neat character in a pretty impressive career. Special mention, of course, must go to Doug Hutchison as the hateful Captain Victor: sporting a foppish mustache and looking (and sounding) suspiciously like a twin to DiCaprio’s equally terrible Calvin Candie, Hutchison is an unrepressed, unbound mess of primal, undiluted racism, the poster-child for every hateful act that humanity can commit against itself. There’s no point where Victor is ever anything less than a complete and utter monster and it’s to Hutchison’s great credit that he still manages to make the character seem three-dimensional.

From beginning to end, I can find very little about The Burrowers that doesn’t hold me enthralled: from the filmmaking to the acting to the script, everything is in complete balance, contributing to one of the most well-rounded features I’ve ever seen. While I must admit to really disliking Petty’s debut feature, Soft For Digging (2001), I enjoyed his follow-up, S&Man (2006) and loved the follow-up to The Burrowers, Hellbenders (2012), making him one of the new crop of horror writer-directors that I watch like a hawk. While there might not be a whole slew of horror-Westerns, numbers-wise, The Burrowers is easily at the head of the class. It’s a film that really gets under your skin: I still find myself thinking about the finale, from time to time, even when I haven’t seen the film for a while. It’s a sad, elegiac film without easy answers or fairy-tale conclusions…it’s a hard film, as hard as the unforgiving landscape that it depicts and the haunted specters of humanity that reside there.

2/27/14: Big Dude on the Little Prairie

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1950's film, Apaches, based on a short story, Best Supporting Actress nominee, cowboys, Geraldine Page, gunfighters, homesteaders, Hondo, Hondo Lane, John Farrow, John Wayne, Louis L'Amour, Native Americans, the Old West, U.S. Cavalry, Westerns

Taking a break from the barrage of Oscar-related films that I watched at the end of February, I decided to go in a completely different direction with the rather modest John Wayne oater Hondo. This was never one of my favorites as a kid but would time change my perspective? Read on, gentle folk…read on.

If there was one thing that both my parents loved when I was growing up, it was definitely Westerns. We were a very film-centric family, watching dozens of movies over the course of a typical week but Westerns always made up a good portion of the fare. To be honest, I was never a huge fan of Westerns when I was younger, although I was completely obsessed with Clint Eastwood and spaghetti Westerns, by association. I was able to find Westerns that I liked, here and there, and even one that I abjectly adored (El Dorado, still one of my top 5 favorite film ever) but I found the genre rather dull, as a whole, and found little to hold my interest. In particular, I was always less than impressed with John Wayne (aside from his outstanding turn in El Dorado, of course). He was one of my parents’ favorite actors, so I’d probably seen all of his films (at least twice) by the time I was a teenager. Despite that, there were very few that I actually remembered (who could ever forget The Green Berets…), making all of these films ripe for re-examination. After all, if I can’t recall anything about the film, it’s almost like watching it anew, right? In this spirit, I decided to give Hondo another shot and see how adult-me felt about it.

Based on a Louis L’Amour story (one of my mother’s favorite authors) and directed by filmmaking machine John Farrow (48 films in 25 years), Hondo is a modest, unassuming and fairly routine little Western. Wayne plays Hondo Lane, the kind of laconic, sharp-shooting gunfighter hero that L’Amour specialized in. He stops by the ranch of Angie Lowe (Geraldine Page) and her young son Johnny (Lee Aker), a ranch which just happens to be located in hostile Apache territory. Angie says that her husband is away but Hondo is more than welcome to stay for a spell. Sensing something more to the story, owing to the general state of disrepair around the ranch (things are obviously going to shit since the man isn’t around, doncha know) and concerned about the nearby Apache, Hondo agrees to stay on and serves as a surrogate father, of sorts, for precocious Johnny. Hondo is also part-Indian, which makes his relation to the white settlers and the surrounding Apache even more complex.

Trouble enters the picture, however, in the form of Vittorio (Michael Pate), the local Apache chief. When his raiding party comes to Angie’s ranch, Johnny ends up holding them off with a few poorly aimed gunshots, earning the undying respect of the chief and blood-brother status. Since no “blood-brother-son” of Vittorio’s is going to grow up fatherless, Vittorio tells Angie to either produce her absentee husband (even the Apaches think he’s imaginary) or choose a nice, strong Apache warrior to replace him. Producing her husband Ed (Leo Gordon) becomes rather complicated after Hondo ends up gunning down the yellow-bellied lout (he tried to shoot John Wayne in the back, so what, exactly, did he expect to happen?), so Angie replaces him with the next best thing: Hondo. Thrown into the mix, Hondo must now negotiate between the angry Apache, the blood-thirsty U.S. cavalry, a boy who needs a father and a lovely, lonely lady who could really use a fella. Too much to handle? All in a day’s work for John Wayne, son…all in a day’s work.

Overall, Hondo is a decent but largely unexceptional Western that doesn’t do much to distinguish itself from the rest of Wayne’s oeuvre.   The original story’s central conceit, that Hondo is a “half-breed” caught between the world of the whites and Native Americans is fairly underutilized here, producing no more than a few throwaway moments and adding nothing particularly deep to the story. In its absence, we’re left with a fairly routine Western about a rugged cowboy protecting a widow and her kid from outside forces. Certainly nothing wrong with that, but nothing particularly ground-breaking, either.

Wayne is good in the role, as expected, although there’s absolutely nothing save for the occasional attempt at Native American-sounding philosophizing to differentiate this from many of his other roles. If anything, Wayne’s character is still the same old red-blooded, Injun-killin’ character he always played: now, he just pays lip service to a “vanishing way of life,” which seems particularly disingenuous since he’s helping to make it vanish in the first place. His ending statement, after the obligatory big gunfight between the Apaches and cavalry, is to say “End of a way of life. Too bad…it’s a good way of life.” Indeed. The film seems to want to have its cake and eat it, too: the only “good” Indian is still a dead one but at least their killers feel kinda bad about it. It’s an interesting, conflicted notion to have the Apaches serve as both the good AND bad guys: the cavalry does nothing noble whatsoever (they also aren’t particularly good tacticians or listeners), whereas Vittorio and the Apaches are shown to be true men of their word. They still get gunned down, mind you, but at least they never lie about anything.

At the end of the day, Hondo stands as a decent but largely unexceptional Western, one that probably won’t have much value beyond Wayne completists.  The filmmaking is decent, the acting is fine and film clips along at a brisk pace. Nonetheless, while adult-me has a softer perspective, he’s still pretty much in agreement with young-me:  Hondo just isn’t much to write home about.

2/13/14: Just a Couple of Easy Riders

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A Martinez, Amanda Wyss, based on a book, Bonnie Red Bow, buddy films, Buddy Red Bow, cinema, David Seals, Dead Man, discrimination, film reviews, films, Gary Farmer, Graham Greene, independent films, jail-break, Jonathan Wacks, magical-realism, Movies, Native Americans, Northern Cheyenne, Philbert Bono, Powwow Highway, racism, reservations, road movie, road trips, self-discovery, vision quests, Wayne Waterman, Wes Studi

Finding one’s own identity and sense of self can be a daunting task under the best of circumstances. Some people may spend their entire lives “discovering” themselves, while others seem to know just who they are from a relatively young age. To make matters even more complicated, notions of self and personal identity also come not only from our internal communities but from the larger global communities around them. It can be hard enough to know who you are without the media and entertainment organizations constantly tossing in their own ten cents.

If finding one’s own place in the world can be difficult enough under the best scenarios, how much more difficult must it be when one has been marginalized, made to be an outsider in one’s own home? What if the surrounding culture, the “dominant culture,” as it were, was not only radically different from yours but, in some cases, diametrically opposite? In the case of the United States’ Native American population, this has often been the case. Jonathan Wack’s buddy pic, Powwow Highway, examines this concept of the search for personal identity while wrapping it within an easy-going, often meandering but ultimately entertaining road-trip framework. Powwow Highway isn’t a perfect film but it is an incredibly likable one and a surprisingly wry one, at that.

Philbert (Gary Farmer), a sweet-natured but naive member of the Northern Cheyenne, lives on a reservation in Montana. One day, he sees a blatantly racist TV commercial for a local car dealership and decides to head over and “pick out his pony.” When he gets there, the dealership is a bit less impressive than the commercial made it seem (read: filthier than the repo-shop in Repo Man) but Philbert is still able to trade some weed, a little whiskey and five bucks for his very own “pony”: a beat-to-shit, rusted-out junker that looks like a contemporary to the Edsel. Despite looking like it will require foot-power, ala the Flintstones, Philbert is ecstatic and sets out on his very own vision quest, in pursuit of becoming a warrior. As luck would have it, he finds a road-partner in Buddy Red Bow (A Martinez), a hot-headed local activist who’s involved in a bitter dispute with a local mining company. They want in, Red Bow wants them out and he’s just passionate and fiery enough to rally the residents.

The mining company, however, plays dirty pool and they’ve figured out a pretty sure-fire way to get rid of the pesky activist: plant drugs on his estranged sister, Bonnie (Joanelle Nadine Romero), get her arrested in New Mexico and wait for Red Bow to go bail her out. In the meantime, they’ll be free to work their magic minus his less-than-passive resistance.  Red Bow meets up with Philbert and, together, the two set off on their respective missions. Red Bow doesn’t have a lot of respect (or patience) for the patently old-fashioned Philbert, finding his stories about the old days and desire to be a warrior to be pretty silly delusions. Philbert, for his part, thinks that Red Bow has lost his way and needs to be reminded of his ancestry. Together, the two meet a collection of colorful characters on the road, including Bonnie’s kooky best friend, Rabbit (Amanda Wyss), another Native American activist named Wolf Tooth (Wayne Waterman), a stoic but frightening Vietnam vet (Graham Greene, in a very early role) and a hunky, girl-crazy stud named Buff (Wes Studi, in one of his first roles, before his breakout in the following year’s Dances With Wolves). Together, this motley crew helps get Red Bow closer to freeing his sister and Philbert closer to becoming a warrior.

At its heart, Powwow highway is anchored by Gary Farmer’s massively impressive performance as Philbert. Without a doubt, Farmer is the true heart and soul of the film, imbuing Philbert with a completely intoxicating mix of childlike enthusiasm, righteous indignation, pride, fear and anger. There are a million ways that a character like Philbert could be portrayed: wounded, silly, self-righteous, a martyr, a savior, an idiot savant. It’s to Farmer’s great credit that he plays Philbert as, quite simply, a complex and completely real human being. At no point does Philbert ever come across as merely a symbol or a stand-in for the film’s message. Even when the magical-realist element of the film is at its highest, such as when Philbert repeatedly sees the Native American warrior in traditional tribal garb, Farmer always makes sure that Philbert’s feet remain firmly on the ground. Despite his constant sunny nature and optimism, Philbert is no Pollyanna: the scene where he grabs and shakes Red Bow is sobering because it’s exactly what we want to do, in that situation.

A Martinez’s Red Bow, while hitting a few more stereotypical character notes then Farmer does, also turns in a great performance. With any other co-star, Martinez’s gruff, passionate activist would be the one that the audience can’t take their eyes off of. Despite his central status in the storyline, however, this is definitely Philbert’s story: Red Bow is, effectively, riding shotgun throughout the film. The rest of the performances are equally assured: Studi is a hoot as the perpetually horny Buff and Greene is quietly powerful as the shattered Vietnam vet. If anything, his scant screen time is the film’s biggest disappointment, since it leaves you wanting more: he says more with a look and a downcast stare than most actors do with a monologue. Wyss (Judge Reinhold’s girlfriend in the seminal Fast Times at Ridgemont High) is fun as Bonnie’s nutty friend but the character ends up being pretty superfluous to the action and doesn’t seem to serve much point.

Idea-wise, Powwow Highway gives plenty to think about. From a filmmaking standpoint, however, things are a bit murkier. For one thing, the film’s soundtrack is pretty awful: it may be 1989 but the synthy keyboard dreck on display reminds of the cheesiest excesses on the beginning of that historically cheesy era. Even the U2 song that runs over the closing credits is schlocky and under-whelming, continuing the unfortunate musical trend.

The film also seems to be fairly low-stakes: despite any of the situations that the characters find themselves in, there never seems to be a genuine sense of danger to anything. The effect is similar to watching weekly episodes of MacGyver: regardless of the size of the bomb, you know Mac’ll be there next week. Similarly, it’s hard to get too invested in situations like Philbert busting Bonnie out of jail (ropes tied to the window-bars, just like in an old Western) or the group being pursued by the entire Sante Fe police department, since everything seems so low-key. Even a potentially tear-jerking finale is ultimately rendered into a happy ending: despite its refusal to pull punches, Powwow Highway seems inordinately determined to please its audience, at all costs.

Ultimately, Powwow Highway ends up being a fun, energetic but slightly weightless film. While there’s an awful lot to like here (Farmer’s performance, the quirky situations, the authentic setting) and only a few real missteps (the awful score. the occasionally dingy cinematography), the film doesn’t seem to have a ton of substance. Perhaps less reliance on Red Bow’s story and more emphasis on Philbert’s quest to become a warrior would have helped: even the film doesn’t seem particularly interested in the resolution of the stale mining subplot, since it never even bothers to actually resolve it within the framework of the film. The real drawing point here is Farmer’s fearless performance. He may have played Nobody in Dead Man, but Farmer proves that he’s the big somebody at the heart of this little world.