Dances with Wolves

Kevin Costner’s Dances with Wolves is a good Western, worth its considerable length if you can forgive how often it explains itself. Costner directs and plays Lieutenant Dunbar, the soldier whose growing familiarity with the Sioux supplies the story. The film wants that process to take time, and usually earns the patience it asks for. He gives the supporting actors room to hold our attention even when Dunbar remains the focus. Its trouble is a recurring urge to tell us what to think of them.

Costner’s modest performance helps: Dunbar can seem interested without making every encounter a display of his own goodness. Graham Greene’s Kicking Bird and Rodney A. Grant’s Wind In His Hair have enough personality to resist being treated as interchangeable guides to Sioux life. Their humour loosens the film’s solemnity. We were moved by the ease that gradually enters their encounters with Dunbar, because the actors make familiarity feel like something slowly earned. Greene is particularly good at making friendliness seem considered rather than inevitable.

Dean Semler’s cinematography makes the plains large enough to diminish the leading man, which is useful in a story so firmly built around him. The open country is a pleasure to look at, but the distance also makes Dunbar seem exposed. Jeffrey Beecroft’s production design makes the places people inhabit feel used, rather than arranged for our inspection. The film remains most persuasive when it lets us look at where people live without adding an explanation of what their lives mean.

Editors William Hoy, Steve Potter, Neil Travis and Chip Masamitsu allow conversations and landscapes more room than the plot strictly needs. Much of the pleasure comes from that extra time, though the 181-minute running time becomes harder to defend when the narration repeats an impression already clear from the performances. John Barry’s score is generous with feeling, and its breadth suits Semler’s images. At times it presses too hard, making an already tender passage seem determined to improve our character. The pictures and actors could manage with less assistance.

Michael Blake’s screenplay is the larger limitation. Its sympathy for the Sioux matters, but the contrast with its coarser white characters can become too easy. Dunbar is afforded the space to change, while the people he encounters are too often required to demonstrate why he should. The actors give these people more individuality than Blake consistently allows them. Mary McDonnell’s Stands With A Fist helps through a naturalness that keeps the human connections credible even when the writing makes them too simple.

As a Western, the film is unusually willing to make getting acquainted part of the adventure. The open country invites curiosity, and the company is often worth slowing down for. We would still like Costner to make more room for Sioux lives that do not depend upon Dunbar’s arrival. The supporting actors suggest enough interests and differences to carry such a film, but the story keeps bringing us back to his education.

The final stretch is less sure of itself, and Costner leans on sentiment when a little restraint would help. The warmth of the supporting cast makes it possible to forgive more of this than the script deserves. Give it an unhurried evening, provided a narrator telling you what the actors have already made clear is not a deal-breaker.