www.suntimes.com/ebert/ebert_reviews/1990/11/576465.html
DANCES WITH WOLVES Date of publication: 11/09/1990 For cast, rating and other information, click here By Roger Ebert They meet at first in the middle of the prairie, holding themselves formally and a little awkwardly, the cavalry officer and Sioux Indians. There should be instant mistrust between them, but they take each others measure and keep an open mind. A civilized man is a person whose curiosity outweighs his prejudices, and these are curious men. Wind in His Hair, a fierce warrior, looks at the charade and says, His mind is gone. But Kicking Bird, the holy man, thinks he understands what the stranger is trying to say, and at last they exchange the word for buffalo in each others languages. These first halting words are the crucial moments in Kevin Costners Dances With Wolves, a film about a white man who goes to live with Indians and learns their civilization at first hand. The dominant American culture was nearsighted, incurious and racist, and saw the Indians as a race of ignorant, thieving savages, fit to be shot on sight. Such attitudes survived until so recently in our society - just look at the B Westerns of the 1940s - that we can only imagine how much worse they were 100 years ago. In a sense, Dances With Wolves is a sentimental fantasy, a what if movie that imagines a world in which whites were genuinely interested in learning about a Native American culture that lived more closely in harmony with the natural world than any other before or since. But our knowledge of how things turned out - of how the Indians were driven from their lands by genocide and theft - casts a sad shadow over everything. It has the epic sweep and clarity of a Western by John Ford, and it abandons the contrivances of ordinary plotting to look, in detail, at the way strangers get to know one another. The film is seen from the point of view of Dunbar Costner, a lieutenant in the Union Army, who runs away from a field hospital as his foot is about to be amputated, and invites death by riding his horse in a suicidal charge at the Confederate lines. When he miraculously survives, he is decorated and given his choice of any posting, and he chooses the frontier, because I want to see it before its gone. He draws an isolated outpost in the Dakotas, where he is the only white man for miles around.
Dunbar possesses the one quality he needs to cut through the entrenched racism of his time: He is able to look another man in the eye, and see the man, rather than his attitudes about the man. The Indians know the white man is coming, and they want to learn more about his plans. They have seen other invaders in these parts: the Spanish, the Mexicans, but they always left. They want Dunbar to share his knowledge, but at first he holds back. And when he finally tells how many whites will be coming As many as the stars in the sky, the words fall like a death knell. One day they bring along Stands With a Fist Mary McDonnell, a white woman who as a girl came to live with the tribe after her family was killed. With a translator, progress is quicker, until one day Dunbar comes to live with the tribe, and is eventually given the name Dances With Wolves. There are some of the plot points we would expect in a story like this. But all is done with an eye to detail, with a respect for tradition, and with a certain sweetness of disposition.
Costner and his cinematographer, Dean Semler, are especially gifted at explaining things visually. Many of their most important points are made with a glance, a closeup, a detail shot. In 1985, before he was a star, Costner played a featured role in a good Western called Silverado simply because he wanted to be in a Western. Now he has realized his dream again by making one of the best Westerns Ive seen. The movie makes amends, of a sort, for hundreds of racist and small-minded Westerns that went before it. By allowing the Sioux to speak in their own tongue, by entering their villages and observing their ways, it sees them as people, not as whooping savages in the sights of an Army rifle. Dunbar Kevin Costner Stands with a Fist Mary McDonnell Kicking Bird Graham Greene Wind in His Hair Rodney A. Grant Ten Bears Floyd Red Crow Westerman Black Shawl Tantoo Cardinal Christine Annie Costner Orion Pictures presents a film directed by Kevin Costner. Screenplay by Michael Blake, based on his novel Dances With Wolves.
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