THE EDUCATION OF LITTLE TREE A film review by Steve Rhodes Copyright 1998 Steve Rhodes
RATING (0 TO ****): ***
For the second time in two days, we were fortunate to be able to see an excellent family film that is playing in highly limited distribution in short runs around the country. And this film was that rarest of such movies, the serious drama, where it is people and not some cute animals that are in grave danger.
As THE EDUCATION OF LITTLE TREE opens, an 8-year-old orphan boy named Little Tree has gone to live with his grandparents. His grandma, played with compassion by Tantoo Cardinal, is a full-blooded Cherokee. As the grandpa, James Cromwell, made famous by BABE and seen more recently in L.A. CONFIDENTIAL, gives an understated and deeply moving performance. Grandpa is a white man who, having adopted the ways of the Cherokee, now considers himself one. Joseph Ashton plays Little Tree with a compelling earnestness. The bond between Little Tree and his grandpa is as strong as you are likely to see. Moreover, the genuine chemistry between all three of them is bursting with love. (As part Cherokee myself, like Little Tree from my paternal grandmother, the film had special meaning for me. And even more so given my son is Little Tree's age.)
Set in a remote cabin in the Great Smoky Mountains, the movie is handsomely filmed by Anastas N. Michos, normally a camera operator, in his first time as a cinematographer. Mark Isham's music relies heavily on the fiddle and the dulcimer to evoke the hillbilly spirit of the backwoods in the 1930s.
Little Tree's education isn't a lot of book learning, although his grandmother does teach him such "useful" words as aardvark, which his grandfather ridicules. Little Tree learns, instead, enormous lessons about life.
The beauty of the story is its lack of sanitization, normally prevalent in kids' movies. The grandpa doesn't have some uplifting job. Instead, he has a whiskey still hidden deep in the woods, and part of the story concerns his concealment of it from the revenuers. Grandpa is even given to cussing a little, as grandpas will, especially backwoods ones. Not that grandma approves, of course. She lectures her husband, and it almost sticks.
Graham Greene from DANCES WITH WOLVES plays the family friend Willow John. In front of a roaring fire, Willow John relates the woeful story known as the "Trail of Tears." With big eyes, Little Tree absorbs every word of it.
A stringy haired blonde girl about Little Tree's age, who is too poor to afford shoes, spouts racist dogma to him that she's learned from her tobacco sharecropper father. "Injuns is lazy and don't work none," she tells him, matter-of-factly, not even realizing the sting of her insult. Actually, most of the whites treat them like lepers.
As adapted by the director Richard Friedenberg from Forrest Carter's book, the flaw of the story, to the extent that it has one, is that it does become a bit preachy at times. But if it does rant a bit, its heart is in a good place, and the polemics are fairly mild.
The story tosses in some humor with the funniest scene occurring during a fundamentalist church meeting. As one woman starts to confess the sin of fornication, several of the young bucks in the congregation pull their hats over their heads and beat a fast exit out the back door, lest they be identified as co-conspirators.
Full of the tragedies of the time, we see that adults, albeit not Little Tree's grandparents, felt it perfectly appropriate to hit kids over the head with canes and to whip them with belt buckles. This bit of Americana is rarely shown anymore in the cinema.
When a couple of do-gooders show up with legal papers to take Little Tree away to a Dickensian-style school that functions as a prison but is known as an Indian School, the grandparents wait in line to get some legal advice. The country lawyer takes their fifty-cent piece, but offers them no hope going against the big federal government bureaucrats.
In a rapid descent into hell for the sweet little boy, Little Tree finds himself locked up and given a proper American name, Joshua, chosen from a book at the Indian School. ("Americans don't name children after objects," the headmaster curtly explains to him.)
With a clear opportunity to stop at a classic feel-good point, the story plows on and shuns the easy ending. The one it chooses left me literally in tears, and yet it is so beautifully done and so hopeful for the future that I left the theater feeling an inner peace.
THE EDUCATION OF LITTLE TREE runs 1:52. It is rated PG for language and thematic elements including "old fashioned" discipline and would be fine for kids around 9 and up.
My son Jeffrey, almost 9, thought the show was okay, but a little too sad. (The film provided a perfect springboard for my father, who accompanied us, to discuss his feelings about the movie and his heritage with Jeffrey, who during the film was clearly touched by it.)
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