Smoke Signals (1998)

reviewed by
Cheng-Jih Chen


"Smoke Signals" is one of those small movies I may not have seen on my own. There was the potential dopiness factor ("the first film made by Native Americans" or something like that). The expectation of a more mediocre "Boyz in the Hood" would have been high: overblown praise for a film about an ethnic group, made by someone from that ethnic group, simply for those facts and not because it's a remarkable movie. White liberal guilt as a marketing tactic.

[Speaking of Native Americans and spin aimed right at white liberal guilt, I recall the fur industry taking up the tactic of using Eskimos to go and hunt seals for fur. Traditional lifestyle, it was called, even though seals had not been hunted in such numbers and solely for fur. In white liberal guilt terms, this caused a short circuit kind of like the ones you see in bad science fiction, where the all-knowing computer is defeated by the hero posing an unanswerable question. "Does not compute" and all that because of "fur or traditional lifestyles". It was supposed to have been one of the reasons for fur's revival in the past few years. But I think I saw the article in the New Republic. For all I know, Stephen Glass wrote it.]

Anyway, "Smoke Signals" is based on the collection of short stories, "The Long Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven," by Sherman Alexie, who also did the screenplay for the movie. The book was recommended to me a number of times, but I never got around to reading it. I'll pick it up in the near future after seeing the film.

It's a good film, funny and humane. The basic story is of the main characters traveling from Idaho to Arizona to retrieve the body of one their fathers. He had left home a decade before, leaving behind his wife and 12-year old son. The son, of course, had not been reconciled his father's departure. The movie is a road movie and a father-son-relationship movie (one that, refreshingly, doesn't involve being lost in space or dinosaurs to work out the conflict). It uses universal themes, textured with Indian reservation culture to give it context and place.

Reservation culture, despite the film's advanced billing, is not shoved in your face. Yes, the film shows the culture's quirks and peculiarities, its humor and tragedy, but it does not call attention to itself. It's simply there.

There are nice scenes illustrating the characters reactions to America's perception of Native Americans in general. They are conscious of it, but look at it with unforced humor. The film itself is an attempt to recast this image, but it does it without straying into the New Age goo you see strewn all over "Dances With Wolves" like buffalo droppings. It is conscious of the image, but realizes that it has to deal with the living in the present.

Most of the film proceeds nicely, feeling much like, say, a Jarmusch film, but it breaks down somewhat about fifteen minutes before the end. There is a crisis in which one of the characters has to run 20 miles for help. The run is very abrupt, and, apparently during his marathon, he is magically reconciled with his father. How this happens is clouded in mystery: we see him running in the desert night, intercut with scenes of fire. There's a voice over, replaying things said earlier in the film. At the end of the run, all is happy. Perhaps he went on a Spirit Quest. Arguably, if engaging in a lot of cardiovascular activity results in a mystical voyage of inner discovery, I may someday discover the meaning of life while on the exercise bike (in the meantime, I have wacky ideas like, hey, hook me up to a Gilligan's Island-style bike-powered generator, and I can power my halogen lamp for ten minutes). Beyond this glich, this is a good movie, and should be appearing at the local art house in the near future.

"The court determined that Fox TV does not impede free and fair competition in the teen-angst soap-com genre, therefore Party of Five need not be broken into five 'Parties of One,' one being distributed to each of the other networks."

-- "The court determined that Fox TV does not impede free and fair competition in the teen-angst soap-com genre, therefore Party of Five need not be broken into five 'Parties of One,' one being distributed to each of the other networks."


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