Customer Reviews

The Business of Fancydancing [VHS]

5 star:		(14)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

Although the pacing is choppy, "The Business of Fancydancing" is haunting and powerful. Successful poet Seymour Polatkin returns to his rez for a friend's funeral and faces harsh criticism for the way he used his people for his subjects, then abandoned them. Evan Adams as Seymour is humorous, sly, confused, and finally shattered by his choices. Strong performances by Gene Tagaban as Aristotle Joseph, who serves as Seymour's conscience, and Swil Kanim as Mouse, the mocking, witty friend who dies. He's also a superb violinist. Michele St. John shines as Seymour's early love interest and indigenous singer who has chosen to live on the rez.
Alexie mocks himself as he poses the question, "What's it like when you talk and white people listen?"
I recommend this film to anyone who wants to understand cultural disjointedness and search for self-identity.

The first key is to first face the issues. Before you can do that you must admit these issues exist. Sherman helps bring these issues up front, in your face. I find in talking to people about this film, the ones that do NOT like it are homophobics. People also have a hard time watching two Indians beat up a white guy. But these things happen every day. We are not painted red men sitting on a pony. We are all human, and Sherman shows us in all our glory, pettiness, anger, desperation, and most private moments.
The interviewer was the woman I didn't like. I didn't "get" her purpose. In talking to my girlfriend she said we're not supposed to like her, that my girlfriend has seen white people talking to me in this manner. The interviewer is every non-Indian that wants to put the Indian in their place. Knowing this helps when you watch the movie.
I find Gene, Evan, Swil and Michelle breaking all the stereotypes. They are mixed blood, they are gay, they are recovering alcoholics, they are amazing musicians, teachers, and you want to love them for all they are and all they are not.

Poetically intriguing! I am sure Alexie will be criticized for showing the ugly side of reservation life along with the beauty, but this film sticks with you. It addresses all the angles. It shows the intra-tribal prejudice that happens when someone leaves the rez and becomes successful, and the ones who could have, but chose not to. The images of childhood innocence woven with gasoline huffing and Lysol sandwiches are sad and beautiful at the same time. The great dialog, Alexie's writing, great casting and cinematography make this all around good. It has more "meat" than Smoke Signals, I highly recommended it.

It will probably be little known to many white folks who haven't spent a fair amount of time amongst the Native population or else on its fringes, but these depictions are pretty much mainstream. The way imagination, dream, and thoughts blend seamlessly with the "real-word" of flesh and stone, is telling, but closer to the intense world view that is here for the waking and dreaming.

The musical creativity was perfectly astounding, both the writing and performances/improvisations, ditto the sound editing, photography, and film editing. And the director used real people rather than trained actors - their stories thus meshed in a genuine way, exposing real native issues without even a hint of sugar-coating.

Some reviewers felt it was choppy - I experienced it as smooth. Sometimes the poetry was a bit unappealing, but that was, after all, part of what gave teeth to the story. The [perceived choppiness] might have been a response as part of the actuality of the rez experience and the "Indian' world view, along with the social interactivity of the personalities of Aristotle, Seymour, Mouse, and the rest. It's clearly not a defect of the screenwriting or the direction of the film. The film has a wonderful pace and rhythm throughout.

Yes, the content is intentionally disturbing - then again maybe not intentionally - in the sense that it's not a contrivance, it doesn't come off that way. It's more the way things could/would naturally move and develop given the circumstances - there's nothing even remotely implausible here.

An unstated theme is the way the scenes seem to reel around - so much like the experience of fancy dancing. This style of powwow dancing/costuming that was at its height around the time the principals in this story would have been coming of age. (Currently - grass dancing for boys and young men, and jingle dancing for girls and young women - are the newer, more prevalent styles). And we can't forget one of the fiddle pieces Mouse intermittently plays (along with the classical and emotionally wrenching distillations of powwow or medicine songs) - it sounds like a reel to me, maybe even the famous Virginia Reel. In a most essential way, the collection of intermittent fancy dance sequences and related songs and recitations - always filmed in darkness, as if in an imaginative sphere/space - this is an underlying modus operandi of the story and of its depiction.

Mouse's violin improvisations are a wonder to behold. Some of the imaginative sequences with him and Seymour or Aristotle were brilliant cross-cultural and/or intensely revealing re-inventions of the traditional native performance practices. And there is some of the best improvisational-style singing I have heard in any genre - even to the point of surpassing many of the better flamenco singers.

Aristotle [in both his singing and his acting] was particularly skillful at portraying every emotional nuance, from searing intensity to the subtle, profoundly spiritual - such that the experiences depicted may be felt to jump right out from the screen and to swirl around the viewer. And it's part of who the actor is depicting that he is totally fluid - uncanny, almost unpredictable in the way he moves from one state to the next - a thorough master like Coyote [the trickster god/goddess], and never ever unconvincing.

And finally - to the credit of the project as a whole, special effects are never overly blatant, which is the way one should proceed when glimpsing this culture where everything is as it seems. (Yeah right, there's always something seething just beneath the surface, just before the next event is to occur.) This is not one person's story, but is rather a collection of anecdotal knowledge, visionary gleanings, where oftentimes one person's dream fades into another's reality, and wondering are they the same?

There are some astounding depictions of shared experiences of two or more people, more candid and potent than the average well-scrubbed Hollywood actors ever come close to reaching into. Witness the brief love scenes; and one of the deleted scenes, where Aristotle and Mouse's blonde ex-girlfriend are having a long conversation - call it a confrontation.

And when the women sing, solo or in pairs/ensembles!!!!!!

Sherman Alexie, one of my favorite writers, wrote and directed a brilliant debut. The performances are moving and beautiful, and at the same time haunting. Alexie directed this like a composer would a beautiful, tragic suite. I found myself laughing and crying, and also thinking about the universal concept of identity while watching this film. It doesn't matter if you are from the Rez, or from NYC. Returning to your home after breaking away is hard for all of us--especially if rejection is inevitable.

I think this is definitely a groundbreaking film. I don't say this simply because Alexie is a Native writer, filmmaker, producer and director. I say this because the film is a brilliant examination of the human condition, done in an unaffected, realistic and straightforward way. What are we left with when we stand at the crossroads between two identities and cultures? Can we ever go back home?

When I first started watching this film, I was not totally engaged in its early minutes and I wondered if I had bought a loser. This is the kind of movie that has to be watched from start to finish. There are so many messages in this movie and the Native American messenger carries messages for almost everyone who lives, breathes, and is human. Life on today's reservations, be it the Spokane or Pine Ridge in South Dakota is one of the America's dirty little secrets. Reservation residents don't live very long, do battle with alcoholism and die from depression, hopelessness and sorrow every day. Harsh truths that few people know about. In this movie we see the struggles of those who manage to leave the reservations, those that stay and those that try to return. Leaving the reservation is only part of the battle, living in the outside world is still tough and Seymour, the lead in this movie, is gay on top of all else. This is a powerful, powerful movie and some people won't want to hear what it has to say.

Michelle St. John gives a wonderful performance as a young woman of both white and native heritage. Another struggle as she returns to her native roots and environment. Michelle should sing more. She has an incredible voice, and an incredible, emotional delivery. Her music and that of Swil Kanim, the violinist, Mouse...are wonderful.

...buy the movie, buy the CD...its all good.

Another exquisite piece of art from Sherman Alexie. This movie is more poetic than Smoke Signals, while oddly enough being less symbolic. In this one Alexie shows what it's like to have made some of the choices he has, and acknowledges some of the things he's had to leave behind.

It's about accepting what can be and what can't, what is and what isn't, and living with the difference.

The movie wants to say something to you and you can get it because Alexie knows how to communicate ideas in words and pictures. You have to listen, though. The amusing and light-hearted additional commentary between Alexie and actor Evan Adams is informative and entertaining. I like both these guys, even after listening to them talk about their movie and the choices they made putting it together.

The clue is in the title: "The business of fancydancing." Who would have thought an Indian (Alexie) would point out to everyone that Indian fancydancing (as well as poetry, the craft of the hero of the movie) is a "business." Likewise film making, I assume.

For a long time I've believed Alexie should have had the Putlizer Prize simply for his title "The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fist Fight in Heaven." Those nine words say more than the majority of full-length novels, but I suppose Alexie can make a combination of words like that happen because he is first a poet. He's a poet in this movie too.

It's exquisite.

I'm a middle aged white woman who loves Alexie's work so I was excited to buy this movie. Although it is rough in places, overall it is a good effort. Alexie can be confrontational, and this semi-autobiographical film does not romaticize Indians nor does it sugar coat their lives. I found parts of it hard to watch, but we members of the majority culture need this slap in the face. Alexie wanted to make his own film and quickly discovered that if he was going to work with Hollywood to do it, he would have to make compromises. Instead, he decided to totally finance, write and direct it himself, use local Seattle actors and crew, and shoot it digitally. The result is definitely not mainstream cinema, and not even indie cinema, but something more in the vein of Dogme. This is not a happy film, but definitely a worthwhile and powerful experience.

This film is worth seeing--for one thing, as others have mentioned, Evan Adams is fabulous, and the portrait of Polatkin's ambivalent struggle to reconcile his ambition with his heritage is a moving one. The poems are also fun, although some of them--like the one Polatkin recites for his white lover in the bathtub, which echoes poems by Alexie about a white lover--are presented as being glib and insincere, as though Alexie were mocking himself. That for me was the heart of the problem with this movie. I never really felt absolutely in tune with it, because it seemed like the movie was trying to distance us from Polatkin, to mock his ambition and self-centeredness, at the same time that it was trying to get us to identify with him. For me the most moving scene is the one in which Polatkin tells the interviewer the story of his sister's death and how the following Christmas he received a dictionary, along with his mother's admonition to use it to get off the rez. The scene concludes with Polatkin telling the interviewer "So don't tell me what I can write about" or who or what I should be, or something to that effect. This to me was the emotional crux of the movie. It wasn't about Mouse, or why Mouse died, or Aristotle. It was Alexie saying, My pain is my pain and I have the right to say what I want to say and to be who I am. But then the other characters are just there as props, and Polatkin's gayness is a metaphor for the bicultural bind of the literate Indian, not a genuine attempt to flesh out a portrait of a gay Native character. Something about that doesn't sit right with me. And the way the relationship between Polatkin and his white lover is portrayed is also offensive. Even the sensuality between them seems forced, put on, even though Adams reeks of sexy through the whole film.(It's funny to see how hot he can be, after his performance as the ever geeky Thomas in Smoke Signals.) But the relationship between the two men is shown to be one between 2 very self-centered, unsympathetic people, and that's a turnoff for me, in life as in film.

I may have watched this movie 5 or 6 times. Every time, I see more references, more allusions, and I intend to continue watching it. Here is a list of my impressions.

Fancydancing as a euphemism for the pressures of trying to keep hopping through life in time to the accelerating beat while staying on your toes, no misteps allowed, and when the music suddenly stops, you must also stop, or lose. Trained to stop on red, or to hold oneself back, whether anyone is there to enforce it or not, or whether they have the means to keep going or not. The white girlfriend of Mouse who has run to the Rez to hide, and speaks more like someone on the Rez than does Seymour, is more a part of the community than he. The graininess of many of the Rez scenes contrasting with the ethereal quality of those in the city. Gallows humor, and the most realistic funeral I've ever seen on film. I love the interview sections, representing a distillation of the outside (read: non-Native, literary, academic, etc.) critique he has received, and his reply, so I differ from another reviewer on that. And then it gives me goosebumps to watch Swill Kanim in the Lysol sandwich scene.

Of course there is more, but these are what most come to mind. This is a movie for people who like to think and feel.