jonie v.

At cost of risking the authorial fallacy, I'll say that I took this film to be autobiographical. One advantage of having a talented writer do a film about a talented writer is that, when the protagonist reads his writing, you don't cringe (we should also have first-rate musicians write the score in movies about fictional musicians). In "The Business of Fancydancing" the writing is gorgeous and is what gives the film substance and shining power. Seymour Polatkin/Sherman Alexie's poetry makes up the bulk of the screenplay, whether in the form of actual poems (read by the protagonist or other characters, printed on still frames, or rendered in song), or as part of the dialogue. The film is non-linear and non-realistic: people don't always speak like real people and events don't follow one another in chronological fashion. But Alexie is brutally honest in his portrayal of the truth of his characters, and the film finally feels much more authentic than most made-to-look-realistic, traditional movies. It is one of the paradoxes of fiction that realism is frequently better achieved through non-realistic means.

"Fancydancing" is a wrenching and angry movie about identity, belonging, and race. Leading one's life as a Native American is clearly no easy job, and Alexie takes a very unsentimental look at the ordeals and dilemmas that come with a Native heritage. His characters are not especially likeable, and all make questionable choices. As Alexie makes clear, however, there are no "right" choices. Whether you stay or go, conform or depart, life's going to getcha and people are going to be mad at you.

The poetry beautifully depicts the pain of this dilemma while at the same time showing the redemption that comes with living the dilemma, sticking with it, not giving in. The images are occasionally hokey, and some sequences could have been cut without any loss to the overall effect of the film. But this is a brave film with a brave, unsparing vision, and it deserves a wide viewership.

It is an ever-fresh source of astonishment to me to see how much this world forgives men (as opposed to, you know, women). They'll craft an overblown, self-indulgent, and absolutely crass piece of work like `Mystic River,' and immediately the critics will outdo each other with praise filled with enough high-sounding adjectives to generate a thesaurus of their own. But let a woman make a meaningful, intelligent film about women and men, or, god forbid, only women, and she'll be immediately attacked with the narrow gamut of vocab reserved for `chick flicks.' It makes you really, really sad.

I actually went to metacritic.com and read me the stellar reviews written by our major movie critics for `Mystic River.' Having seen the film last night, and having being variously puzzled, irritated, bored, and enraged by it, I had to see for myself what the critics saw in it that was so wonderful. Answer: you won't find out from the reviews. The above-mentioned critics are so busy telling us what a masterful director Eastwood and masterful actor Sean Penn are, and what masterful acting the director elicited from Tim Robbins, Kevin Bacon, Marcia Gay Harden and Laura Linney, that they forget to give us a, you know, reading of the film (which you thought movie criticism was all about). But hey, this is Oscar material, what can you do? Gotta be handled with kid gloves.

So, since I have no Oscar-related obligations whatsoever, let me give you my reading of the film. Guys, meaning men, meaning white men, are very fragile and very fierce creatures. They are tough and powerful and all that, but when you hurt them, when you really hurt them, they thrash around in agony like wounded lions and bring a lot of destruction and self-destruction around them. Since, however, this is the majesty of the white male human animal, one can only look on in awe and marvel and terror. The enormity of the white male condition is such that criticism is really beyond the point. In `Mystic River,' men hurt, god they hurt, but they also rage, and Eastwood, not one to pull back when it comes to marveling at the majesty of the WMHA, shows the two emotions battle each other as if such battle were a true-blue epic. Beyond epic: as if it were metaphysics and existentialism and fate and cosmic law rolled into one. Heck, he even wrote his own gloomy score to accompany the drama of it all! So you see what I mean when I say that men are forgiven a whole lot in this world. Because this stuff, all metaphysics and epic aside, is as boring as s***. And I mean it, from the bottom of my heart.

Oscar Prediction: Best Director (Eastwood) and Best Actor (Penn) for this lousy film.