The Business of Fancydancing (2002)

Business of Life

The picture of Rez Indian is totally brought to the forefront of the viewer in this video. The manner in which the content is presented, makes the viewer become part of it and its information. There are no comments to say that this is what should be done...only what exists. Basically, the story is real, the characters are real, because the subject matter is real! June 29, 2008

This movie shows us that Native Americans can be just as

whiney and obnoxious as the rest of us. We can't fix the past, so face the future without making the same mistakes. April 8, 2008

Straight from the heart

I was very impressed by this film. Every element - script, acting, directing, editing - resulted in a disarmingly fresh and courageous story. No artifice here! February 23, 2008

Aboriginal Sanctuary

Northwest author, director, poet, producer, activist, and humorist Sherman Alexie gathered a group of his friends together and they "made a movie" or they almost did. Falling a little short of the mark of a polished and finished film, nevertheless this movie gives us a series of tableaus that are both striking and emotionally charged, challenging us to "understand" our Indian brothers. This lovely and sad picture tackles many of Alexie's favorite themes, like life on the Rez, substance abuse, racism, native heritage and coveting of the "old ways", a child's eye view of parental alcoholism, struggle for meaning in an ignorant and non-caring world, and the driving need some Indians have to return to the Rez, to "make a difference", juxtaposed to the pulsating need others have to stay away, to build new lives amongst the white eyes; and something new -sexuality.

Evan Adams, long identified as Thomas Builds-the-Fire from that excellent Alexie adaptation, SMOKE SIGNALS (1998), stretched his creative impulses to portray Seymour Polatkin -who was a very successful gay poet, and who happened to live with a paleface "life partner". "In the before time," Seymour tells his book store audience, "Homosexuals were completely accepted by other Indians, treated as special, like the crazy ones, or the disabled; cherished and protected. Homophobia was something Indians had to learn from the white men." That, I suppose, and firewater. Evans, as an actor, is right up front about his own homosexuality, so the character of Seymour is an interesting mix if Alexie and himself; heartfelt and accurate, like a sound thump between the eyes.

Alexie has been criticized for "revealing" too much angst, pain, and sorrow relative to his kin's alcoholism, and his own -illuminating the substance abuse that runs rabid and rampant through all of the Indian nations. His character in FANCYDANCING, Mouse, dies of an overdose. He contends that he is simply writing from his actual experience, from his life -that he "speaks the whole truth" regardless of the literary and symbolic consequences. I support and would defend his artistic license for introspection. Reading his poetry, novels, essays, and narratives is like taking a crash course in "Indianism"--and that is spoken like a honest-to-God Indian Wannabe, I remind myself painfully.

Evan Adams is extremely effective as Polatkin the conflicted gay poet, the butt warrior estranged from the Spokane Rez, who is pulled back for his cousin's funeral. Alexie enjoyed himself with the casting, spraying the mix with diverse ethnicity. Adams, who is a full-blooded Indian, looks very Asian in the role. Michelle St. John, wonderful as Agnes, the school teacher who returned to the reservation is half Jewish. Gene Tagaban, playing the volatile Aristotle Joseph, looked every inch the stoic archetypical Indian, great sweeping long black locks, fairly tall, muscular, looked great in buckskin, with that great Injun "profile", actually is half Pilipino. Swil Kanim, who played the fiddler Mouse, looked more Cajun than Spokane, and grew facial hair like an Arab. .

For some odd reason this interesting Independent film after it worked the Festival Circuit, winning a few awards, just dropped out of sight and was never widely distributed. I have a friend who was in it, and he brought it to my attention. Thank God there is a DVD of it. For Sherman Alexie fans, it is a must see, and for the rest of folks -give yourselves a tasty treat and sit down for this 103 minutes of film, and it will "move" you.
November 20, 2007

Worth seeing, but . . .

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. October 27, 2007

More reviews at Amazon.com ...