**1/2 (out of ****)
Starring Dustin Hoffman, Chief Dan George, Faye Dunaway, and Martin Balsam
Directed by Arthur Penn & written by Calder Willingham, from the novel by Thomas Berger
1970
139 min PG13
Something�s missing in director Arthur Penn�s (�Bonnie and Clyde�) magnificently staged anti-Western. Maybe it�s that Penn is crushed under the weight of his own production�too serious and dour in what is essentially a satirical fable. Maybe it�s just that I don�t like �holy fool� stories; you know, where you have the jester who ends up wiser than you and speaking down to you. It�s a hard trick to pull off and, amazingly, Dustin Hoffman fails. He�s one of my favorite actors, but by the end of �Little Big Man� he just comes across as smug. Think that look of calm, shit-eating self-satisfaction that Tobey Maguire has at the end of �The Cider House Rules,� although �Little Big Man� doesn�t grate nearly as much.
Anyway, the movie follows the life of an Old West Candide (Hoffman), perpetually switching between life as a settler and life as a Native American, and mostly failing at both. He tries being a brave, a gunfighter, a drunk, religious, a shopkeeper, a scout, and so on and so forth, without much contemplation. Intellectually I appreciated how the movie skewered so many conventions of the Western: the Indians talk good but the invaders talk like goofballs (Hoffman�s settler talk is a bit too much) and Wild Bill Hickok dies a sloppy death.
But, at the same time, I kept thinking, so what? Penn�s hand is heavier than it ought to be and his targets�is there anything more tedious than �religion as hypocrisy?��are often obvious. Life as a Cheyenne is almost certainly more fulfilling, honest, and moral than life as an 1870s settler, but the way �Little Big Man� beats us over the head with how Cheyenne culture is 100% superior to white culture in every single respect is dramatically uninteresting. This may be what Pauline Kael means when she describes her experience of �Little Big Man� this way: �long before Custer�s Last Stand you�ve heard the little click in your brain that says, �Enough.�� Compare this to Nicolas Roeg�s much more involved and compelling �Walkabout,� his �compare �n contrast� between Australians and Aborigines.
Maybe in 1970 it really was enough to show expansionism negatively and to see the �winning� of the West from a view that, if it isn�t truly Indian, then is it at least a white guy who spends a lot of time with Indians. Which I suppose is the best you can expect from Hollywood. Still, I got pretty sick of the words �the white man� after 2 � hours.
Finished Wednesday, November 16th, 2005
Copyright � 2005 Friday & Saturday Night
Back to home.