TELEVISION REVIEW | Well acted HBO film is gloomy, plods at times

May 25, 2007
BY DOUG ELFMAN Television Critic

'Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee" is rooted historically, so no surprise twists come in the HBO movie. America's genocide of Indians is its most shameful crime, so as a viewer you really only wonder in which ways Indians will die.

It's based on the hefty 1970 book, but it smartly, narrowly focuses on three men who represent the American Indian experience at the close of the 19th century. "Bury My Heart" approaches them quite fairly.

There's Sitting Bull, who fights to the bitter end, until all other Indians have surrendered and settled on reservations, where they starve and die of bullets and disease.

Sitting Bull (August Schellenberg) isn't just glorified as a legend. He's too proud and makes questionable claims, as Sitting Bull really did.

Henry Dawes is a Republican who offers money and land to convince Indians to succumb lest they should be further brutalized; regardless, Indians are slain.

Dawes isn't cardboard evil. Mostly quietly, Aidan Quinn plays him as a flawed soul with half-decent intentions.

In between these two men is Charles Eastman, an Indian raised by whites who becomes a doctor for the tribes. Eastman (Adam Beach), husband of poet Elaine Goodale (Anna Paquin), is a man of two races, and a man without a race.

The film is well-plotted and acted, though moderate in technique. The aesthetic is mainstream cinema, with sweeping violins and obvious camera shots. It can seem plodding, romantically doomed and always gloomy. Not bad, not great.

It would make for a good film for teachers and parents to show kids, and I don't mean that as a put-down. In college, I probably would have enjoyed it in lit class when we studied Chief Joseph's surrender speech:

"I am tired of fighting. Our chiefs are killed. ... I want to have time to look for my children, and see how many of them I can find. Maybe I shall find them among the dead. Hear me, my chiefs! I am tired. My heart is sick and sad. From where the sun now stands I will fight no more forever."

Missing in my classrooms but humanely covered in "Bury" are daily horrors: forced to be Christian, to take a "Christian name," to witness loved ones slaughtered, and to assimilate or die in America, for we are the land of the "free."

delfman@suntimes.com