Dances with Wolves (USA, 1990)
Directed by Kevin Costner
Starring Kevin Costner, Mary McDonnell, Graham Greene, Rodney A. Grant

It may be a clichéd complaint, but more often than not the Academy has got the Best Picture Oscar dead wrong. Sometimes, as with Crash, their mistake is obvious and the outcry is instant; on other occasions, as with Citizen Kane, both the Academy and the public have taken time to see the error of their ways. And then we have Dances with Wolves, which beat Goodfellas to the big gong to deny Martin Scorsese his Oscar for a third time. While not as crass a mistake as the others, time has not been kind to Kevin Costner's debut, which now seems long on principle but short on actual story.The obvious way to prey on Dances with Wolves would be to attack Costner's subsequent career. His later efforts behind the camera have left a lot to be desired, with Waterworld running hugely over budget and The Postman being the dictionary definition of tedious. His acting style and drawling delivery suggest a man who takes himself far too seriously, rivalling only Nicolas Cage for stony-faced absurdity. But a quick glance at his back catalogue reveals a slightly more complicated picture. Lest we forget, Costner was once an admired and popular actor, who acquitted himself perfectly well in No Way Out, The Untouchables and Field of Dreams. And for all the gaping flaws in his directorial efforts, you could never accuse him of going in with anything but the very best intentions.The most obvious quality of Dances with Wolves is that it is very even-handed towards its subject matter. It approaches the relationship between Native Americans and American soldiers with the same restraint and intelligence that Clint Eastwood applied to the subject of revenge in Unforgiven. There has clearly been a lot of effort expended by Costner and the writer Michael Blake to get away from the clichéd depiction of Native Americans as a backward, violent people, who deserved everything they got from the brave, civilised white men driving them off the land in the name of God and Progress.You also have to applaud Costner's ambition as a director. There are few actors, let alone big stars, who would have taken on such a big project first time out. Costner was shooting in mostly external locations for four months, including several elaborate sequences with hundreds of real horses and buffalo. His commitment was such that he nearly broke his back from doing his own stunts, and stumped up over $3m of his own money to cover the costs incurred by bad weather. Costner was prepared to take risks with Dances with Wolves, and that deserves praise regardless of whether the film works or not.A further point of admiration comes in Costner's decision to have much of the dialogue spoken in the Lakota language. The fact that the film grossed more than $400m worldwide, and $184m domestically, is a massive raspberry to the notion that Western audiences won't pay to watch films that aren't in the English language. But it also proves that the respect for the different cultures within the film is genuine, not just a device for boosting Costner's artistic standing. This remains the case even after Russell Means pointed out the flawed translations, which left all the men in the film speaking in the female Sioux dialect.In terms of the admiration it generates, Dances with Wolves is in the same league as Battle of Britain in terms of pure good will. But like Battle of Britain, this admiration does not guarantee good drama, and little by little Costner's film begins to look earnest to the point of being dul. It ends up stuck halfway between Unforgiven and Heaven's Gate, being neither as gripping nor elegiac as the former, nor as wretchedly pretentious as the latter. It never becomes as well-meaningly dull as Battle of Britain, but its flaws in terms of pacing and emotion cannot help but prey on our minds.The first 45 minutes of Dances with Wolves are very slow and very portentous. Costner is clearly pulling out all the stops to make us admire and believe in the character of John Dunbar, but he ends up both trying too hard and not enough. The opening battle sequence features Costner attempting suicide by riding straight at the Confederate front line with his arms held out in a messianic pose - a decision which results in sniggers or sneers rather than feelings of empathy. In the various scenes that follow, where Dunbar is sent out to the frontier, too much effort is expended trying to express his bravery and not enough made on showing him as a rounded human being.When I reviewed (500) Days of Summer, I argued that the presence of a narrator in any kind of film creates an element of certainty which can sometimes work against dramatic tension. In the case of Dances with Wolves, one could argue it is necessary since the diary is integral to the later stages of the plot. But while it is partially justified on a narrative level, Costner's delivery of it is frankly third-rate. His readings feel rushed and increasingly desperate, as he tries to convey the gravity of the situation without much success.The narration aside, there is precious little about Dances with Wolves which is rushed. At just over 3 hours long (4 hours in its Director's Cut), comparisons with Heaven's Gate are unavoidable; the project was even nicknamed 'Kevin's Gate' after the production delays were leaked to the press. Costner's film is nowhere near as baggy as Heaven's Gate, let alone as self-serving, but it is every bit as drawn out, especially in its final act. Had Kevin gone through with a pair of scissors and lost even 30 seconds from every scene, it would have made a world of difference.The biggest problem with Dances with Wolves is that it constantly tells us how important the events are without doing enough to show us why this is the case. There are many beautiful or poignant images throughout, from the hundreds of dead buffalo lying on the plains to the couple's departure from the winter camp. But these images don't carry the weight that they should because we haven't invested enough in the characters to make them any more than pretty compositions.The film is so respectful towards the Sioux that it is almost hesitant to scratch the surface and ask the difficult questions about how their society works, such as the relationship between fathers and sons, and the position of women. This is understandable up to a point, considering the negative depiction of Native Americans in Hollywood throughout the 20th century - a fact which, if you believe Marlon Brando, led him to turn down his second Oscar. But you would think that if Costner were brave enough to embark on something of such scale and ambition, the last thing he would be worried about was mildly offending people.Fortunately, the film does pick up after the first 45 minutes and has moments where the action and characters do take flight. Many of these scenes find Costner willing to let his hair down, whether it's dancing with Two Socks around the camp fire or giving audiences a clear view of his naked bottom. It is hard not to get swept up in the chases scene across the plains, diligently matched by John Barry's stirring score. And some of the lighter moments within the camp help us to relax as well; when Dunbar interrupts Kicking Bird's nearby lovemaking, Graham Greene's facial expression says it all.The romantic aspect of Dances with Wolves is well-played for an epic, if only because the central relationship develops at a reasonable rate. We don't get that agonising sensation as in Out of Africa, where we know the characters are meant to kiss and are begging them to get on with it. The scenes of Stands with a Fist interpreting between Dunbar and Kicking Bird are well-played, serving their purpose while conveying the sexual tension between the characters. Their relationship conveys the conflicted identity of the central characters and the possibility of future harmony between the nations.Dances with Wolves is ultimately a very middling film. It's too long to adequately serve its story, but not so long that we lose all patience with it. Its respect for its characters undercuts the drama, but not to the extent that we sit there drifting into a coma. And its direction is uninvolving, but not in an artsy, egotistical way. Calling it an average or ordinary film is to belie Costner's ambition, but any higher praise is impossible in light of its flaws. It remains significant but not stirring, admirable but not engaging, important but not profound.

Rating:
Verdict: Admirable but not always engaging

Battleship Potemkin (USSR, 1925)
Directed by Sergei Eisenstein
Starring Aleksandr Antonov, Vladimir Barsky, Grigori Aleksandrov, Ivan Bobrov

When assessing any classic film, one has a duty to point out any flaws or shortcomings even while accepting whatever historical significance the film holds. While it's pointless to criticise an old film without knowledge of its artistic, social and technological context (in other words, what could and couldn't be done at the time), it's every bit as asinine to go all rose-tinted and claim that someone has great worth purely because of its age.We might admire silent films as a genre, but that does not mean that every silent film is up to the standard of The General. We might acknowledge the contribution that The Birth of a Nation made to the art of editing, but that does not excuse its inherent racism. Likewise, it is possible to admire Battleship Potemkin for its advances in the art of montage and for its spectacular set-pieces. But admiration of either aspect is not enough to excuse its overwrought tone, poor storytelling and its abject failure as a piece of propaganda.Battleship Potemkin could be called the high point of Sergei Eisenstein's first career. Prior to falling out with Joseph Stalin in the late-1920s, the eccentric Soviet filmmaker had won the favour of the Communist Party with his first feature Strike, an episodic recreation of a 1903 strike at a Russian factory. As part of his theory of montage, Eisenstein intercut scenes of factory workers being suppressed with footage of cattle being slaughtered, using unrelated images to generate an emotional response. The film impressed Stalin and Eisenstein was commissioned by the Party to make Battleship Potemkin as a follow-up.Both Strike and Battleship Potemkin use a past event in pre-Soviet Russia to illuminate the class struggle of the present. Bolshevism, and the Marxism upon which it was based, rested on the principle that history is based upon struggles between the workers and the bourgeoisie, with the former eventually leading a revolution to overthrow the latter and create a society based upon equality and communal ownership (a rank generalisation, but for these purposes it will suffice). By invoking examples of revolts or struggles which occurred before the Bolsheviks swept to power, Eisenstein would instil in people the idea that they were part of a greater struggle, and that liberty was now within their grasp.There is no denying that Battleship Potemkin deserves credit and admiration on a technical level. While the age and variable quality of surviving prints makes it difficult to judge Eisenstein's visuals, the use of montage has never been replicated to quite the same effect in any other film. We tend to think of montage as an editing technique to denote the passage of time - cutting together scenes of, say, a couple together in various poses or locations to show how long they have been together.Eisenstein's montage, on the other hand, is driven by emotional response: shots of people are intercut in such a way as to provoke a reaction from the crowd. One example of this comes early on, when the crew are arguing about being served maggot-ridden meat. Eisenstein intercuts gruesome shots of the meat with the sailors' faces, to reinforce their degraded state. While the direct practice of Russian montage has been virtually non-existent since the 1950s, Eisenstein's work represents a huge step forward in the language of editing: his use of cutting to convey emotion is as radical as D. W. Griffith's use of panning shots to show battles on a huge scale in The Birth of a Nation.There are also several moments in Battleship Potemkin which are exciting, or at least impressive. The Odessa Steps sequence, depicting a bloody but completely fictitious massacre, has entered the canon of all-time great scenes, and remains without question the best part of the film. The shot of the pram running down the eponymous steps was famously parodied in The Untouchables, which was itself parodied in the third Naked Gun film seven years later. But the scene is also memorable for its shocking moments, from the sight of a young boy being shot to the silent scream of a woman with shattered spectacles, an image which Francis Bacon used as the basis for several of his paintings.So far, then, Battleship Potemkin would seem to be as much of a classic as it has been revered to be. But once we get beyond admiring its technical achievements, or experiencing brief shock at the violent moments, or gaining some small understanding of the context in which it was made, what we are left with is a lot more underwhelming and poorly constructed than its reputation would lead us to believe. Its flaws are not enough to completely turn our hearts, but all the admiration in the world can't make up for them.For starters, the film is thinly written and poorly paced. Silent films relied primarily on physical expression to tell their stories and flesh out characters, since having actors mouth long speeches intercut with lengthy inter-titles would not be dramatically engaging. By using exaggerated movement and meticulous facial expression, the likes of Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin were able to convey in a second what the talkies would need a whole minute to say. This gave silent films an in-built modesty and efficiency, so that when they did run longer than an hour (or two, as Metropolis did), they usually earned the right to do so.Even at 74 minutes, Battleship Potemkin is about three times longer than it needs to be to serve such a simple story. Eisenstein's use of montage may generate a certain amount of emotion, but it has the side effect of dragging out the action long after the point has been made, and made, and made again. Compared to later propaganda works like Triumph of the Will, the point the film makes about class unity and power is insultingly simple, even to an audience who were potentially illiterate and therefore couldn't read inter-titles.While Eisenstein may have the subtlety of a hammer, he lacks the sharp edge of a sickle. There's no point trying to assess Battleship Potemkin in terms of characters, because the point of Soviet propaganda was to instil collective identity and prioritise class unity over the satisfaction of individual wants and needs. Complaining that there is no discernible protagonist, or that the only charismatic character is killed off after 20 minutes, is nothing more than a reflection of our own film discourse; we expect things to be a certain way because we have been taught that that is the only way.Even if we accept this, however, the film is massively overwrought and narratively fanciful. Because this is a propaganda film, it's a waste of time trying to separate fact from fiction, because everything has been dressed up both in the language of Eisenstein's editing and the political views it takes. But even with that level of acceptance, it is frankly ridiculous to believe that the whole fleet would refuse to fire on the Potemkin having been impressed by their bravery. Not only is it a huge anti-climax, it's so out of the blue and illogical that it threatens to undo whatever hard work Eisenstein had done up to that point.Worst of all, Battleship Potemkin fails because it does not cut the mustard as propaganda: it does not do what is says on the tin. Just as all good comedies should make you laugh, and all good horror movies should scare you, so a properly made propaganda film should draw you into the story or ideas so that you are convinced by them, even if only for the moment when the film is playing.Propaganda films are the exception to the rule that you cannot judge a film by its box office. Triumph of the Will worked because it appealed to ordinary men and women, many of whom didn't vote for the Nazis in the first place: it was a hit because, to quote Leni Riefenstahl, it "impressed an audience which was not necessarily interested in politics". Battleship Potemkin, which had all the distribution you could ask for, failed to become a popular hit. This is not because punters in the 1920s were stupid: it is because the film preaches to the converted. The Party's message had become so saturated in popular art and culture that there was no need for anyone in the Soviet Union to see it.Time has not been kind to Battleship Potemkin. Certainly the decision of the Brussels World's Fair to name it the greatest film ever in 1958 looks every bit as foolish as the Academy's decision to give the Best Film Oscar to How Green Was My Valley over Citizen Kane. Its innovations in editing and structure still stand, and as an historical artefact it retains some degree of importance. But otherwise there is precious little to celebrate about it, falling short on an emotional level of both Griffith and Riefenstahl.

Rating:
Verdict: Overwrought and overrated

Carrie (USA, 1976)
Directed by Brian De Palma
Starring Sissy Spacek, Amy Irving, Piper Laurie, Nancy Allen

Like Jaws a year before it, Carrie is one of the great happy accidents in horror cinema. Stephen King almost threw away his debut novel out of artistic frustration, and was only paid $2,500 for the film rights. The production was underfunded by United Artists and its director, Brian De Palma, lacked commercial viability, having had only a modest hit with Obsession. But out of this potential disappointment came an engrossing and terrifying film, one of the best Stephen King adaptations and perhaps the high point of De Palma's career.Like a lot of Stephen King adaptations, there was a relatively small gap between Carrie being published as a novel and the film version being released. The only contemporary production with a shorter turnaround was Christine, which went from a novel in April 1983 to being filmed by John Carpenter that same summer and being released in December. Hence it is difficult to judge how much of the film's success lies in De Palma's direction and how much of it lies in the source material.De Palma's biggest contribution, from a narrative point of view, is to take such a relatively simple premise - a high-school girl with telekinetic powers - and explore it over 90 minutes with precious little in the way of padding. Because Carrie was originally intended as a short story, it has an inbuilt modesty which is absent from It or The Shining. But what it lacks in epic storytelling it, more than makes up for in its thematic depth and the intense believability of its characters.Carrie at its most basic is about the horrors of high school: the bullying, the peer pressure, the feeling of being an outcast and, in an exaggerated way, having to live up to the expectations of one's parents. Its influence can clearly be seen in everything from Michael Lehmann's cult classic Heathers to more mainstream efforts like Mean Girls. The opening sequence in the showers sets up the majority of the girls as school as utterly repulsive. Their rapid-fire, everybody-talks-at-once dialogue is obnoxious for all the right reasons, and their posing, pulchritudinous bodies are in stark contrast to Carrie, who is so gaunt and wiry that you might mistake her for Gollum.Within this context, Carrie's telekinesis represents her burgeoning adolescent rage. It begins as something over which she has very little control, but over the course of the film she learns to focus it and use it sparingly. The film uses telekinesis in the same way that Let The Right One In uses vampirism, as a means of expressing a deep emotional reaction to the world by placing it outside of oneself. But as with the final scenes in Let The Right One In, Carrie's abilities are not entirely within her grasp, and at the prom there is still a question of whether she is controlling her powers or the other way around.Carrie is also about the suffocating influence of religion, and in particular its role in the repression and persecution of women. Carrie's mother is a Christian fundamentalist who believes that menstrual bleeding is an indication of sin. When punishing Carrie she continually recites the phrase "Eve was weak" and forces her daughter to repeat it, to confess to a crime that she has committed simply by being born a woman.The mother, played with abandon by Piper Laurie, is essentially a sadomasochistic character. She derives pleasure in the form of spiritual vindication from both inflicting pain on Carrie and by condemning herself. By believing that all women are cursed and sinful, she is submitting herself and her daughter to a greater will, allowing herself to be punished both alongside her daughter and on her behalf. The deep bond between mother and daughter is paralleled by the bond between sex and spirituality. The mother's gasps as she dies are borderline orgasmic, and she dies in the same pose as the icon of Christ in Carrie's closet.The Biblical connotations of Carrie are not confined to the position of women. Carrie's bleeding is interpreted as not just punishment for her own sins, but for the sins of her mother and father. Towards the end of the film, it is revealed that Margaret White slept with Carrie's father outside of wedlock, the implication being that Carrie is illegitimate. The father left the family, perhaps because of the pregnancy, perhaps because he was intimated by Margaret's personality or her faith. For whatever reason, the mother's guilt for that sin is laid upon Carrie; she implicates her daughter because she cannot face and atone for her own sin.In this sense Carrie is immediately comparable to A Nightmare on Elm Street, which dealt with the theme of the sins of the father in a more surrealistic way. But there are also strong connections with Suspiria, Dario Argento's giallo masterpiece which was in pre-production when Carrie was released. Both films are very stylish and striking in their manipulation of colour. Mario Tosi's cinematography contains the same shimmering blues and Technicolor reds that Argento's work features in abundance.

But more than that, both Carrie and Suspiria have huge elements of fairy tales about them. Where Suspiria is modelled on Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Carrie is a reworking of Cinderella with the final act subverted. Instead of a handsome prince coming to save the day and everything working out fine, Carrie descends into hell, embracing her extraordinary powers and losing all feelings for anyone else. In this context Carrie's classmates are the ugly sisters (with the handsome prince being in on the act) and Margaret is the wicked stepmother, a further indication that Carrie is illegitimate.The film simply wouldn't work without the performance of Sissy Spacek, who is nothing short of phenomenal. Having first come to prominence in Badlands, Spacek was originally cast to play Christine Hargensen, the role which eventually went to Nancy Allen. Determined to change De Palma's mind, she smeared Vaseline into her hair and turned up to the final audition in a dress she wore in seventh grade. She brings a heart-breaking fragility to the role, making us feel so strongly for her character that we almost find ourselves cheering in the midst of her carnage. The image of the blood-stained Carrie walking home, or climbing the stairs into the attic, is simultaneously touching and terrifying.The only thing which prevents Carrie from being a full-blooded masterpiece is some of De Palma's visual trickery. Many of his decisions work well, adding to the tone and substance of the film. When Carrie and Tommy are dancing, the camera is at a Dutch angle and twirls around at a faster pace than the couple. This and the final dream sequence, which was filmed in reverse, successfully reinforce the magical, fairy tale quality of the story. And the use of slow-motion up to and include the pig blood falling do add a real sense of tension.But once the pig blood hits the fan, De Palma gets carried away and his visual decisions undercut the climactic scene. Using split-screen undermines the sense of unbridled panic we are meant to have: by asking us to focus on two different things at once, we both lose a sense of scale and find it hard to focus on the often-poetic justice being meted out to. The Metropolis-style kaleidoscope view of people laughing doesn't contribute all that much, and the looping of her mother's voice ("they're all gonna laugh at you!") makes the whole thing feel like the final groove of Sgt. Pepper.Despite its slightly botched ending and some overly conventional jumps, Carrie is a damn fine film which still has the power to unnerve after 35 years. Spacek's extraordinary performance is supported by some fine work from Nancy Allen and Piper Laurie, along with a brief appearance from John Travolta on the cusp of superstardom. Where De Palma's later works would be memorably shocking, this is shockingly memorable, and remains one of the high points of his often distinguished career.

Rating:
Verdict: First-rate teen terror