This week I celebrate my fat-kid-cakeness love of Thunderheart. It has Val Kilmer before he got crazy, Graham Greene before he couldn’t get work any more, and EIGHT POUNDS OF PWN.

Enjoy this beautifully-composed shot…right before this dude is killed-ass.

NOTE: All pictures are from this site; I saved them here to avoid hotlinking. SPOILERS if you go.

In fact, SPOILERS all around! Beware.

Nutshell: By-the-books FBI Agent Ray Levoi is 1/4 Sioux; that gets him sent to a Sioux reservation in South Dakota as a “liasion” for a murder investigation. Turns out the murdered man is a tribal activist. Ray runs into a lot of friction as people figure out he’s whiter than a Wonderbread sandwich, but despite himself he feels the investigation is fishy, the “government aides” are assholes, and the tribal residents are being fucked over. Will he find the balls to do anything about it? (Would I watch this movie if he didn’t?)

Thunderheart’s history is almost as interesting as the movie; it was filmed by Michael Apted in response to his documentary about the murder of two government officers on an Indian reservation, and what was really going on in this forgotten pocket of America. The story must have grabbed him, because he took a lot of particulars of the documentary, changed some names, stuck in some mysticism to keep things “fictional”, and made this movie, which I think is fucking awesome and no one else has ever seen. (Except .)

While there is an air of mysticism on the rez that can seem a little plot-devicey (prime suspect Jimmy is generally considered to have shape-shifting powers, which he uses to escape the police, like, 150 times), Apted’s strength lies in debunking the tropes while underscoring that cultural identity has a similar power.

Another of his strengths is that this movie is ragingly non-bullshitty.

Like – visit beautiful South Dakota!

…home of the impoverished Sioux reservation!

I wrote a whole lot of MFA thesis stuff here, but I’m going to just keep going, because I don’t think anybody here would be surprised that a movie showing government goons terrorizing the violently disenfranchised people on the rez didn’t get a whole lot of screen time.

Ray’s first contact on the rez is with Walter Crow Horse, played by my boyfriend, Graham Greene. He’s the rez sheriff, and he loves fucking with Ray. And I love him. It’s the circle of life!

Walter Crow Horse: License and registration?
Ray Levoi: Blow me.
Walter Crow Horse: Hey, this is *my* jurisdiction now. And you were going 59 in a 55 zone.
Ray Levoi: Let me see the radar.
Walter Crow Horse: I don’t need no radar, I can tell! I just listen to the wind; it said, “Fifty-nine, nail ‘im!”

Walter Crow Horse is the one who initially opens Ray’s eyes into the huge holes in the investigation, and some of the best scenes are when he says something like, “You gotta listen to the water,” Ray rails against superstitious BS, and Walter’s like, “Well, there was river water in his lungs, but he was found in the middle of the desert,” and Ray’s like, “…pwned.”

You know who else pwns Ray?

Maggie Eagle Bear. Educated, articulate, and a huge menace to the government goons, which is why half her conversations with Ray end with them diving to the ground to avoid getting shot by the FBI. (SPOILER: In the movie, Maggie Eagle Bear is murdered by the government. In the real-life incident that inspired the movie, Anna Mae Pictou Aquash fared even worse, accoridng to Wikipedia:

“The first autopsy (reports are now public information) states: “it appears she had been dead for about 10 days.” The Bureau of Indian Affairs’ medical practitioner, W. O. Brown, missing the bullet wound on her skull, stated that “she had died of exposure.” [4]

Subsequently, her hands were cut off and sent to the Federal Bureau of Investigation headquarters in Washington, D.C. for fingerprinting. Although federal agents were present who knew Anna Mae, she was not identified, and her body was buried as a Jane Doe.”

Aren’t you shocked this movie isn’t more widely known? I certainly am!)

Jimmy Looks Twice. Tribal activist, prime suspect in the murders. The other guy’s an FBI agent who’s just pulled him out of a religious ceremony. (He’s a very thinly-veiled Leonard Peltier.)

On your right, GRANDPA SAM REACHES. Likes long walks on the rez, having visions, watching Mr. Magoo, and PWNing Ray.

(On the left, my boyfriend, who likes being totally handsome.)

Things this movie does right: Dude, almost everything. Ray, as an FBI agent, reaches his first stages of empathy not because of any “magical Native American”, but because things in the case don’t add up and, as an investigator, he starts to figure out that maybe the people menacing families with guns are not totally to be trusted. Later, as his empathy increases, his sense of belonging in the community also increases, but he has to work hard to deserve anyone’s respect; some people’s respect he never gets. I find this very cool. DESERVE that shit!

Things this movie does wrong: Towards the end, Ray does get a magical vision where it seems he’s the reincarnation of someone running at Wounded Knee. (However, case is given that it might be a dream, and Walter gets royally pissed that an “instant Indian with a fucking Rolex and a brand new pair of shoes” should have the audacity to have a vision, so, hee.) Also, the movie ends on a far more upbeat note than the actual event did, but otherwise it would have been unrelentingly bleak, and so I understand the reasons why. So maybe it’s not that the movie did it wrong, but instead that the world is a terrible place! Yay!

So, to sum up: I think this movie is awesomecakes. Thank you and goodnight!

PS. It’s beautifully shot. Look at this.