LITTLE ROCK — I don’t know why so many people seem to react so violently to Kevin Costner. While he has had his ridiculous moments - the scene in Madonna’s Truth or Dare where he describes her show as “neat,” his accent in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, Waterworld - he’s usually an effective and welcome screen presence.
And not just in sports movies such as Bull Durham, Tin Cup and Field of Dreams.
I thought he was great in Clint Eastwood’s A Perfect World and Mike Binder’s The Upside of Anger. Generally he’s enjoyable, even in (or maybe especially in) such minor projects as the attempted (and failed) serial killer franchise Mr. Brooks. He’s perfectly fine as a working-class Bostonian (though some people will kill him whenever he attempts any accent other than the Southern California clay wheel skateboard patois that seems his native tongue) in the recently released Company Men.
Despite the legion of haters, Costner isn’t a joke. There was a time, 20 years ago, when it was possible to imagine him as a singular cinematic artist, a director of remarkable vision and sensitivity. The 20th anniversary Blu-ray DVD of Dances With Wolves, the film that seems likely to be the cornerstone of Costner’s legacy, was released recently by MGM ($29.95).
It contains the 236-minute director’s cut; the theatrical cut was a full hour shorter. It includes all the extras you’d expect, including a couple of featurettes and a documentary about the making of the film.
The making of Dances With Wolves is an extraordinary story. It took Costner more than five years to make the movie; he was a relative unknown when he began working on it. Before it was released, it was widely thought of as a doomed vanity project. Hollywood wags called it “Kevin’s Gate,” an allusion to Michael Cimino’s ill-fated 1980 fiasco Heaven’s Gate.
The roots of the film go back at least to 1983, the year that Costner was famously cut out of Lawrence Kasdan’s The Big Chill. That decision so pained the director that he gave Costner a showy role in his next film - the Western Silverado, which raised the young actor’s profile dramatically. Costner did another movie in 1983, the little-seen Stacey’s Knights (which isn’t available on DVD in the United States).
The director of Stacey’s Knights was Jim Wilson, who would go on to co-produce Dances With Wolves with Costner. The screenwriter was Michael Blake, who in 1986 showed Costner a script for a Western he’d written. (Legend has it Blake envisioned the script as a wedding present for his friends Viggo Mortensen and X singer Exene Cervenka. Mortensen is rumored to be the leading candidate to play Capt. John Dunbar - the part Costner played in Dances With Wolves - in a proposed sequel.Costner has repeatedly said he doesn’t want to reprise his role.)
Costner read the script, liked it and suggested that Blake turn it into a novel because he thought that would improve its chances of being turned into a movie. Blake did, and Costner bought the movie rights.
Blake set about adapting his novel into a screenplay. (He won a Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar - one of seven Academy Awards the film would win.)
Costner filmed the movie from June to near the end of November in 1989. Except for the Civil War sequences, which were shot last, the film was mostly shot in sequence to preserve to continuity of the seasons. It was filmed mainly in the Badlands and the Black Hills of South Dakota, with a few scenes in Wyoming. It hada modest budget of $19 million, but delays and overruns forced Costner to contribute $3 million to finish the project.
He was a rookie director with a film that was three hours long, had complex battles scenes and a buffalo hunt that required an actual stampede of several thousand creatures. (Costner did employ a couple of animatronic beasts to ensure that, per the American Humane Association, “no animals were harmed” during the making of the film.) It was a Western at a time when the genre may have been at its most unfashionable. Oh, and great stretches of the film were subtitled. What could go wrong?
Well, actually there’s not much wrong with Dances With Wolves.
While it’s possible to argue that any three-hour (much less four-hour) movie is overlong,the mode is epic and the film’s rhythm is attuned to the spaciousness of the prairie. It’s a big story and an ambitious movie. It opens with a scene that might have been written by Stephen Crane, in which a Union army lieutenant (Costner) steals out of a hospital tent where surgeons are preparing to take his foot.
The officer steals a horse and rides toward the Confederate lines, intending to go out in a blaze of suicidal glory. (On impulse, Costner threw his arms out in a gesture reminiscent of Christ crucified - this surprised his stunt director.) But the Confederate bullets miss him and his charge inspires the Yankees to overrun Rebel lines. Lt. Dunbar is a hero. Promoted to captain, he’s given his choice of postings.
Having lost neither his foot nor his existential melancholy, Dunbar chooses a remote outpost in Dakota territory because he wants “to see the West before it’s gone.” At Fort Sedgwick, he’ll be the only white man around for miles. It becomes his Walden Pond, his hermitage apart from the whir and drone of civilization. We know nothing of Dunbar’s background, but we can tell from the entries in his diary (read in a stolid but appropriate monotone by Costner invoice-over) that he’s sick of humans. He befriends a wolf, which raises the curiosity of the Lakota tribesmen who’ve been warily keeping an eye on him.
Wind in His Hair (Rodney A. Grant) wants to kill Dunbar, but medicine man Kicking Bird (Graham Greene) counsels against it. In a series of tentative encounters, Dunbar and the Indians feel each other out and eventually develop trust.
Soon Dunbar is spending most of his time with the Lakota, learning their language and their folkways, helping hunt the disappearing buffalo. (Most of the Indians who appear in the film had to be tutored in the Lakota language; the crash course they received didn’t take into account that Lakota is sex-specific - their teacher taught them only the feminine forms. Indian activist Russell Means - no fan of the film - said that when he went to see it with friends from the reservation they laughed at the men who were speaking “like women.”)
In what may be the film’s weakest conceit, Dunbar - now renamed “Dances With Wolves” for his lupine husbandry - falls in love with a woman named Stands With a Fist (Mary McDonnell), who just happens to be a white woman who was captured as a child during a raiding party.
Yet, while Dances With Wolves does hit most of the predictable notes, it avoids the patriotic bluster common to the genre, and its portrayal of the Lakota - aside from the “mistakes” noticed by Means and other close observers - strikes me as genuinely empathetic and not at all condescending. Most of all, Dances With Wolves is a film of uncommon specificity and attention to detail.
Dunbar is no action hero; he’s a quiet, wounded man nursed back into health by an alien culture. He doesn’t save the Lakota - they save him. At the same time, the movie is remarkably free of any New Age notions about the inherent nobility of native peoples.
People - me included - sometimes point to Dances With Wolves’ Best Picture Oscar as a minor travesty, lamenting the snub of Martin Scorsese’s GoodFellas. But 20 years on, I find it hard to argue against Dances With Wolves, for it is a different kind of epic, with an almost humble hero.
These days, perhaps it is impossible to separate Costner from his most hubristic misadventures.
That’s a shame, for by any objective measure, Dances With Wolves is an important, artfully realized, major motion picture.
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Style, Pages 29 on 02/01/2011