This well intentioned movie did not capture the spirit of Dee Brown's book, alas.
Focusing the story largely around the admirable Lakota doctor, Charles Eastman and his White wife tries to give an emotional center to Brown's sprawling narrative but the characters of Sitting Bull and Red Cloud come off as little more than an elaboration of the famous "Noble Redman meets Litter" commercial of the 70's. Superficial, blatantly sentimental and ultimately, not all that stirring----although I loved the aerial cinematic dance of the Battle of the Little Bighorn.
HBO would have been better off following the narrative structure of the book---a compelling and heartrending documentation of the woes, duplicity and failures of communication over several hundred years that ultimately achieved the near genocide of the native peoples of America by the turn of the 20th Century.
Perhaps a miniseries could have achieved this.
Ultimately, this HBO production had little heart to bury.
Focusing the story largely around the admirable Lakota doctor, Charles Eastman and his White wife tries to give an emotional center to Brown's sprawling narrative but the characters of Sitting Bull and Red Cloud come off as little more than an elaboration of the famous "Noble Redman meets Litter" commercial of the 70's. Superficial, blatantly sentimental and ultimately, not all that stirring----although I loved the aerial cinematic dance of the Battle of the Little Bighorn.
HBO would have been better off following the narrative structure of the book---a compelling and heartrending documentation of the woes, duplicity and failures of communication over several hundred years that ultimately achieved the near genocide of the native peoples of America by the turn of the 20th Century.
Perhaps a miniseries could have achieved this.
Ultimately, this HBO production had little heart to bury.
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