The
plight of the aboriginal peoples of North America is scarcely
visible to most Americans. Few go to reservations, except
to gamble, and Native Americans seem invisible off the reservation.
One visible Native American, who has met the president of
the United States and the pope, is Seymour Polatkin. The
Business of Fancydancing, directed by Sherman
Alexie, is a biopic about Polatkin (played by Evan Adams),
a film that cuts back and forth in time, seemingly trying
to account for his success as a poet and simultaneous failure
to feel at home with his people in the Spokane Indian Reservation.
The plot, which seems lost amid the flashbacks and flashforwards,
is his return to the reservation for the first time in a decade
to attend the funeral of his boyhood friend Mouse (played
by Swil Kanim), a gifted violinist who committed suicide.
The explanation for his unease is partly wrapped up in the
short scenes that are not placed in chronological order and
partly in the text of some of his poems. The main socialization
factor cited is that at age six he watched a sister die accidentally
when a child shot a gun at her, whereupon his mother stopped
talking and Polatkin began to engage in profound contemplation.
When he attended college in Seattle, he realized that poems
expressing stories about his memories of life on the reservation
touched readers everywhere except the reservation itself.
A close boyhood friend, Aristotle Joseph (played by Gene Tagaban),
dropped out of college (and thus his ambition of becoming
a pediatrician) after four semesters, concluded that he did
not belong outside the reservation, while Polatkin continued.
In one scene Aristotle beats up a stranded white motorist,
in another Aristotle berates Polatkin for leaving the reservation,
but Aristotle and Mouse appear to be typical Native American
males, whose life expectancy is forty-nine, whose principal
cause of death is suicide, and 60 percent of whom are alcoholics.
Yet Polatkin smiles almost always when he speaks and seems
to have found himself through his poetry as well as his openly
gay life with a very devoted lover (Kevin Phillip), though
the two banter about their respective ethnic identities in
a manner that stops short of being an ongoing lover's quarrel.
Polatkin's principal defender, on and off the reservation,
is Jewish-Spokane contemporary Agnes Roth (played by Michelle
St. John). The film's story consists of short conversations
and booksignings punctuated by Native American songs and rituals,
including a colorful dance by Polatkin at the conclusion of
which he is in tears. The film must be seen twice to grasp
Polatkin's meaning, though a better way would be to buy one
of his many books of poems. MH
I
want to comment on this film
