The Business of Fancydancing By Rick Curnutte Richard A. Curnutte, Jr. is the Editor of The Film Journal. He has studied English and Film at Ohio University and The Ohio State University.

Writer/director Sherman Alexie attempts to weigh in on several important subjects in his debut film, The Business of Fancydancing, including cultural abandonment, societal bigotry and stereotyping, and sexual confusion and frustration. Trying to paint on such a vast canvas is often admirable, even if the process is not entirely successful. Here, though, the results are almost embarrassing.

Seymour (Evan Adams) is an intelluctually obtuse Native American who left his reservation years ago to pursue higher education and a career as a poet. Along the way, he has alienated his friends and family on the "rez", and become a whipping boy for a population of Native Americans who believe he's sold out to ingratiate himself to the world of the white literati. His poems are significantly tribal and philosophical, more a whitewashing, so to speak, of the Native American experience than a tribute to it.

Now, one of his best friends from childhood, Mouse (Swil Kanim) has died. Seymour, whose sexuality is dealt with cloyingly, rather than honestly, leaves his lover behind to return home for the wake. When he gets there, he must confront those he left behind, including his best friend, Aristotle (a horribly amateurish Gene Tagaban) and his ex-girlfriend Agnes (Michelle St. John), with whom he outed himself, breaking her heart (typical, it's implied, of a newly gay man). Why do so many movies about gay men have to contain said gay man breaking the heart of some tender-hearted young woman? Have no gay men ever outed themselves, say, to a man they're in love with? In Fancydancing, Seymour's homosexuality is viewed almost as a joke, a part of his artist persona...not only is he a righteous Native American, but he's a fag, too. As if these attitudes were not bad enough, there is a preposterous scene between Seymour and Agnes where he offers to leave his lover and spend his life with her. "We just wouldn't have sex", he states, reinforcing the stereotype that homosexuality is about sex, heterosexuality about love.

Such narrowmindedness is unfortunate in a film so ripe with possibility. Alexie toys with experimentalism, intercutting between his narrative and non-linear segments featuring tribal dancing, and black-and-white segments between lead characters and an excruciatingly biting interviewer. These segments, while indulgent and sometimes forced, turn out to be the strongest in the film. Alexie uses this interviewer as his catalyst for attacking his characters' most basic faults. Unfortunately, these segments are necessary, as the rest of his film fails to capture their spirit of playfulness and cynicism. Alexie takes his characters far too seriously, then ridicules them in these segments of charicature. One method or the other might have been effective. Together, they collide and deliver a stunted story of supposed redemption and forgiveness. Neither homespun or avant garde, Fancydancing attempts to be all things for all people and winds up being nothing for anyone.

                                                                 © FILM JOURNAL 2002