**1/2 (out of ****)
Starring Dustin Hoffman, Chief Dan George, Faye Dunaway, and Martin Balsam
Directed by Arthur Penn & written by Calder Willingham, from the novel by Thomas Berger
1970
139 min PG13
Something’s missing in director Arthur Penn’s (“Bonnie and Clyde”) magnificently staged anti-Western. Maybe it’s that Penn is crushed under the weight of his own production—too serious and dour in what is essentially a satirical fable. Maybe it’s just that I don’t like “holy fool” stories; you know, where you have the jester who ends up wiser than you and speaking down to you. It’s a hard trick to pull off and, amazingly, Dustin Hoffman fails. He’s one of my favorite actors, but by the end of “Little Big Man” he just comes across as smug. Think that look of calm, shit-eating self-satisfaction that Tobey Maguire has at the end of “The Cider House Rules,” although “Little Big Man” doesn’t grate nearly as much.
Anyway, the movie follows the life of an Old West Candide (Hoffman), perpetually switching between life as a settler and life as a Native American, and mostly failing at both. He tries being a brave, a gunfighter, a drunk, religious, a shopkeeper, a scout, and so on and so forth, without much contemplation. Intellectually I appreciated how the movie skewered so many conventions of the Western: the Indians talk good but the invaders talk like goofballs (Hoffman’s settler talk is a bit too much) and Wild Bill Hickok dies a sloppy death.
But, at the same time, I kept thinking, so what? Penn’s hand is heavier than it ought to be and his targets—is there anything more tedious than “religion as hypocrisy?”—are often obvious. Life as a Cheyenne is almost certainly more fulfilling, honest, and moral than life as an 1870s settler, but the way “Little Big Man” beats us over the head with how Cheyenne culture is 100% superior to white culture in every single respect is dramatically uninteresting. This may be what Pauline Kael means when she describes her experience of “Little Big Man” this way: “long before Custer’s Last Stand you’ve heard the little click in your brain that says, ‘Enough.’” Compare this to Nicolas Roeg’s much more involved and compelling “Walkabout,” his “compare ‘n contrast” between Australians and Aborigines.
Maybe in 1970 it really was enough to show expansionism negatively and to see the “winning” of the West from a view that, if it isn’t truly Indian, then is it at least a white guy who spends a lot of time with Indians. Which I suppose is the best you can expect from Hollywood. Still, I got pretty sick of the words “the white man” after 2 ½ hours.
Finished Wednesday, November 16th, 2005
Copyright © 2005 Friday & Saturday Night
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