Smoke Signals

Boyz on the Res.

When Victor Joseph (Adam Beach) learns that his estranged father has died in Phoenix, he decides to travel there to collect his belongings. He doen't have the money so he agrees to accept the offer of a loan from his neighbour, Thomas Builds-the-Fire (Evan Adams), on condition that the two travel together. The two are linked by an incident 2 decades earlier; after an Independence Day party in 1976, Victor Joseph's father saved the baby Thomas from a fire which killed both of Thomas' parents. As the two young men set off to Phoenix, Victor remembers various occasions spent with his father, and also with Thomas.

The stage is set for a voyage of discovery. Since the two young men are American Indians and this is their first big expedition on their own out of the familiar life of their reservation, this movie promises an original take on the tradition of road movies. The two main characters are very different: Victor Joseph is strong and resilient. His father's desertion has cast a pall over his life and we see, courtesy of extended flashbacks, that he was a complex man; capable of great love but also of lashing out at his wife and the young Victor. Thomas, in contrast, is very naive; he prides himself as a storyteller, in the tradition that has endured for centuries in his tribe. However, Thomas understands little of the life he speaks about, as he has led a sheltered life since the death of his parents.

The memory of Victor's father, Arnold Joseph (Gary Farmer) is the central subject of the film, and Gary Farmer's performance casts a large shadow across the movie. Farmer was very impressive as the deluded Nobody, Johnny Depp's Indian companion in Jim Jarmusch's black-and-white western Dead Man (itself a voyage of discovery) and he dominates Smoke Signals. His personality and his physical presence lights up the screen, so much so that the other characters seem low-key in comparision. In fact, Chris Eyre makes an explicit reference to Dead Man - at one point, Arnold Joseph asks his son who is the best Indian of all. The son tells him" Nobody".

Wisely, Smoke Signals leavens the serious with deft comic touches, most of which are wry observations on Indian stereotypes and the contrast between Indian and the 'whites' (e.g. the irony of Indian on a reservation celebrating the independence of the White Man on the 4th of July). The most glaring weakness of the movie is, while celebrating the storytelling aspect of Indian culure, the Thomas Builds-A-Fire character is not a very good storyteller ! He affects an annoying sing-song voice while telling the stories, but worse, the stories aren't much good. Almost everyone in the film tells a yarn at some point, and nearly all of them do it better than Thomas.

Chris Eyres direction is assured, and he resists the temptation to overdo the imagery. Fire pervades the journey ; the families of both boys are changed forever by the blaze at the beginning; the two must travel to Phoenix where another fire at the conclusion of the movie signifies both destruction and and rejuvenation. Secrecy is also explored, Thomas desires to destroy secrecy through his story-telling but his stories alter the past into the memories he would like to have. Victor is taciturn; he has secrets as had Arnold. When he arrives in Phoenix, he meets a girlfriend of his father. He asks her if she loved Arnold - she replies that" we kept each other's secrets".

If Eyres is to be faulted for anything, it is that he has tried to squeeze too much into this film. But it is a small complaint. While the road movie is a hackneyed concept, Smoke Signal's Indian perspective sustains our interest.

Directed by Chris Eyre

.

Top

Back to the Main Page
© 1998 Stockholm Film Review. All Rights Reserved.