Dee Brown's "Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee" was a sensation when released in 1971, and HBO's very loose adaptation of it is quite likely to transform into one again. Faithfully adapting the book, a historical look at the American government's attempts to dismantle the sundry Indian tribes in the late 1800s, would've been a fool's errand, so screenwriter Daniel Giat ("Path to War") doesn't even try. He essentially goes with a handful of chapters and mixes in the results of his own research.
Hence, HBO's "Wounded Knee" focuses on three men. Sen. Henry Dawes (Aidan Quinn), one of the few men in Washington, D.
C., who didn't just want to wipe out the American Indian race outright, hoped to assimilate Indians into white society through education and conversion to Christianity. (The expression "assimilation or extinction" isn't a particularly good sales tool.
) Sitting Bull (August Schellenberg), the last of the great chiefs and spiritual head of the Lakota Sioux, was wary of any conciliations politicians extended to his people. Giat adds Charles Eastman (Adam Beach) to the picture, placing him at the film's moral center. Eastman was a Sioux separated from his family and given a white upbringing; he went to
When he returned to the reservation to help his people, he was appalled at the treatment extended them by the government. And the infamous massacre at Wounded Knee Creek in 1890 caused him to reject his assimilation. Beach gives a tremendous performance as a man who's not sure how comfortable he really is in his own skin and who must confront the agonizing possibility that he may have sold out his own race.
Schellenberg's stoicism makes his character's tragedy all the more poignant. Other good performances are sprinkled throughout the film Fred Thompson (playing, interestingly, a president - Grant), J.K.
Simmons and Anna Paquin but there's some stiff, "historical"-style acting that gives some scenes a rather stilted tone, as if the whole production were some grand civics lesson, a notion underscored by frequent montages of tintype photos strewn throughout the film. Presenting the massacre from Eastman's point of view he learns about it via flashbacks from the victims mutes its horror, and not in a good way. But Beach's work in particular gives the film its urgency, and the sense of loss conveyed in the film is palpable.
Through the film, Charles is tormented by nightmares of being steamrollered by onrushing trains. In the end, those nightmares came true for most of his people. What: Adaptation of Dee Brown's best seller about Washington's tortured relationship with American Indians in the 1800s.
When: 9 tonight; 4 a.m. Monday, noon and 11 p.
m. Tuesday, 4 p.m.
Thursday, 12:10 a.m. Friday, 12:30 p.
m. and 10 p.m.
Saturday. Plus multiple screenings across various HBO platforms.
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