Kevin Willmott is an obviously political film-maker – his ‘CSA: Confederate States of America’ hypothesised an alternate history in which the civil war was lost by the North; and he brought his next film ‘The Only Good Indian’ to Sundance this weekend. From the opening shot when a Native American woman opens the door of her house onto sun-split plains before stepping onto the gravel outside, it’s clear that Willmott knows his Westerns. It may seem a cliched homage at first – this iconic image belongs in ‘The Searchers’ – but soon a story unfolds that might have John Ford spinning. ‘The Only Good Indian’, written by Thomas L. Carmody, relates yet another neglected part of the American West mythology – the forced removal of Native children to boarding schools, on pain of physical assault, and with no guarantee of return to their parents. It resonates with the story that ‘Rabbit-Proof Fence’ tells of Aboriginal children; and, like that film, ‘The Only Good Indian’ is instructive and moving, driven by a wonderful central performance by Winter Fox Frank as the abducted boy; Wes Studi as the private detective tracking him, and J. Kenneth Campbell’s sheriff are ably along for the ride.
As a piece of political polemic, the film makes its case subtly; though it may be striving for too much – this is a movie that wants to contain topics as vast as the lives of former slaves in the decades following the civil war, Native self-loathing, and the post-traumatic stress suffered by gunslingers that ‘Unforgiven’ devoted a whole film to. In that regard, it has huge ambition, and it deserves a wider audience than films like this usually get. But it also bites off more than it can chew – for one thing, the use of the boy’s reading of ‘Dracula’ is a motif that could have been powerful but seems undercooked, and some of the boarding school staff seem like the worst kind of one-dimensional villain stereotypes.
That said, Willmott and Carmody have contributed a fascinating addition to the revisionist Western canon; ‘The Only Good Indian’ is the best as-yet-unsold film I’ve seen at Sundance so far.
