Eavesdropping At The Movies

It's enormously disappointing that Neither Wolf Nor Dog is as bad as it is, because its subject - Native American life in a society built upon a land that was taken from them, and the pain, grievances and stories that the displaced people carry with them - is massively, conspicuously underrepresented in US cinema and demands to be explored. Unfortunately, although the story on which it is based is true, the hackneyed device of a white man, Kent, who learns about someone different and with whom we're supposed to emotionally identify falls on its face, and the filmmaking is awful. When the film visits Wounded Knee and we hear Dan, the Lakota elder, expose his history of pain and loss, Kent's unearned tears destroy the scene. Mike argues for the film's first act, suggesting that it sets up promising questions and themes, and has a slowness that invites the audience to contemplate these. Dan's interactions with Kent, knowingly using him to tell his stories, conflicts with his friend Grover's reaction, suspicious