New Wounded Knee Breaks Hearts Again
As history,
Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee is essential, enlightening and disturbing, and has been since Dee Brown published his groundbreaking 1971 best-seller about the displacement and mistreatment of Native Americans in the late 19th century. As drama, HBO's movie (based on the book, airing Sunday, May 27, at 9 pm/ET) should only enhance and revive its reputation.
Your heart is likely to break, bleed and cry out to the Sioux, trapped in one of history's bloodiest culture clashes, long before this movie reaches its devastating climax at the 1890 massacre of Wounded Knee Creek.
It's a complex story, forcefully told (by screenwriter Daniel Giat) and directed (by Yves Simoneau) with a feel for the epic landscape of the Indians' hunting grounds and a sympathy for their diminished circumstances in reservations.
Wounded Knee opens with the Little Big Horn battle of 1876 and traces the surge toward an American holocaust through multiple points of view. Most compelling is the story of Charles Eastman (Adam Beach), a Sioux child who witnessed the Custer carnage before being sent off to be assimilated into white culture.
His optimism for his people's future soon shatters as he witnesses them being stripped of pride and, more important, their identity. As he did in Flags of Our Fathers, Beach delivers a moving portrait of disillusion and despair.
In a 1980 Supreme Court ruling, Justice Harry Blackmun wrote, "A more ripe and rank case of dishonorable dealings will never, in all probability, be found in our history."
Wounded Knee is a vividly painful reminder of a shameful period we can't allow ourselves to forget.
Change Is Good
Mixing the thriving crime-procedural genre with the endangered species of the network TV-movie, Tom Selleck's Jesse Stone movie series (based on the Robert B. Parker novels) is among the moodiest character studies you'll find anywhere. In Jesse Stone: Sea Change (Tuesday, May 22, 9 pm/ET, CBS), the fourth film in the cycle, Selleck wears this role of a lonely, bitterly bored police chief in a small New England town like a well-fitting but weathered glove. When asked, "How's the drinking thing?" he sardonically answers, "Better since I gave up hope." All brooding pathos and gruff attitude, swilling Scotch while listening to Brahms, Stone tries to find some purpose by tackling a 15-year-old cold case, at the same time also looking into an alleged rape case that could muddy the waters of a lucrative fall regatta. The story unfolds slowly, subtly, at times threatening to succumb to Stone's own malaise. But like life, it's untidy in its resolution, and when sudden jolts of violence occur, you rarely see it coming.
