'Dances with Wolves': Kevin Costner's Sioux Erasmus
There are many movies that I haven't seen. To give you an idea of the magnitude of the tragedy, until the lockdown I hadn't seen Dirty Dancing (what a marvel) nor Pretty Woman. I wanted to take advantage of this series of articles to efficiently fill some of my cinematic gaps. In an era of massive audiovisual offering and absolute atomization of channels, I cure my FOMO in deferred. This week I saw Dances with Wolves for the first time and these are my notes:
- Only the Spanish dubbed version was available. What memories. It’s been a long time since I heard phrases like “Damn son of a bitch” and “Move your useless ass, demons!”. Dubbing allows you to explore the plot more closely, but it occasionally pulls you out of the story: “Ah, Mr. Burns,” “Ah, Dr. Frasier Crane,” “Ah, Bruce Willis in all the movies”…
- Do I still have the childish longing to have a horse and for it to be my friend? The answer is yes.
- The wolf that accompanies the protagonist is called Two Socks, which in Spanish has been translated as “Calcetines” (Socks). For a wolf. “Socks”. It’s like calling a tiger “Currupipi”: it’s wrong, it shouldn’t be allowed, it’s spitting in the face of the forces of nature and you deserve what happens to you (like one day, without even blinking, this beast with a bunny’s name rips your throat out).
- There are websites that classify movies based on whether the dog dies or not. I extend this to canids. I warn you, then: the wolf dines on bullets and the dinya. Yankee go home (in England).
- I would like to disprove the title: a) there is no dancing with wolves at any point and b) there is only one wolf unit.
- But there are a lot of buffaloes! So many! What a shame that the natives didn't coincide with the Italian migration (who knows why). They could have made pantagruelian quantities of fresh mozzarella.
- Very nice soundtrack, which is not by that one (John Williams), nor by that other one (Hans Zimmer), nor by that other one (James Horner), but by that one (John Barry). It’s important not to confuse it with that of The Last of the Mohicans, which I also haven’t seen, and which is by two others (Randy Edelman and Trevor Jones).
- Did you know that… Kevin Costner grew a horrible mustache to play John Dunbar? He wears it on his face for almost two hours of footage, it’s hard not to have seen it. Then he shaves and we go for the eighties mullet look, which he would maintain the following year in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves.
- The protagonist falls so in love with the natives that he starts to dress like them, speak like them, and adopt their customs. When he comes back into contact with his compatriots, the clash is insurmountable. I know the experience. I also returned from an Erasmus. In Rome. I can tell you about it whenever you want.
- It seemed ideal for falling into the cliché of the white savior if it weren’t for the fact that it’s the natives who save him, and that he doesn’t save them from anything: the colonizers arrive and ruin everything. The film ends with an intertitle that says: “Thirteen years later, their homes were destroyed, their buffaloes exterminated, and the last group of free Sioux were subjugated to the authority of the white man at Fort Robinson, Nebraska. The magnificent horse culture of the plains had ended, and the American frontier would soon disappear”. It is not considered a spoiler if it appears in history books.
Verdict: the indigenous cast is very good, that the Lakota language is spoken and that the Europeans are depicted as the murderers they were. The Sioux outfit, Kevin, looks terrible on you (you look like you came out of a Party Fiesta), and there's also too much footage. And the director's cut lasts four hours! It's more like Wikiloc than IMDb.