Riding To Redemption Ridge

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

DANCES WITH WOLVES Directed by Kevin Costner

Screenplay by Michael Blake

John J. Dunbar (Kevin Costner) is an almost too perfect example of the new American male, that improbable beau ideal who has been created out of recent feminist fantasies and the failure of certain old-fashioned masculine dreams.

Dunbar drops out of his executive position in a large, hierarchical organization engaged in morally questionable work in order to get closer to nature -- his own and Mother's. Once settled in the wilderness, he proves to be a sensitive and caring ecologist, tenderly nursing the land and its creatures. When, eventually, he encounters members of a culture that is alien to him, he is open to their ways, making no effort to impose his on them. Quite the opposite; he becomes an earnest convert to their life-style. When he finds a wife, he is exemplary in his gentle attentiveness and supportiveness as she struggles to find and assert a "personhood" that was confused by events in her early history.

What a guy! What an anachronism! For Dunbar is not a 1990s yuppie who suddenly decides to take his Sierra Club membership seriously. He is a lieutenant in the U.S. Cavalry, circa 1864. Given command of a small fort deep in Sioux country, he finds that its garrison has mysteriously disappeared. That provides him the freedom for self-discovery and for developing peaceable relationships with the Indians, as well as a romance with Stands with a Fist, a white woman who was taken captive by Indians as a child (hauntingly played by Mary McDonnell).

Dances with Wolves -- it is the name the Sioux give Dunbar -- is a movie that is very easy to make fun of, and not merely because of Dunbar's risible ahistoricism. It would be nice, for instance, to meet some white man, other than Dunbar, who is not a brutish lout. And it would not harm the film if there were one or two bad-natured Sioux visible in it. (The Pawnee, who obviously need a p.r. consultant, are portrayed as the scourge of the prairies.) It is, as well, all too easy to see why Costner -- or any actor -- would want to direct himself in the role: all that time alone on the screen, looking swell and acting noble, in a movie that runs three self- indulgent hours.

But Dances with Wolves is also a movie to take seriously. If the essence of the western is riders on a ridgeline, surveying virgin countryside and reveling in their freedom to ride to a horizon unvexed by civilization, then it really does not make any difference if they are wearing feathers or Stetsons. The point has always been to remind us that open land shaped American history and character, and to make us ponder the cost of fencing off our former spaciousness and degrading the peoples who lived within it.

As a director, Costner is alive to the sweep of the country and the expansive spirit of the western-movie tradition. The good guys and the bad guys have exchanged their traditional roles in his film, but their contentions are staged with style and energy. In this reversal there is, just possibly, redemption, not only of historical crimes but also of a movie genre lately fallen into decrepitude. It is possible, surprisingly, to imagine John Ford happy in the great multiplex in the sky.