Death on The Reservation

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

TITLE: INCIDENT AT OGLALA

DIRECTOR: MICHAEL APTED

TITLE: THUNDERHEART

DIRECTOR: MICHAEL APTED

WRITER: JOHN FUSCO

THE BOTTOM LINE: Nonfictional and fictional quests for the same truth -- a thinking person's double feature.

IN INCIDENT AT OGLALA, WHICH IS A documentary, two FBI agents lose their life as they pursue a suspect on South Dakota's Pine Ridge Sioux Indian reservation. In Thunderheart, which is fictional, an FBI agent regains his soul as he investigates a murder in the same place.

Both movies also share a director, Michael Apted, who is probably the first filmmaker ever to bring out such closely related works at roughly the same moment. Certainly no one before has so vividly availed himself of the chance to shed the crosslight of fiction (Thunderheart was made after Incident) on his own attempt to write history on film. Flaws and all, the movies constitute a directorial tour de force, as well as an intriguing study in cultural anthropology and a plea to social conscience that is difficult to ignore.

The documentary owes something to Errol Morris' The Thin Blue Line. Like that brilliantly styled film, it returns repeatedly to the crime scene, reconstructing different versions of the murder. But for the most part, it is content to let a wide range of heads do a lot of talking about the brutal death of special agents Jack Coler and Ron Williams on June 26, 1975. At that time, the radical American Indian Movement was seeking to re-establish traditional tribal ways and to disestablish a tribal leadership it considered corrupt. Its opponents responded with terror squads, and between them the two sides created something close to a civil war on the reservation.

Chasing a man they suspected had stolen a pair of boots, the G-men stumbled into an AIM camp and, perhaps understandably, a fire fight broke out, at the end of which the agents were dead. Three AIM members were charged with their murder. Two were acquitted, but Leonard Peltier, who was tried separately, was convicted on the basis of evidence the film insists -- quite convincingly -- was trumped up. He continues to serve double life sentences.

Thunderheart, with no obligation to sift through the intricate facts of a complicated case, has more time than the documentary to portray the shameful living conditions at Pine Ridge and to suggest the power of the mystical traditions AIM sought to revive. Its protagonist, an FBI agent named Ray Levoi (Val Kilmer), is assigned to the reservation mainly for public relations reasons; he's one-quarter Sioux. And not proud of it. But the squalor of Pine Ridge touches him, as do the Native Americans, led by a tough, funny tribal policeman (Graham Greene) and a sly, funny shaman (Chief Ted Thin Elk). Slowly, but with powerfully accumulating dramatic effect, they put Levoi in touch with his Indian heritage. And with the truth about the murder he is there to investigate. It turns out to be similar to the situation projected in the documentary: there is an attempt to frame AIM members, with Levoi's FBI boss (Sam Shepard) both faking and ignoring evidence in order to get a quick conviction.

Gripping as both films are, they have one more thing in common: problematic conclusions. Thunderheart ends with a conventionally melodramatic confrontation, which, though impressively staged, is unpersuasively upbeat, given the brutality and helplessness of life on the reservation that the movie has so indelibly impressed upon us. Incident at Oglala is, by contrast, evasive about a significant point. One comes away from it convinced that the men accused of this crime (including Leonard Peltier) were victimized by the FBI and prosecutors in need of hasty revenge for the death of two of their own. Nevertheless, the fact remains that the agents were executed by shots fired at close range after they were wounded and defenseless. One cannot completely sympathize with a movement that does not either own up to the crime or prove lack of complicity in it. Nor can one entirely accept a movie that does not ask more forthright questions about it.