The Business of Fancydancing

Native American author Sherman Alexie makes a promising directorial debut with "The Business of Fancydancing," a complex drama about several Spokane Indians unhappily reunited at a peer's funeral.

Native American author Sherman Alexie makes a promising directorial debut with “The Business of Fancydancing,” a complex drama about several Spokane Indians unhappily reunited at a peer’s funeral. More adventurous in theme, story structure and cinematic style than 1998’s “Smoke Signals,” the arthouse hit adapted from Alexie’s stories, pic’s individual set pieces are particularly striking. However, stalled character development in the second half of the pic reduces the impact of the whole. After touring fest circuit, best prospects probably will lie in specialized broadcast sales; theatrical viability is iffy.

As in his best print fiction (“Reservation Blues,” etc.), Alexie funnels Native American experience through a thorny, culture-clashing mix of vivid character conflicts; as in his least (“Indian Killer”), narrative follow-through gradually loses steam. Uneven story content aside, feature is kept consistently interesting by Alexie’s willingness to take risks with storytelling and camerawork.

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A brief prologue shows childhood best friends Seymour Polatkin (Evan Adams) and Aristotle Joseph (Gene Tagaban) goofing for the camera on their high-school graduation day in 1985; brash and confident co-valedictorians, they’re headed from the Washington state “rez” to college as roommates full of lofty ambition.

Eighteen years later, the onetime best buds are worlds apart. Seymour has become a bestselling poet who packages saccharine morsels of Native wisdom and suffering for a guilty-white-liberal readership. Smug and pious, he has a Caucasian male lover (Kevin Phillip) who’s seldom allowed to forget his membership in the oppressing majority race. Yet Seymour himself hasn’t visited the reservation or communicated with old friends in years; consciously or not, he knows his more-Indian-than-thou act wouldn’t play so well to actual members of the “tribe.”

Aristotle, meanwhile, has sunk into do-nothing carousing back at the rez after dropping out of college, leaving his artistic ambitions unfulfilled. He bitterly resents Seymour’s success, partly because latter pillaged — without acknowledgement — Aristotle’s colorful life story and wild-man persona to fuel his poetic packaging of Native life.

An early-morning call brings sad news: The two men’s lifelong pal Mouse (Swil Kanim) has died. Seymour reluctantly drives his SUV back home for the wake, where there are awkward scores to settle with an ex-girlfriend Agnes (Michelle St. John) and Aristotle.

In a case of the anticipation being better than the payoff, Seymour’s arrival at the reservation is where the pic bogs down narratively, amid a series of rote confrontations and brooding interludes that don’t carry the premise as far as one would like.

Still, there are powerful moments throughout, with Alexie pitching flashbacks, mind’s-eye segs and other narrative-complicating devices that rep some of the best material here. They run a wide, often surprising emotional gamut, from the cruel thoughtlessness with which Seymour, in flashback, sprang an “I think I’m gay” speech on college sweetheart Agnes, to a scary tableau in which Aristotle and Mouse vent violent cultural rage on a stranded white motorist.

Seymour’s simultaneous abandonment/exploitation of his Spokane roots is charted in numerous wickedly astute scenes, while interspersed throughout are wordless bits with lead characters “fancydancing” in full tribal garb. (A less successful running motif consists of the protags being grilled in TV-studio-like environs by a mysterious African-American “interviewer” (Rebecca Carroll) whose snide harping on their every perceived hypocrisy or personal failure grows tiresome.)

DV lensing by Holly Taylor is uncommonly rich, with painterly, hyperreal effects such as a ravishing long shot in which Mouse — who otherwise gets short shrift in character development — is seen striding through a verdant Northwest forest, playing his fiddle like a medieval minstrel. Editorial and sound elements are likewise imaginative, untethered to linear form.

If “The Business of Fancydancing” ultimately leaves a mixed impression, scene by scene it makes some fascinating points about identity politics, history, loyalty and the price of success — not a bad payoff for a first-time filmmaker.

Lead thesps are strong, though supporting ones are stilted at times. Tech aspects are solid, while soundtrack of traditional and contemporary Native American music is a flavorful plus.

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