Word: thunderheart
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Dates: during 1992-1992
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...TITLE: THUNDERHEART...
...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...
...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...
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...