I doubt I’ll ever view Mount Rushmore the same again. It’s little wonder that the great American Indian chief Crazy Horse is being carved not far away, seeing how American Indians feel about the Founding Fathers desecrating their sacred mountain. Hardly is it the only image in this indie film by American Indian director Chris Eyre (Smoking Signals) that taunts me to dare forget what I’ve seen. Truly Skins hooked me, played swimmingly with me, yanked me out into the air gasping for breath, then deposited me, spent, onto the hard floor of a fishing boat. I fell like a stone.

Is this tightly-scripted movie about the impotent rage of the broken, impoverished Oglala Sioux on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota? You bet. Is it about haunting shame, regret and heartbreak simmering behind their eyes? Definitely. It’s also about two brothers, one a disillusioned, alcoholic Vietnam Vet named Mogie (a stunning Graham Greene, Dances With Wolves), the other a respected police chief so frustrated with the apathy of everyone that he becomes a vigilante, named Rudy (a seething Eric Schweig, The Last of the Mohicans.

These could be cardboard characters spouting out against the world, but the emotions are mostly understated with only one electric scene with cursing and roll-on-the-ground fighting and another from Rudy’s memory of his alcoholic, abusive father. I liked them both quite a lot despite their uncomfortable rawness of character. Mogie liked to hang out in White Clay, NE where he and his buddy (Gary Farmer, Smoke Signals) could buy beer from a white guy who enjoyed a lively business. After a stocking-faced Rudy fixed a couple of indolent punks with a baseball bat to their knees, he turned next to the big beer store with vengeance in his eyes, not realizing that Mogie was on the premises. It changed both of their lives and lead harrowingly to the climax on Mount Rushmore.

Before we arrive there, though, we’ve had a few belly laughs at the silliness of Mogie tripping Rudy to steal the football, trying to shoot a beer can and reeling over his feet while carrying a birthday cake of mysterious contents to his barely-grown-up, good-hearted son, Herbie (Noah Watts, The Slaughter Rule). He’s not stupid silly, really, but is conscious of what he says.

Both brothers demand sympathy as we come to know how much they deep down care for each other. Like the terminal cancer blighting their environment, they, too, must learn to deal with the evil inside and around them. Whether they are able to do this, maybe with their traditions, I’ll leave for you to quietly experience through their indigenous eyes.

I have few complaints about Skins so honestly caught on camera in its filth and misery. The aura of the Wounded Knee Massacre (hey, is that why Rudy broke those punks’ knees?!) over a hundred years earlier lay thick over the ‘rez’ as we followed Rudy on the job. All the actors were American Indian, many never having acted before and sometimes I was reminded of one of the Billy Jack movies, but would I have preferred Hollywood actors? Hardly. Elaine Miles from Northern Exposure had a brief, rather wooden scene as well as a preachy pipe carrier.

Skins was based on a novel by Adrian C. Louis, screenplay by Jennifer D. Lyne. B.C. Smith, who also scored Smoke Signals, infuses the movie with a driving, soulful beat and Stephen Kazmierski’s cinematography showcases it wonderfully. At only 84 minutes or so, Skins is sometimes criticized for its mostly undiluted, ugly message that may seem too negative to handle, but for all American Indians, their story must be heard. They need us to care and help them out of the cycle of booze and violence. President Clinton was briefly shown in the movie’s beginning as he visited PineRidge, but he doesn’t seem to have cared enough to give them money owed them and the present warmonger in office cares only to create more dissipation for decades to come in another hapless nation.

Destroying nations, my friends, should not be a media event. In Skins there is a television reporter in White Clay, but her cold, flippant voice and Mogie’s privately sarcastic interview illustrates the depth of the separation between American Indians and…the rest of Americans.

Would our Founding Fathers even care? Would they shed a tear for those who were here before us, who languish under their sightless gaze, if they could only see them now?

Perhaps, though, they only represent us. We have the chance now as perhaps never before to see our native Americans just as they are in this R-rated movie. I’ve seen them and shed tears. I think you will, too.

Please visit macresarf1’s brilliant review of Skins if you’re still not convinced.


Recommended:
Yes

Viewing Format: VHS
Suitability For Children: Not suitable for Children of any age