Movie Review

Lily Gladstone leads fine cast in Native American drama Fancy Dance

Isabel Deroy-Olson and Lily Gladstone star in Fancy Dance.

Photo courtesy of Apple TV+

Movies focused on Native Americans are in too short supply, and those that do get made tend to focus on the sins of the past, not the realities of modern-day life for them. After getting an Oscar nomination for one of those former types of stories in Killers of the Flower Moon, actor Lily Gladstone is back with a latter type in Fancy Dance.

Gladstone plays Jax Goodiron (Lily Gladstone), who lives on the Seneca-Cayuga reservation in Oklahoma with her niece, Roki (Isabel Deroy-Wilson). Tawi, Roki’s mother and Jax’s sister, has gone missing, leaving Jax to take care of her as best she can. As we soon see, though, that care involves lots of scamming and stealing, an unsavory way of surviving that is unfortunately part of their reality.

Tawi’s disappearance and Jax being deemed an unfit guardian causes Child Protective Services to place Roki with her white grandfather, Frank (Shea Whigham), and his wife, Nancy (Audrey Wasilewski). Knowing how important it is for Roki to attend the tribe’s annual powwow, where she has danced with her mother several times before, Jax sneaks her out of Frank’s house. However, Jax’s determination to find out what happened to Tawi, as well the authorities issuing an Amber Alert for Roki, makes their journey extra difficult.

Written and directed by Erica Tremblay (a member of the Seneca-Cayuga tribe herself), and co-written by Miciana Alise, the film does a solid job of showing the challenges Jax and others like her face in the world without making the story overly maudlin. Jax is shown to be a hustler from the very first scene in the film, and the fact that she ropes Roki into her schemes makes the crimes they commit difficult to swallow for viewers.

But each of the misdeeds is in service of helping their goals, and are also weighed against the trauma they are experiencing with Tawi’s disappearance. Tremblay has a subtle touch when it comes to the larger topic of missing Native women not being a priority for law enforcement. She makes the shameful idea a constant part of the film without pressing so hard that the outrage turns into a sermon.

Even though the film tells a very specific story, the experience of the various family members is universal enough to keep it from being siloed off from the rest of the world. Nearly everyone can relate to the bond Jax and Roki share, the pain of losing a loved one, or the frustration of a parent not living up to expectations. If anything, the details of being part of the Seneca-Cayuga tribe make those elements even more powerful.

While Gladstone was worthy of her Oscar nomination for Killers of the Flower Moon, the character she played was often hard to read. Although she’s not very expressive in this role, she brings all the requisite emotions out of the character, giving her a lot of depth. Deroy-Olson, who resembles a young Natalie Portman, gives a lived-in performance despite her relative lack of acting experience. Whigham, Wasilewski, and Ryan Begay as JJ, a tribal police officer, also bring a lot to their supporting roles.

Streaming channels like Apple TV+ have been part of the decline in attendance at movie theaters, but the big positive they have brought is the ability for films like Fancy Dance to find a wider audience than they might otherwise. It also gives fine actors like Gladstone and Deroy-Olson more opportunities to showcase their talents, hopefully leading to even more roles in the future.

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Fancy Dance is now playing in select theaters and streaming on Apple TV+.

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Movie Review

Meta-comedy remake Anaconda coils itself into an unfunny mess

Photo by Matt Grace

Jack Black and Paul Rudd in Anaconda.

In Hollywood’s never-ending quest to take advantage of existing intellectual property, seemingly no older movie is off limits, even if the original was not well-regarded. That’s certainly the case with 1997’s Anaconda, which is best known for being a lesser entry on the filmography of Ice Cube and Jennifer Lopez, as well as some horrendous accent work by Jon Voight.

The idea behind the new meta-sequel Anaconda is arguably a good one. Four friends — Doug (Jack Black), Griff (Paul Rudd), Claire (Thandiwe Newton), and Kenny (Steve Zahn) — who made homemade movies when they were teenagers decide to remake Anaconda on a shoestring budget. Egged on by Griff, an actor who can’t catch a break, the four of them pull together enough money to fly down to Brazil, hire a boat, and film a script written by Doug.

Naturally, almost nothing goes as planned in the Amazon, including losing their trained snake and running headlong into a criminal enterprise. Soon enough, everything else takes second place to the presence of a giant anaconda that is stalking them and anyone else who crosses its path.

Written and directed by Tom Gormican, with help from co-writer Kevin Etten, the film is designed to be an outrageous comedy peppered with laugh-out-loud moments that cover up the fact that there’s really no story. That would be all well and good … if anything the film had to offer was truly funny. Only a few scenes elicit any honest laughter, and so instead the audience is fed half-baked jokes, a story with no focus, and actors who ham it up to get any kind of reaction.

The biggest problem is that the meta-ness of the film goes too far. None of the core four characters possess any interesting traits, and their blandness is transferred over to the actors playing them. And so even as they face some harrowing situations or ones that could be funny, it’s difficult to care about anything they do since the filmmakers never make the basic effort of making the audience care about them.

It’s weird to say in a movie called Anaconda, but it becomes much too focused on the snake in the second half of the film. If the goal is to be a straight-up comedy, then everything up to and including the snake attacks should be serving that objective. But most of the time the attacks are either random or moments when the characters are already scared, and so any humor that could be mined all but disappears.

Black and Rudd are comedy all-stars who can typically be counted on to elevate even subpar material. That’s not the case here, as each only scores on a few occasions, with Black’s physicality being the funniest thing in the movie. Newton is not a good fit with this type of movie, and she isn’t done any favors by some seriously bad wigs. Zahn used to be the go-to guy for funny sidekicks, but he brings little to the table in this role.

Any attempt at rebooting/remaking an old piece of IP should make a concerted effort to differentiate itself from the original, and in that way, the new Anaconda succeeds. Unfortunately, that’s its only success, as the filmmakers can never find the right balance to turn it into the bawdy comedy they seemed to want.

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Anaconda is now playing in theaters.

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