Smoke Signals
February 19, 2009
Back in college I had read Sherman Alexie’s very good book The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven. It is a series of vignettes and short stories about life on a reservation, in format somewhat similar to The House on Mango Street. It is a very accessible book, its stories deftly-spun and moving. I knew at the time they had made a movie of it, but hadn’t gotten around to watching it until just last week.
I recommend it.
The film is called Smoke Signals, and it does a very good job of selecting a single strand of narrative from the book’s tangled skein and running with it. It lacks starpower (Tom Skerrit is in the film for 5 minutes, and you’ve never heard of anyone else in the movie), and the production values are minimal, but it is just about the most accessible independent film you’ll ever see, eschewing convoluted narrative structures, experimentation with cinematic techniques, or bizarre symbolism in favor of a well-told tale from a fresh perspective.
