Woman Walks Ahead
Dec. 9th, 2018 08:20 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerI enjoyed Women Walks Ahead (for the value of “enjoy” that includes “suffered over its presentation of historical tragedy”) enough that after watching it, I gallivanted to the internet to read some of the history the movie is based on, which somewhat damaged my appreciation of the movie.
In the movie, Catherine Weldon is a recently widowed painter from New York; when we first meet her, she’s chucking a portrait of her deceased husband into the river. During her unhappy marriage, she couldn’t pursue her art, but now that her husband is gone she’s heading out to Standing Rock Reservation in hope of painting Sitting Bull.
To Weldon this goal is purely artistic, but other people take a more political viewpoint. On the train ride west, a man accuses her of being a spy for one of those Eastern organizations that keep stirring up trouble about things like “maybe the US government shouldn’t break treaties with the Sioux.”
But of course, once Weldon manages to meet Sitting Bull and he agrees to sit for her painting (she pays him a cool thousand dollars for the privilege), she does get embroiled in politics.
Jessica Chastain is good as Weldon, but Michael Greyeyes’ Sitting Bull is the real standout: he effortlessly integrates the many sides of a multifaceted character into a seamless whole. His Sitting Bull is a quiet potato farmer (although this one seems to be a pose designed to throw off annoying white people), a shrew bargainer, (that thousand dollars, remember), a man slightly vain of his famous connections (“This is the suit I wore to meet the president,” he tells Weldon, who is trying to hide her horror at the idea of painting the famous Sioux warrior in a plain black suit without a single feather) - a charmer with a puckish sense of humor who is also, when the need arises, a commanding leader.
Weldon is not quite his match (but then, how many people would be?) but she’s far from a pushover, and the great pleasure of the film comes from watching these two strong personalities verbally spar, getting the measure of each other and figuring out how to work together.
For instance, you’ve got Sitting Bull’s first portrait sitting: he’s agreed to change out of his presidential meeting suit into something a little more traditional (“For one thousand dollars, you should get your money’s worth,” he says) and he does so right in front of her. Now he knows perfectly well that it’s not the done thing to strip naked in front of white women; but they’re still testing each other, and he’s curious to see how she reacts. It’s confrontational but non-threatening: you don’t feel that the movie’s about to go all Game of Thrones on you.
(There are a couple of sexually threatening moments - involving racist white dudes who are enraged by Weldon’s involvement with the Sioux in general and Sitting Bull in particular - but it never goes full Game of Thrones.)
Now this is all well and good, but upon reading more about Weldon I discovered that her real life was actually even weirder and more unconventional than what the movie gives us, and now I feel a little cheated. The real Weldon wasn’t a widow; she was a divorcee who left her husband for a married man, with whom she had an illegitimate child - only for her lover to leave her, at which point Weldon and her son moved back in with Weldon’s mother.
Over the next decade, Weldon got interested in Indian affairs, joined the National Indian Defense Association (NIDA), and then moved out to Standing Rock Reservation (son in tow) to aid Sitting Bull in his fight for Sioux rights, and also kind of incidentally painted his portrait.
Now I can see why the movie trimmed some of these details: a twelve-year-old son might chew up a lot of screen time. But on the whole - why tell a story about a widowed artist who stumbles into activism when you could tell a story about a passionately committed activist divorcee who paints some portraits on the side?
In the movie, Catherine Weldon is a recently widowed painter from New York; when we first meet her, she’s chucking a portrait of her deceased husband into the river. During her unhappy marriage, she couldn’t pursue her art, but now that her husband is gone she’s heading out to Standing Rock Reservation in hope of painting Sitting Bull.
To Weldon this goal is purely artistic, but other people take a more political viewpoint. On the train ride west, a man accuses her of being a spy for one of those Eastern organizations that keep stirring up trouble about things like “maybe the US government shouldn’t break treaties with the Sioux.”
But of course, once Weldon manages to meet Sitting Bull and he agrees to sit for her painting (she pays him a cool thousand dollars for the privilege), she does get embroiled in politics.
Jessica Chastain is good as Weldon, but Michael Greyeyes’ Sitting Bull is the real standout: he effortlessly integrates the many sides of a multifaceted character into a seamless whole. His Sitting Bull is a quiet potato farmer (although this one seems to be a pose designed to throw off annoying white people), a shrew bargainer, (that thousand dollars, remember), a man slightly vain of his famous connections (“This is the suit I wore to meet the president,” he tells Weldon, who is trying to hide her horror at the idea of painting the famous Sioux warrior in a plain black suit without a single feather) - a charmer with a puckish sense of humor who is also, when the need arises, a commanding leader.
Weldon is not quite his match (but then, how many people would be?) but she’s far from a pushover, and the great pleasure of the film comes from watching these two strong personalities verbally spar, getting the measure of each other and figuring out how to work together.
For instance, you’ve got Sitting Bull’s first portrait sitting: he’s agreed to change out of his presidential meeting suit into something a little more traditional (“For one thousand dollars, you should get your money’s worth,” he says) and he does so right in front of her. Now he knows perfectly well that it’s not the done thing to strip naked in front of white women; but they’re still testing each other, and he’s curious to see how she reacts. It’s confrontational but non-threatening: you don’t feel that the movie’s about to go all Game of Thrones on you.
(There are a couple of sexually threatening moments - involving racist white dudes who are enraged by Weldon’s involvement with the Sioux in general and Sitting Bull in particular - but it never goes full Game of Thrones.)
Now this is all well and good, but upon reading more about Weldon I discovered that her real life was actually even weirder and more unconventional than what the movie gives us, and now I feel a little cheated. The real Weldon wasn’t a widow; she was a divorcee who left her husband for a married man, with whom she had an illegitimate child - only for her lover to leave her, at which point Weldon and her son moved back in with Weldon’s mother.
Over the next decade, Weldon got interested in Indian affairs, joined the National Indian Defense Association (NIDA), and then moved out to Standing Rock Reservation (son in tow) to aid Sitting Bull in his fight for Sioux rights, and also kind of incidentally painted his portrait.
Now I can see why the movie trimmed some of these details: a twelve-year-old son might chew up a lot of screen time. But on the whole - why tell a story about a widowed artist who stumbles into activism when you could tell a story about a passionately committed activist divorcee who paints some portraits on the side?
