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I work as a psychotherapist with adolescents and young adults. I use “Smoke Signals” with them by assigning them to rent and view the movie, which is always enjoyable because it’s witty, humorous, wise, and significant. The movie poses two essential questions: 1) If someone else has mistreated, hurt, abandoned, or disrespected you, is it possible to forgive them if they’ve NEVER asked forgiveness, never done anything to “put it right,” never returned in atonement to undo the damage, and never begtun to deserve it? And 2) if it *is* possible–and it may not be–SHOULD you? Because if you do, doesn’t that just make you a willing victim by letting them “get away” with what they did, and pretending the relationship is okay again?
Victor lives in the tension of this dilemma. As a 12-year-old youth, he witnessed the effects of alcohol on his family. His father vascillated between being loving and instantly “turning” to become hostile, violent, and humiliating to the young boy. Victor finds himself becoming more deeply embarrassed by his family’s domestic abuse and alcohol use, even defiantly scolding his own father that his favorite Indian is “Nobody…nobody…nobody!”
Victor’s mother awakens the next morning to see Victor angrily smashing his father’s beer bottles on the back of his father’s picup truck (the two things he believes his father loves more than him), and the epiphany stuns the mother, who insists on an immediate end to family drunkenness. Proving Victor’s fears true, the father–forced to choose between alcohol and family–flees the family, and never returns. It is within that unchanged arrangement that his father dies, 8 years later, having never returned home.
Victor and his oddball companion Thomas make a side-splittingly funny journey south from Idaho to Phoenix together to make arrangements for the father’s possessions, confronted by the racism, peculiarities, and hostilities of the non-Indian “outside” world. Thomas, having never seen the dark side of Victor’s father, irritates Victor with incessant stories and tales about the dad’s greatness.
Victor, having been so deeply wounded and sold-out by his father’s abandonment, has become tough, fierce, aggressive…and lonely. “You can’t trust anyone!” he scolds. “People will walk all over you!” His mistrust poisons his friendships, family, and feelings about his father. He’s become just another tough guy, hardened by family violence and substance use.
In Phoenix, Victor finds an essential artifact of his father’s life: a worn-out photo with “HOME” written sloppily on it. At once, Victor begins to realize that his father’s fatal flaw was COWARDICE: the father could confess his sins to new companions a thousand miles from home, but could never return home and undo the damage he’d caused. And so his son has suffered for 8 years. Victor begins to realize that he himself is allowing his actions to damage others, and that it is cowardice, not manly independence, that controls his decision to remain distant and fierce.
Victor slowly begins to repent of his own abusive toughness, cutting his hair in symbolic repentance (traditional hair-cutting is done either in grief, or in repentence for shameful behavior). The process of discovery continues when Thomas angrily confronts Victor about Victor’s own behavior: remaining cold and distant from his own mother, acting forceful and ruthless to others, etc.
Victor ends the film by freeing himself of his 8-year hostility toward his unforgiven father, and in that final act of forgiveness we find that the greatest benefit is for VICTOR, who becomes kinder, funnier, gentler, and more confident in his friendships. The significance of forgiveness, he learns, isn’t to let someone else off the hook, but to let one’s own self off the hook of the pain caused by another, rather than carrying that pain inside for years.
In the final scene, this release of aged anger is represented by the cathartic release of his father’s ashes into a river, meaningfully shown in film montage as expanding in power from streams into torrents, much like the energy of either a person enraged or a person set free.
It is at the end of the film that we really begin to understand Thomas’ original cryptic remark at the beginning, “Some children aren’t really children at all. They’re just pillars of flame that burn everything they touch. And some children are just pillars of ash, and they fall apart as soon as you touch them.”
Not one single person yet who’s watched this film at my urging has disliked it.
“Smoke Signals” was the first movie to be written, directed, and co-produced by a Native American. It is based on the novel “The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven” by Sherman Alexie, who also published a movie adaptation of “Smoke Signals” as well.
The majority of the cast is from a variety of Canadian First Nations tribes (Coast Salish, Cree, Cayuga, Ojibwa), so there are different cultural backgrounds at work as well. “Smoke Signals” is a journey of the heart, an exploration of what it means to be Indian, venturing into the world outside the rez. Thomas’s stories are part Indian legend, part reweaving of the facts surrounding Victor and his father.
The story follows Victor Joseph as he goes to collect the remains of his father, who had abandoned his family and moved to Arizona (the film’s working title was “This Is What It Means To Say Phoenix, Arizona,” based on a chapter of “The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven.” His wise friend Thomas Builds-the-Fire goes with him on a trip from their rez in Coeur-d’Alene, Idaho to Arnold Joseph’s trailer in Arizona. Along the way they rediscover their pasts and their perceptions of the world around them.
An unusual, touching film that pokes fun at the stoic Indian stereotypes endorsed by Hollywood for decades, such as the “It’s a good day to die” line. There are many notable First Nations actors (Adam Beach, Evan Adams, Tantoo Cardinal, Irene Bedard, Gary Farmer, Elaine Miles) that make this film a joy to watch. Inspired performances from all, especially Adam Beach and Gary Farmer. This is my favourite film of the last few years as it never loses its humour, mystical side, and beauty.
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