Buried in History

Virginia Woolf once wrote that after reading some novels, she felt she was expected to reach for her checkbook. HBO's new film, "Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee," which airs Sunday, makes you feel that way, except that you don't know where to send the check.

Dee Brown's 1971 book, "Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee — An Indian History of the American West," is a landmark in American popular history, an enormous best seller that has retained its reputation as a work of scholarship. Taking its title from a poem by Stephen Vincent Benet ("I shall be there. I shall rise and pass. Bury my heart at wounded knee"), Brown's history of the Whites and Plains Indians ends with the massacre on December 29, 1890, of hundreds of Lakota men, women, and children at Wounded Knee Creek in South Dakota. The book was unique in telling the story of the frontier from the Indian perspective using journals, letters, and recorded interviews, backed up by documentation from American government sources. Never before had white America seen such a lucid and detailed record of the conquest of North America laid out before it.

HBO's film, though, can accommodate only the last two chapters — just 30 pages of the entire book — to tell more than two centuries of story. Shot with breathtaking clarity in Alberta, Canada, and directed by Yves Simoneau in an almost reverential tone — perhaps touch too reverential — "Bury My Heart" trods the treacherous path already taken by other dramas based on nonfiction books, such as "Son of the Morning Star." The problem, as always, is how to remain faithful to history while maintaining a compelling dramatic narrative. "Bury My Heart" succeeds in the latter, but at the expense of the known facts.

The script, by Daniel Giat, makes too liberal use of the bane of the historical drama: the dreaded composite character. In this case, the handsome and talented Adam Beach (who, after playing a Navajo Marine in "Windtalkers" and as Ira Hayes in "Flags of Our Fathers," is becoming the go-to guy for Indian roles) plays Charles Eastman, a real-life Santee Indian who received an Ivy League education and who, at the beginning of the 20th century, represented the aspirations of assimilationists. The real Eastman was not, as the film portrays him, at the 1876 Battle of the Little Big Horn as a boy or at Wounded Knee in 1890 (indeed, he does not figure in Brown's book at all). Apparently feeling that the story required a window into both white and Indian cultures, Mr. Giat has written Eastman into every aspect of the story, including an early friendship with Massachusetts Senator Henry Dawes, the most dedicated Indian advocate in the Senate, which did not come about until years after Wounded Knee. Having done this, Messrs. Simoneau and Giat give Beach little to do apart from appear increasingly disillusioned as the story progresses to the final massacre.

Aidan Quinn, as Dawes, has the ever-thankless role of tortured white liberal; the same can be said of Anna Paquin as Elaine Goodale, a teacher who later became Eastman's wife and who, the script seems to imply, is more attuned to the needs of the Sioux than white men simply because she is female. The appropriately named August Schellenberg plays Sitting Bull with fitting dignity, but the script doesn't allow him to explore the enigma of a man who toured with Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show and signed autographs at Coney Island while remaining for many the most visible symbol of Plains Indian resistance.

In the entire cast, only two actors make vivid impressions: presidential hopeful Fred Thompson as a gruff but sympathetic President Grant and Wes Studi — and what would a film on American Indians be without Wes Studi? — as Wovoka, the real-life Sioux shaman who led his people in the Ghost Dance, which inadvertently triggered the final bloodbath.

Despite its good intentions, "Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee" tries to jam too much history and significance into too small a space. For instance, the entire prickly issue of whether the Sioux were a predatory people who took their sacred Black Hills territory from the Crow — and, trust me, I've heard that question debated by members of both tribes, and as a white person you wouldn't want to touch it with a 10-foot lance — is compressed into a few lines of dialogue between Sitting Bull and Colonel Miles (played by a grim-visage Shaun Johnston). Insults, humiliations, and atrocities to the American Indians become so common that the conflagration at Wounded Knee seems almost anticlimactic. (Mr. Simoneau's restraint in the Wounded Knee scenes is in sharp contrast to Joe Johnston's horrific imagery of the slaughter in 2004's "Hidalgo.")

"Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee" differs from an earlier generation's view of the 19th-century white-Indian wars in one definite respect. Films such as 1970's "Little Big Man" expressed the polarized politics of the Vietnam era — the slaughter of the Indians by Custer at the Washita Valley, for instance, was made to look like My Lai, and there was no question about what the audience's reaction was supposed to be. In the HBO film, there's no clear idea of who was right or wrong or even how the fight started. "I swear," a weeping soldier says to Eastman, "we didn't fire the first shot, sir." The conflict, it seems, was the result of faulty intelligence and cultural ignorance. This explanation will be understood by a generation growing up with the war in Iraq.