This means getting him to get rid of the nerdy looking business suit he wears and his braids. Victor is also on a reclamation project to make Thomas look "more Indian". Thomas is also a visionary and a story-teller, who occasionally drives Victor to distraction with his spontaneous Shaman-like tales. Victor is a suspicious and angry young man who excels in sports, while Thomas is warm, accepting and physically unprepossessing. Structured around a series of flashbacks, we see Alvin trying to impress the young Victor with magic tricks while in the next moment slapping his face for accidentally spilling some beer.ĭuring a long bus ride, Victor and Thomas discuss what it means to be an Indian as well as what it means to be a human being in the larger sense. This act lends a certain grandeur to Alvin in Thomas's eyes, but for Victor his father is just a wife-beating drunk. Thomas is rescued by Alvin, who catches him from a second story window. The infants Thomas and Victor are saved from the fire but Thomas's parents die in the flames. While guests are asleep following a drunken party at the house of Thomas's parents on the fourth of July in 1976, Alvin accidentally starts a fire with a sparkler he is waving drunkenly. Their relation to each other and to Victor's dead father supplies the central dramatic impulse for the film. Thomas, whom Victor regards as something of a pest, pleads to be taken along. Victor's father Arnold (Gary Farmer) has just died and Victor is sent to return his ashes to the reservation. Structured as a picaresque "road movie", "Smoke Signals" (based on Alexie's short story collection "The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven") depicts a journey from the Coeur D'Alene reservation in Idaho to Phoenix by two teen-aged Indians, Victor Joseph (Adam Beach) and Thomas Builds-the-Fire (Evan Adams). It evokes William Blake's lines in "Auguries of Innocence": While lacking the big budget elements of the plastic commercial blockbusters featuring Arnold or Tom or Julia, it is from another perspective much grander than those types of films. Written by Coeur D'Alene Sherman Alexie, directed by Cheyenne/Arapaho Chris Eyre and starring American Indians, "Smoke Signals" is a deceptively "small" movie.
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