Screenwriter Steven Knight and director Susanna White have here created juicy roles for Jessica Chastain and the charismatic Canadian actor Michael Greyeyes. It is an intriguing story from real life: with brutal moments, underpinned by a sturdily liberal and humanist balance in its portrayal of an important and little-known encounter between a white woman and a Native American. These were the artist-activist Catherine Weldon and the Sioux leader Sitting Bull, whom Weldon set out to paint while living with him and the Sioux tribe — to the horrified disgust of the military and civilian pioneers who suspected a subversive political intent.
In truth, this movie appears to have softened and straightened out the historical record a little, making Weldon a widow when the facts were more complicated, and turning its heroine into someone a little more naïve politically than appears actually to have been the case. The film depicts her as a slightly memsahib-ish idealist who journeyed out to the dangerous territories with her trunk full of canvas and brushes, and who became a partisan for the Native Americans only after putting into practice her quixotic and romantic plan of painting Sitting Bull’s portrait. In real life, her political ideals seem to have been in existence at the same time as her artistic ambitions. But however fictionalised, the film does show that art is political: painting Sitting Bull’s portrait is a public act of sympathy with unavoidable political consequences.
Jessica Chastain’s Weldon is tough and yet naïve, someone who appears initially baffled and affronted by the hostility her ambitions arouse among her fellow whites. Sam Rockwell plays a local military man who is sneeringly contemptuous of her and who is incidentally engaged in a plan to starve the Native Americans into submission, reducing the rations available to those on the Reservation in return for legally signing away a good deal of their land rights.
Michael Greyeyes himself is a calm, yet brooding figure as Sitting Bull, almost like Napoleon at St Helena, the great military commander reduced to a quasi-retirement, digging potatoes and accepting a future of farming, rather than hunting – on land given on the white man’s say-so. He meets cute with Caroline: she patronisingly tries to address him in a kind of pidgin English, talking about coming over many rivers and valleys to see him. “So – you came here on the New York train?” asks Sitting Bull sardonically. It is an amusing scene. (I wonder if Steven Knight was inspired by the moment in Crocodile Dundee when the native Australian tells Sue that she can’t take his photograph: “You believe it’ll take your spirit away?” – “No you’ve got the lens cap on.”)
This Sitting Bull, so far from being the noble savage condescendingly imagined by the well-meaning white, is in fact a complex leader and savvy operator who agrees to be painted for a $1000 fee, which he in fact returns to Caroline and which she uses to buy their provisions. He also is an artist himself, having drawn autobiographical scenes from his own life.
The drama is always in danger of becoming a slightly bland and platonic romance, but the movie produces a couple of violent but atypical flourishes in order to reassert its reality. One settler sneers in Caroline’s face that he hopes the “Indians” will “fuck” her and later some townsfolk hit her in the head with a rock and beat her savagely in an alleyway. These are shockingly brutal if fleeting moments, scenes and Caroline has also been told about the locals’ revulsion for the warriors’ predilection for scalping their victims. Her association with them is a taboo-transgression which the whites cannot forgive, and there is perhaps a faint echo of John Ford’s The Searchers here. Woman Walks Ahead is a solidly crafted and well shot, if basically unchallenging film.
- Woman Walks Ahead is screening at the Toronto film festival with a release date yet to be announced
