Skins (2002)

*/****
starring Eric Schweig, Graham Greene, Gary Farmer, Noah Watts
screenplay by Jennifer D. Lyne, based on the novel by Adrian C. Louis
directed by Chris Eyre

by Walter Chaw There is palpable desperation in Skins, director Chris Eyre’s broad follow-up to his well-received Smoke Signals, but that desperation is not so much a reflection of the plight of the film’s Native American characters as a result of Eyre’s yen to expose the tragedy of the Native American experience. Skins is far from an effective exposé of the calamity of the Ogallala Sioux–it founders badly as a pulpit-pounding vanity piece, playing its cards loose and proselytizing. A picture this badly written, transparently directed, and–save a pair of decent performances in its two main roles–dreadfully acted is a tune best received and appreciated by a very specific choir and likely no other. While a nearly all-Native American cast and crew is certainly a refreshing accomplishment, one is left to wonder if the picture needed to be so much specifically for an all-Native American audience–and a limited one at that. Skins, in other words, is a pretty good rant, but a pretty bad movie.

Mogie (Graham Greene) is an alcoholic Native American who lives (we’re informed in an opening faux broadcast-news vignette) in the poorest county in the country: the site of the Wounded Knee massacre, just sixty miles south of tacky tourist mecca Mt. Rushmore. That it’s set at Wounded Knee is only the first keening clarion pronouncement that Skins will attempt irony and outrage; the introduction of Mogie’s brother Rudy (Eric Schweig) as a clean-living Reservation cop-turned-vigilante, however, announces that Skins will cross the line from satire into farce. When one of Rudy’s face-blacked acts of criminal mischief (assault with a deadly weapon, arson–ha ha!) results in the tragic disfigurement of his soused brother, Rudy is forced to re-examine…no, he isn’t. The first and last problem of Skins is that Rudy is the good guy–not so much misguided as poorly aimed. His target shouldn’t be drunken teens and liquor stores; his target should be national monuments at the silent urging of his Vietnam-demented brother.

There’s clearly no shortage of anger in the picture, and while I’m sympathetic to the tendency for oppressed peoples to make art that is furious, if furiously simplistic (see also, among countless others, Nawal Saadawi’s oft-studied and extraordinarily poor Woman at Point Zero), the lack of moderation and, ultimately, the transparency of intention in Skins renders the whole project something less insightful than actually hateful. While I’m not arguing the primogenitor role of the White Man in the subjugation (that continues today with certain professional sports mascots) and massacre of the Native American, at some point a culture has to claim its share of culpability for its continued depression and isolation. Failing that, the only solution (as Skins implies) is a violent uprising, leading to the eventual bloody restoration of this continent’s aboriginal people. An intoxicating possibility for the arrested few, in an environment in which terrorism has gained some level of poignancy I’m relatively certain that a scene in which a highly recognizable landmark is defaced will strike less as uplifting than irresponsible.

Greene and Schweig do their best in their respective orbits: the one the prototypical drunken vet, the other the haunted man of peace (more is done to fill in the backstory of the latter than the former, leading to the disturbing realization that Signs is reliant itself on certain pejorative racial stereotypes)–but the supporting players are so uniformly awful (including longtime offender Elaine Miles, somehow worse here than she was in six years of “Northern Exposure”) that it’s impossible to forget that the picture is one voice railing an unsurprising harangue. It’s even difficult to say that the intention of the film is at least well-meant in that its ultimate message is that to honour the dead and one’s culture, one must direct violence and mayhem outward against the conquering “other.” Without discounting by one iota the righteousness of this voice, it remains vital that we are able to identify propaganda masquerading as art. Skins has a right to yawp, and we have a right to our grains of salt.