**/****
directed by Daniel Junge
by Walter Chaw Sports as empowerment as heady a trip as sports as oppression (Columbine's real villain, after all, is a virulent administration-sanctioned jock culture), Chiefs follows a Wyoming Native American High School basketball team through two consecutive seasons of state championship basketball. Indians perhaps the most marginalized minority in terms of insensitive sports mascot stereotype and caricature (The Cleveland Indians' unforgivable Chief Wahoo, anyone?), that the documentary chooses to champion a team self-named "The Chiefs" is both interesting and thorny. (Enough so that when a more interesting film fails to emerge, Chiefs at the end bears the increased burden of expectation and disappointed anticipation.) Rather than take a good look at the open hatred and racism demonstrated by a few Wyoming yokels, Chiefs decides less interestingly to concentrate on a few Chiefs players and their struggle to get off the rez and/or into a college. A broader examination of the way sports can provide minorities a community and that community an identity (and, conversely, how sports can pervert that unifying power into something clannish and dangerous) is reduced by the picture into a somewhat standard look at disadvantaged youth. A worthy topic for sure, it's also an extremely familiar one. Chiefs, for every bracing game sequence, offers frankly too much spiritual mumbo-jumbo and confused narrative to justify its length and breadth.
