Smoke Signals is a charming road picture but not much more. These days, I guess that's enough for me to recommend it, but it could have been so much more. It has a comfortable sweetness but pulls back on the punch that has come to characterize other works from Aboriginal people, such as Drew Hayden Taylor's play Someday or Tomson Highway's The Rez Sisters. This is more like The Rez Lite.
The film opens in the Coeur d'Alene Indian Reservation in Idaho. The timelines bounces between the past and the present, when the two principal characters were boys, versus now, as adult acquaintances. Victor and Thomas (Adam Beach and Evan Adams), are indeed two very different people. Victor is a grumpy, haunted jock who has just found out that his father Arnold Joseph (Gary Farmer) has passed away. Thomas is the nerdy Urkel-like neighbour who loves to tell stories about other people to mask his own loneliness. Together, they embark on a trip to Phoenix to recover Arnold's ashes. As their journey unfolds, the flashbacks help shed some light as to why Victor has hardened his heart over the years, and infers how blame and guilt can force people into doing the wrong thing over and over again, despite their own better judgment.
It's based on Sherman Alexie's book The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, and a lot of the film's insights are quirky and offbeat. Victor and Thomas question what it means to be a modern-day Indian through passing references to prominent figures such as Geronimo, General Custer, and, naturally, the reviled Christopher Columbus. Sometimes it works, as in a scene when the pair breaks into an impromptu song about John Wayne's false teeth. In other places, however, it seems forced, such as when Thomas admits to Victor he has watched Dances With Wolves many times over.
There's nothing wrong with making comedies that are safe and un-obtrusive. Smoke Signals opts to approach life's complexities with a restrained but sometimes poignant tone. I just wish it could have gone a bit further. For example, in the opening scenes, the local radio station on the Rez cuts to its traffic reporter out on the field, and we next see a man sitting on a lawn chair on top of a vehicle waiting for cars to go by. "Two cars went by a few minutes ago," he retorts. See? Nothing ever happens on the Rez. I would have liked to have seen more of that.
