A man's buried past returns with the arrival of a childhood friend whose crime he once helped cover up.
Review by
Benjamin Poole
Directed by: Lyle Mitchell Corbine Jr
Starring: Michael Greyeyes, Chaske Spencer, Jesse Eisenberg, Kate Bosworth, Lisa Cromarty, Hilario
Garcia III
In the cinema of our imaginations, we are always the headline star in the
ongoing movie of life; playing protagonists who are perhaps flawed, but
ultimately the ‘good guy’ in the unfolding narratives of existence. But
this self-perpetuating heroism is only possible via essential
confabulations, where we convince ourselves of our integrity, and forgive
our own trespasses. The sort of moral fabrications which a genuinely
terrible misdeed on our parts would make nigh on impossible to pull off.
You can’t be the good guy if you’ve killed someone drunk driving, or
murdered someone in a bar fight: how would you live with yourself?
Honestly, I think I’d rather be deceased myself than deal with the horror
of someone’s death being my fault.
With that, my favourite sort of stories are the ones which explore the
reoccurrence of repressed guilt, when a character does something utterly
awful, covers it up and has to find a way to square it moving forward, all
the while with the inescapable past snapping at their heels. 2018’s
Calibre
is a stomach-churning example of this sort of plot, and writer/director
Lyle Mitchell Corbine Jr.’s Wild Indian is a similar
proposition, applying the amaranthine ‘return of the repressed’ premise
within Ojibwe social contexts, probing the evergreen issues of guilt and
responsibility within frameworks of societal cultures and identity.
We begin in the 1980s. Mokwa and Ted-O are young boys who live on a
Wisconsin reservation. Mokwa’s home life is miserable, with an abusive
father who instils a quiet and simmering rage in the kid. This anger
expresses itself when, one day, while out shooting cans with his pal,
Mokwa turns the gun on another boy in the woods and kills him dead. Ted-O
reluctantly helps Mokwa bury the body and the deed is done.
Years later, the ramifications of their actions have manifested in
different ways. Mokwa (Michael Greyeyes) has seemingly erased the
person he was, burying him under the ‘Western’ values and ideologies he
has fully taken on. His name is now Mike, he’s married
Kate Bosworth and he’s a swinging dick at some important office job
in the city. Ted-O (Chaske Spencer), however, is in and out of
jail, the barely suppressed remorse of what he did as a child weighing him
down as much as it gave ‘Mike’ something to run from.
Enough is enough, and Ted-O resolves to catch up with both Mokwa and the
truth of their past. The film customarily draws parallels between the
characters, and, intriguingly, attempts to link their destinies to their
cultural origins. Ted-O is still in contact with his family, while Mike
was given extra purpose to leave his vituperative home. Ted-O is a
recidivist, while Mike is a professional with a baby on the way. In a
furious projection which vocalises this subtext, Ted-O has a right old go
at the Ojibwe formerly known as Mokwa, telling him he’s the ‘Fakest
fucking Indian I’ve ever seen’.
However, while the concepts which underpin Wild Indian are
rich and potentially interesting, the treatment afforded to them is
ultimately unsatisfying. As Ted-O duly tracks down the now possibly
sociopathic Mike, the film itself seems propelled by a similar sense of
ruthless urgency, which it indulges at the expense of its ideas and
themes. As if the sad violence of the first scenes is something which the
film itself turns away from in revulsion, in the uncomfortable knowledge
that such a pointless and cruel act can never truly be reckoned with,
whether onscreen or in our inner psyche.
Wild Indian is in UK/ROI cinemas and on VOD from October 29th.
