Week 6: Grand Avenue (1996)

Grand Avenue (1996)



Director: Daniel Sackheim
Producer: Greg Sarris, Robert Redford
Writer: Greg Sarris
Rating: R



Watch online: (through blockbuster) http://www.blockbuster.com/browse/catalog/movieDetails/118257



Review: http://www.amartinez.com/Reviews.html



by Michael Dorris


"In the popular imagination, American Indians have usually been defined in the past tense. There's a museum mustiness in the treatment of native peoples in films, an approach that tends toward over-reverent, one-dimensional characterizations, predictable story lines and nostalgia for the good old days of an Eden before European contact. From "F Troop" to the more recent well-intentioned but stultifying TNT cable network movies honoring native people past and present, Hollywood Indians generally lack the vibrancy and immediacy of flesh and blood human beings. They stand for ideas rather than have them on their own.



"Grand Avenue," an HBO "original drama event" that has Its premiere tonight at 8, does not avoid all of the genre's pitfalls, but it takes a giant step toward offering a gritty and unsparing depiction of contemporary urban Indian life. Based upon Greg Sarris's stunning 1995 collection of interrelated short stories of the same title-and adapted by Mr. Sarris-the three-hour presentation turns a reverse telescope on a situation that's invisible to most Americans but a reality for approximately half of this nation's 2.2 million Indians.



What, native artists are often asked, constitutes the "Indian" in their work? Take away the beads and feathers, take away the brave on horseback framed by a sun set, take away the fringe and the broken English and the faraway look in the eye, and what's left?



Unlike movies such as "Dances With Wolves" and "Pocahontas," "Grand Avenue" has the courage to propose an answer to these questions. The men and women who inhabit this intricately woven tale are in many senses "modern Americans." They watch television, eat fast food, dress like everyone else. They speak an idiomatic slang that reflects a lack of high-quality formal education rather than a stilted jargon created by some non-lndian screenwriter. They face the same problems that others in their economic strata do: inadequate child care, unsafe streets, a lack of opportunity. And yet they are, to the eye who knows how to recognize them, undeniably "Indian."



As people related by blood and common experience, their ultimate strength, as well as their immediate liability, is their staunch refusal to criticize one another-which is to say they accept fallibility, accept human frailty, accept failure, as part of life. They never give up on the possibility of redemption, these flawed but brave individuals. They're always starting over, drawing from a seemingly inexhaustible well of crazy optimism, as if they believe that next time, through an uncontrollable chain of circumstances, everything will work out fine, all the dreams will come true, all the promises will be kept.



There are many ways psychologists could describe this syndrome, this against-all-odds belief in hope, but the words that the characters in "Grand Avenue" would use, the words that the people upon whom the book and the screenplay are based might use, are simply "unconditional love."



The idea for a film of "Grand Avenue" originated at Robert Redford's Sundance Institute, and the film is the first television project of Mr. Redford's Wildwood Enterprises, with Elsboy Entertainment (he is executive producer with Paul Aaron and Rachel Pfeffer). HBO has given the drama first-class backing. Under the direction of Dan Sackheim (an Emmy Award winner for his work on "N.Y.P.D Blue"), the rather episodic plot flows smoothly, and the music by Peter Melnick, which Is performed by Rita Coolidge, provides an understated, enhancing ambiance.



Set primarily in a Santa Rosa, California, neighborhood populated by blacks, Hispanics and off-reservaaon Indians, "Grand Avenue" follows the fortunes of three interrelated families as they struggle to survive a series of catastrophes. Mollie (Sheila Tousey), a Pomo woman with three children-Justine (Deeny Dakota), Alice (Dianne Debassige) and Sheldon (Cody Lightning)-returns to the town of her birth after the death of her husband on a Lokaya reservation. Aided by her cousin Anna (Jenny Gago), she sets up housekeeping in a run down rental house. In no time, Mollie loses her job as a motel maid, the sexually active Justine gets involved with a gang member and an old boyfriend surfaces. He is Steven Toms (A Martinez), an upwardly mobile teacher married to an Apache woman.



Two characters stand in sharp contrast to the tempestuous doings of the rest of the neighborhood. Nellie (Tantoo Cardinal) is a serene medicine woman, gardener and traditional Pomo basket-weaver. Her immaculate house is proof of her mental stability; her pressed ribbon dresses advertise her ties to her Indian roots. She takes an interest in Alice, Mollie's second daughter, and teaches her the craft of basket-making, suggesting that amid all the distractions of contemporary life, a continuity with a tribal past will be kept alive.



Alice is the single most interesting element m "Grand Avenue." She is a survivor, a girl forced to grow up too quickly but a person who resists the loss of a basic innocence. Clearly she has stepped into the mothering role vacated by the often weak and self-pitying Mollie, and manages to communicate a quiet, uncomplaining strength in times of crisis. She more than anyone else holds the family together, and the startlingly fresh and powerful performance by Ms. Debassige anchors the film and gives it a deep resonance.



Mr. Sarris, who in his many roles (writer, adapter, co-producer) might be considered the auteur of "Grand Avenue," knows whereof he speaks. A professor of literature at the University of Caiifornia at Los Angeles and of Irish, Fllipino, Jewish, Pomo and Miwok background, he grew up in Santa Rosa and experienced the turbuIence of its mean streets firsthand. He is the author of several scholarly works; his fiction debut, "Grand Avenue," drew rave reviews for its Iyricism and insight into the complex psychology of contemporary Indian life.



His influence in the film surfaces in many subtle but authentic ways: the casual notice of a woman cooking fry bread on the stove, the right choice of a particular new dress that Mollie selects, the quiet acceptance of hardship and the surprise at good fortune evinced by men and women used to being down on their luck. One hopes that viewers of "Grand Avenue" will be motivated to seek out the more fully realized version of the story, his heart-wrenching book.



"Grand Avenue" makes no excuses for its melodramatic plot twists; urban strife is not delicate. Events on the street jag and dip like a seismograph during an earthquake. Almost as in physics, each action has an equal and opposite reaction, each tentative step forward away from despair is answered by seemingly random violence, bad luck or insurmountable odds. The only element always found in American Indian communities that is largely missing from the film is the survival humor, the shared, forced comedy to which Indian people must so often resort and that is missed or misunderstood by most mainstream observers.



Perhaps the symmetries of "Grand Avenue" are a bit neat and strained-the film begins with a funeral and ends with one. Perhaps the remission of an illness ls a little too perfectiy timed. Perhaps the deus ex machina of a benevolent father-figure, an Aicoholics Anonymous enthusiast (August Schellenberg), is just slightly too convenient. Perhaps the stylish, good taste of the self-congratulatory medicine woman is a bit too Martha Stewart. But the value of "Grand Avenue" is redeemed by the full-hearted performances. The neatly tied ends are balanced by keenly observed little details, the feeling that the film evolved from a painful reality.



This Is a movie in which the accumulation of eclectic moments finally overcomes the burden of an inevitable, discouraging theme, in which the finely tuned characterizations breathe life into shopworn silhouettes, in whlch acute cinematography eclipses overworked themes. The viewer comes away from "Grand Avenue" with a deeper awareness, an awakened sensibility, that goes beyond typical television-movie didacticism. We have a sense of what it is like to be on the skids in Santa Rosa, an empathy rather than a sympathy for the durable men and women we've watched struggle with thelr demons. This is an identification that transcends ethnicity or economics and approaches a "there but for fortune" sort of recognition. And that, in the long history of tribal people on the little screen, is a downright leap.



At the end of "Grand Avenue" all the surviving characters are suffused with a sense of irrational hope. Who are we to tell them they're wrong?"



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