Skins
Two Brothers
I am not going to tell you what goes on in this movie.
The job of the movie reviewer is to give you a plot synopsis, up to a point. Knowing where that point is can be difficult. You don’t want to give too much of the game away, but you have to let people know what they are in for. You don’t want to give away “spoilers”, but you have to tell enough about the movie so that people understand why they should go or why they should stay away.
You should go see Skins, the new feature film from Chris Eyre, opening up in an arthouse theater near you. (And hopefully, you have a better arthouse theater in your town than I do in mine.) You should go see it because it features two great performances by Native American actors. Eric Schweig is fabulous as Rudy Yellow Lodge, a stoic policeman on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. Graham Greene is brilliant as Mogie, his older brother, an alcoholic Vietnam veteran living in the shadow of one of the largest beer distributorships in the Western world, located right outside the reservation.
More than that, I cannot tell you.
I can tell you about the locations, I suppose. This film was made on the Pine Ridge Reservation in rural South Dakota, home of the Oglala Lakota tribe of the Sioux nation. It is the sort of place where the Texaco station is the best restaurant in town. It is the sort of place where the local police department can’t afford decals to put on the doors of their beat-up squad cars. It is the sort of a place where all the houses are either falling apart or well on their way there. (The closest Home Depot looks to be in Sioux Falls, on the other side of the state.)
But Chris Eyre does a better job of telling you what the reservation is like than I can. He just takes his camera and shows what the area looks like, without guilt or rancor or that telltale Hollywood preachiness. Skins is worth seeing for those visuals alone, for Eyre’s view of the reservation and the people who live there, and how the only appropriate reaction to what goes on there is…
But that would be giving too much away.
Skins is a movie you need to see to understand. It is the least sentimental of movies, telling its story (which I cannot give away) in a realistic, semi-documentarian style. But it packs an emotional wallop. Its goal is to make you feel a certain way, to get inside the skins of the characters and their motivations, to identify with them, so that when the events of the story (which I refuse to divulge) occur, you can sympathize, and understand why they do what they do.
In that respect, Skins is a film in a class with Spike Lee’s masterful Do The Right Thing. Skins, too, is about race and poverty and hopelessness in America, and the suppressed explosions that can come to the surface in extraordinary times. But unlike Lee’s movie, Skins never preaches, never screams, never beats the audience over the head with its message. None of the characters ever says a harsh word about people of another race (once you discount the requisite discussion of Little Big Horn and Wounded Knee). But the lessons are the same, the themes are the same, and Eyre creates characters here that are just as memorable as those of Ozzie Davis or Danny Aiello’s in Do The Right Thing.
That is really the best I can do, the most I can tell you, other to say that Skins is an extraordinary movie, one that will challenge you, one that will make you feel and hope and understand. I hope you will take the time to seek it out.
(Note: This review was written after the movie’s showing at the Atlanta Film Festival. Unfortunately, it never got a wide release, which is too bad. Check it out if you have a chance.)