Indian Comics Irregular #114

Broadcast on 7/11, the made-for-TV movie "A Thief of Time" completed
the PBS trio of Tony Hillerman mysteries. This last entry was
pleasant but uninvolving. I give it a 7.0 of 10.

In a review (Indian Country Today, 8/5/04), L.A. Shively pinpoints a
few of "Thief's" problems. Some excerpts:

Stunning visuals interlaced through strands of Navajo cultural
belief are not enough to weave a sturdy blanket of suspense and
intrigue in the PBS American MYSTERY! television special adaptation
of Tony Hillerman's novel "A Thief of Time."

Beneath the story line, the novel attempts to highlight the
devastation occurring from dealing in illegal, black market
antiquities found on American Indian cultural sites.

Unfortunately, the message is lost in the film because the script
is heavily rewritten with poorly-developed characters, loose
direction and jumpy editing--surprising considering the high-
powered credentials of the production crew.

Rehashing the Series

As I hinted in ICI #88 and #104, the PBS adaptations were good but not
great. The shortcomings I noted in "Skinwalkers," the first
installment, applied to all three. Namely:

1) Hillerman's mysteries are simply too complex to make great movies.
They generally link a dozen or more characters in an intricate web of
events and associations. The protagonists and the readers often need
a flowchart to sort out the connections.

A novel gives you the time to study passages as much as you want until
the details sink in. TV is the opposite. The information flows by
and there's no way to retrieve it once it's gone. (Unless you
laboriously replay it on your TiVo, that is.)

For the three movies, PBS diagrammed the character connections on its
website. These schematics linked 10, 16, and 12 people respectively.
To me that suggests a big problem. If a story is so complicated it
requires a cheat sheet, it's not well-suited for television. TV
excels at presenting bold images, not elaborate information.

2) Hillerman's books work because the veteran Joe Leaphorn and the
inexperienced Jim Chee are thinkers. Working in parallel, the two
lawmen wrestle with clues like dogs with bones. Step by step, they
patiently piece together the puzzle.

Wes Studi and Adam Beach are good actors, but Studi is a flamboyant
showman and Beach is a lovable charmer. Neither comes across as
introverted or introspective. I don't know if their roles were
miscast, miswritten, or misdirected, but they didn't play the Leaphorn
and Chee readers know so well.

3) The movies offered touches of Navajo culture, but they lacked a
sense of place. In Hillerman's novels, geography is almost another
character. It's so central to the stories that Leaphorn often gets
out his trusty Indian Country map and plots where incidents occurred.

I don't think the movies were filmed on the Navajo rez, and it shows.
Except for cities such as Phoenix and Santa Fe, there were few
mentions of real locales. What's more, there was no mention of Window
Rock, the Navajo capital...Shiprock, perhaps the most famous Navajo
town...or the geological formations they were named after.

A movie that doesn't allude to the tribal police HQ in Window Rock or
Leaphorn and Chee's station in Shiprock is hardly a Hillerman movie.
At most it's some watered-down version of a Hillerman movie.

"The Dark Wind" (1991) remains the best adaptation I've seen of a
Hillerman mystery. As someone wrote on IMDB.com, "The feel of this
movie is much truer to the feel and action of the books...." Rob
says: Check it out.

Rob Schmidt
Blue Corn Comics