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Review: Tragedy masked as a mystery

Ann Klefstad Duluth News Tribune
Published Friday, April 04, 2008

A deeply engaged audience saw “Older than America” in an advance screening
Thursday at Cloquet’s Premiere Theatres, near where it was filmed on and
near the Fond du Lac Reservation last winter.

The movie is billed as a mystery, but it’s not. It’s a tragedy.

In a mystery, the violence at the heart of things is a surprise. There’s
suspense, and the point of watching is to find out what happens.

In a tragedy, whether it’s Oedipus or Hamlet or six children who die, the
crisis event is known from the beginning. The story plays out against the
background of our foreknowledge, and the point is not what happens, but how
it happens. In “Older,” there’s even a traditional tragic Chorus: the rez
guys joking around the fire who have a second life as larger-than-life
mystics in the traditional world.

Georgina Lightning’s “Older than America” is a tragedy about an Indian
boarding school and its abuses. The setting is a modern American
reservation rife with small-town politics.

Lighting, co-writer and director, also plays the heroine, Rain. She lives
with her boyfriend, Johnny, a tribal policeman played by Adam Beach. Johnny
is charming in an authentically rural way, a gentle man who won’t take
abuse from white racists. He has a humorous lilt but is wholehearted in his
devotion to Rain.

She cares for her mother, Irene (Rose Berens), who’s been confined for
years in a mental institution as a paranoid schizophrenic. When Rain begins
to have disturbing dreams, and later sees a man from those dreams in waking
life, she begins to fear for her own sanity.

Auntie Apple (Tantoo Cardinal) raised Rain after her mother was locked up.
We find that Irene was committed with Apple’s complicity, elicited by the
local Catholic priest, Father Bartoli (Minneapolis actor Steve Yoakam, here
used as a stock villain). A back story made up of Irene’s memories plays
out, in punchy black and white, as Rain’s visions and dreams. These tell
the tale of the old school, abandoned after an earthquake.

The plot is driven by a series of events, starting with a second
earthquake, that build to the film’s tragic center. The earthquakes reveal
the film’s flaw: An earthquake is almost impossible in Minnesota. Other
elements are similarly perfunctory. Plot points are overly written,
insufficiently shown.

But audiences here were certainly willing to suspend disbelief, to brush
off realism, in order to take in the symbolic content of the film.
Earthquakes, in this world, are the earth trembling in response to
violation. That could happen anywhere, and it’s not tectonic plates that
make it happen.

And the point of the film — beyond making known these schools’ cruel
history — is that vision must be double if both the traditional Indian
world and the white world are to be livable together.

Rain sees past and present simultaneously; the spirit character Walter Many
Lightnings is often seen as a child and a man in the same frame. Father
Bartoli is a holy man and a devil; Johnny is a warrior and the most gentle
of men. Irene is mad and sane; Auntie Apple is loving and malign.

When the school’s secret is exposed, the characters are reconciled around
the circle of the drum. The doubleness is both accepted and resolved.

It’s an immensely moving moment. The audience, many of whose parents and
grandparents had experienced the kind of abusive treatment laid bare in the
film, openly wept.