The first and only time I saw Dances with Wolves in its entirety was during a particularly trying period of my life. Racked with questions about my future's direction I sought escape in silver screen adventures and visited a nearly empty theater to avoid dwelling on myself. Though it was some several months after the film's initial release, and though the end-of-year excitement enjoyed during the Christmas rush was long completed, I met with an unexpectedly joyous experience and was blown away.

In the movie's three-hour journey through the Old West I found myself totally caught up in a screen drama that exactly appealed to my sense of practical and spiritual need at a moment of personal crisis. Taking succor from the epic display of Michael Blake's self-adapted novel-turned-Academy Award winner I was renewed and released back into the world of possibility with my troubles abated through a dose of perspective and artistic beauty.

Since then I've seen clips of Dances with Wolves on cable TV and in the living rooms of friend's homes and I've been unable to watch it all the way through for fear of losing the aura of gratification I remember from early 1991. I'm holding on to the notion of memory's benefit rather than submit to my current perspective and the possibility, however remote, that I'll no longer care for the film.

Not unrealistically I've taken this approach to Kevin Costner's directorial debut because I love how good it was to see on the big screen the first time around. This is because I often find my sensibilities altered over time as I become interested in new ideas, topics and approaches to art and entertainment. Since I'm far from being a static individual with anything but fixed ideas about what constitutes great cinema I'm constantly watching, re-watching and reading virtually everything I can lay my hands on related to movies and movie culture. It stands to reason I'd think differently about Dances with Wolves now than I did then.

Instead of being completely convinced by Lieutenant John Dunbar (Costner) and his expedition into the western frontier of America, I might find his idealism faulty and his experiences overly sentimental. Instead of seeing his friendship with the Sioux as open-mindedness practiced in spite of Eurocentric manifest destiny, I might think the movie short shrifts the awful plight of the American Indian in preference for Dunbar's transformation into Dances with Wolves. Likewise I might find I'm no longer accepting of Dunbar's relationship with Kicking Bear (Graham Greene) and his eventual citizenship in the Sioux Nation complete with his changed of name, adopted language and new code of behavior. In short I might find that the film I once considered extraordinary is nothing but a breathtakingly well-produced piece of mealy-minded crap not worthy of further consideration.

While I doubt this possibility in consideration of my relationship with the film, the position is given due credence in light of Costner's career path following Dances with Wolves. Where his eccentricities and artistic sentiments were the high tide of his times from Bull Durham through JFK, his influence has certainly faltered with Waterworld, Wyatt Earp and The Postman. Yet his lasting achievement may very well be Blake's story about John Dunbar, a man extraordinarily aware of how white American society was slowly eroding the very possibility of an untouched West riven through with wild bison, native peoples and uncharted territory.

It is this signal possibility of adult innocence that Dances with Wolves appeals to. It is the same theme that likely stands up to this day when given our general cynicism and indifference to conditions larger than ourselves. Costner's movie is precisely about the urgency of experiencing scarce resources before the excess of humanity has wasted them into distant memory.

Though superficially a western set in the years surrounding the Civil War, the film is actually more of an ecologist's fantasia about peace and belonging. Dunbar's adventures begin when he leaves the surgeon's bench to suicide but is, instead, able to accidentally lead a successful raid against an immovable Confederate army. Parlaying his false heroism into new opportunity he accepts the charge of manning a fort at the farthest reach of the then-current western frontier somewhere in the vast space of the Dakotas.

Quickly forming an attachment to the peaceful landscape Dunbar spies a feral wolf that becomes his companion just as he's gradually accepted into the tribe of his neighbor, the Sioux leader, Kicking Bear. Meeting with a mixture of tribal distrust and acceptance with Wind in His Hair (Rodney A. Grant) and Stands With a Fist (Mary McDonnell) as the most pressing polarities, Dunbar proves his value as a pale face Sioux and man of the plains. In time he also romances Stands With a Fist who is also a white although she was adopted by Kicking Bear who saved her from certain death as a girl following the extermination of her original family by a rival Indian tribe.

Encroaching white civilization brings imminent threat to the Sioux and leads Dunbar to make a choice between his heritage and current circumstances. Siding with Stands With a Fist, now his wife, and his Sioux brethren, Dances with Wolves chooses his more certain identity and is forced to flee from soldiers intending to jail him.

Uncomfortably echoing the experience of native populations in America, Dances with Wolves and Stands With a Fist become fugitives from the newly imposed law of the land. They separate from Kicking Bear's tribe to lead their enemies away even as the ending scrawl reminds us how the Sioux nation was brought to its knees beneath the heel of the United States government before the 1800s were ended.

Sounding the appropriate note of melancholy over lost times, people and wide open spaces Dances with Wolves is a triumph of cinematic crafts in addition to being a showcase of moral certitude and multi-cultural appeal before the phrase became a veritable new age jingo. South Dakota provided modern day locations that are magnificent with their glance to older times. John Barry's score is stirring just as Dean Semler's cinematography accurately levies the sheer weight of nature impacting humanity arranged across its surface.

Interestingly enough, Costner shot so much footage that his 183-minute long release print was but the more commercial of the two he completed. Working with editor Neil Travis he also later presented a 247-minute special edition rumored to expand the storyline and characters to further emphasize the film's epic qualities and extend its particular kind of movie magic. With so much effort concentrated on so large a canvas Dances with Wolves was more than a calculated investment or the result of some highly specialized demographics research. It was also a labor of love.

Produced for some $15 million, Costner and co-producer Jim Wilson's risk on the unpopular western genre, Silverado and Pale Rider as the previous decade's main exceptions, proved an unexpected success and global phenomenon. Grossing $184 million in the United States and an additional $240 million internationally, the film was a hit. Its success was made all the more extraordinary in consideration of the film's length and consequently reduced screening opportunities in not being two hours long. Despite this massive financial boon, though, distributor Orion Pictures Corporation, long a player in American independent movies with fare like Platoon and The Silence of the Lambs, still went bankrupt and saw its dissolution into other companies that parsed up its film library of released and unreleased titles in the early 1990s.

For the Oscars race of 1990 Dances with Wolves was not a clear favorite despite its popularity and high rate of return for its investors. Many in Hollywood were more supportive of the nostalgic bent towards making Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather: Part III Best Picture when considering the top honors given to its prequels. Martin Scorsese's Goodfellas was another top pick with its kaleidoscopic vision of 20 years in the life of an eventual mob informant. Penny Marshall's emotionally satisfying Awakenings was also well thought of in popular circles although it wasn't a real threat to the picture of the year crown. That left Jerry Zucker's Ghost, an outsider from the start, and Costner's western to divide the Academy's voting block one way or the other.

Some critics looked at the nomination of Ghost as kowtowing to modern pressures of lauding popular movies otherwise lacking serious artistic considerations were it not for their having become box office hits. Many in this camp pointed to Stephen Frears's The Grifters as a more likable alternative Best Picture nominee and still other were careful to sing the praises of Bob Rafelson's little seen Mountains of the Moon. Neither picture was all that widely recognized but each of them would have been welcome in the year's top five picture as replacements for Coppola's trial by Mario Puzo or Jerry Zucker's pornography of yuppie love surviving death itself.

Because I've seen Goodfellas and Awakenings multiple times with growing admiration in the first case and lessening excitement in the second, I now wonder if Scorsese's picture was wronged by the installation of Dances with Wolves as picture of the year. Its filmmaking bravura is as convincing now as it was in 1990 only it new enjoys the benefit of hindsight telling me it's still a good movie worth watching over and over again.

Because I've refused to re-watch Dances with Wolves all the way through to preserve one of my most treasured movie-going experiences I can't profess to have an objective opinion about the 1990 Academy Awards. Still, if it weren't for the seminal place of Costner's picture in my celluloid dreamscape there is the very real prospect I wouldn't be capable of writing these very words today.

To my praises of Lieutenant Dunbar's noble adventures I can only add that I'm an acolyte of his purpose and an admirer of the result.