Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee |  | Actors: Aidan Quinn, Adam Beach, August Schellenberg, Anna Paquin
Studio: Hbo Home Video
Category: DVD
List Price: $9.98
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Rating:  62 reviews
Sales Rank: 4149
Format: AC-3, Closed-captioned, Color, Dolby, Dubbed, DVD, Subtitled, Widescreen, NTSC
Languages: English (Original Language), English (Subtitled), Spanish (Subtitled), French (Subtitled), Spanish (Dubbed)
Rating: NR (Not Rated)
Region: 1
Aspect Ratio: 1.78:1
Number Of Discs: 2
Running Time: 133 Minutes
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.2
Dimensions (in): 7.1 x 5.8 x 0.6
MPN: 94221
UPC: 026359422126
EAN: 0026359422126
ASIN: B000R20164
Theatrical Release Date: May 20, 2007
Release Date: September 11, 2007
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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| Features:
| • | Inspired by Dee Brown's acclaimed bestseller, the HBO Films event begins powerfully with the Sioux triumph over General Custer at Little Big Horn. The action centers on the struggles of three characters: Charles Eastman (Adam Beach, FLAGS OF OUR FATHERS), a young, Dartmouth-educated Sioux doctor; Sitting Bull (August Schellenberg, THE NEW WORLD), the proud Lakota chief who refuses to submit to U.S |
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Product Description
Movie DVD
Amazon.com
With an acceptable balance of strengths and weaknesses, HBO's revisionist rendition of Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee can be recommended as a very basic (if slightly inaccurate) history lesson for younger viewers. It doesn't flinch from the harsh realities that were so passionately chronicled in author Dee Alexander Brown's enduring 1970 classic of Native American history, nor does it soften the brutality of violence between the U.S. federal forces and the doomed Native American tribes who fought to preserve their native territories, from the legendary battle of Little Big Horn in 1876 (depicted in the opening scenes) to the shameful slaughter of Sioux warriors at Wounded Knee, South Dakota, on December 29, 1890. Originally broadcast on May 27, 2007, and running slightly over two hours, this U.S./Canadian coproduction struggles to tell a story that would've been better served by a full-length miniseries (and will surely disappoint anyone familiar with Brown's important book), and the screenplay is so busy giving us a Cliff's Notes version of history that it lacks any particular focus or consistent point of view. Instead, we get a sobering, noble, and heartbreaking tale of territorial injustice, with forced parallels to the war in Iraq, full of admirable performances yet riddled with clichés and anachronistic details. If you look closer, however, you'll find much to admire: Although his character was dubiously conceived to appeal to a contemporary white audience, Adam Beach (from Flags of Our Fathers) gives a fine performance as Charles Eastman, a Sioux doctor integrated into white society, who grows increasingly conflicted by the plight of his people. He's the tragic embodiment of the faulty ideals of Senator Dawes (Aidan Quinn), whose governmental effort to assimilate Native Americans leads to disastrous outbreaks of violence, depicted here with blunt-force realism. As Eastman's sympathetic and upright wife (a white schoolteacher with a strong sense of conscience), Anna Paquin makes the most of an underwritten role, and Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee is an impressive showcase for outstanding native American actors like August Schellenberg (as Sitting Bull) and Gordon Tootoosis (as Red Cloud), who bring obvious authority and conviction to their roles. The film is most effective when addressing the inevitable failure of the white man's well-meaning but ultimately misguided policies toward Native Americans. To the extent that we still struggle with the historical legacy of those policies, this flawed but instructional rendition of Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee can be viewed as a compact precursor to deeper historical study. --Jeff Shannon
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Showing reviews 1-5 of 62
 video February 19, 2010
G. Bell
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
i was directed to amazon.com by a website, however this product will not work in europe, This is not your fault
Can You Handle The Truth? January 22, 2010
W. Powell
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
The story is as painful as an approaching tornado. The warning alarms are sounding, you know its coming, there's signs of its devastating power in the air and yet you continue watching knowing that the inevitable destruction is heart-wrenching.
This movie almost comes across as a docu-drama or reenactment. The natives for the most part appeared real, but I somehow kept expecting to see a rusted out chevy or ford lying on the 1876 plains. What I liked most about it was the believability of the story. Though I know the harsh brutality of the United States' dealings with the Native American, It made me down right angry to see it and taste it through this film. That's a compliment to the makers of this one for getting it right. Basically, you are a witness to an atrocity planned and executed to genocidal perfection. Here though, the truth does not set you free, it sets you to thinking about other past, present and future lies that help governments justify their land grabbing actions. Is resistance futile?
The lesson this film teaches is that your land is something worth fighting for, even if you did steal it from someone else.
 Read the Book January 8, 2010
Steven M. Anderson (Minneapolis, MN)
"Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee" was one of those landmark books one reads in ones youth and the story and images just stay with one. I had resisted seeing the DVD because I suspected it would be a disappointment and it was. So I guess I wasn't actually disappointed. It is a Hollywood scripwriter's fantasy about what the end of the Plains Indians and their forced exile onto the reservations. Was it genocide? Yes, I think it certainly was and it's too important and compelling a story to be trivialized and twisted as this movie does. I give it points for a somewhat successful evocation of the times and its use of Native American actors but it's history in much the same sense most stories about the history of the West are.
I only know what I've read and learned from a few decades of interest in Western History. I have no connection to Indian culture other than an interest and would not presume to try to present their point of view. I'm grateful for any sympathetic portrayal of their story but just once I'd like to see it done with some accuracy.
One example. Early in the film we see a "battle" between Lakota under Sitting Bull and US troops led my General Miles. The Lakota mount a cavalry charge against a line of infantry with Hotchkiss guns. I'm not an expert, but the Lakota would never do such a thing and, as far as I know, no battle like it ever took place. They didn't fight like that nor would Army defend such a tactically poor position where Indian marksmen (they tended to be very good shots) could have picked off the troops at their leisure from above. The scene is just laughably bad and, in a way, an insult to Sitting Bull.
George Eastman was not a Lakota and was never near the Little Big Horn when Custer attacked. He was a Dakota, another branch of the tribe and the make movie even makes reference to this by referring to his chief as Little Crow, the leader of the Minnesota Sioux Uprising in 1862. Driven from the state, a lot of those people settled on the Lake Traverse Reservation in northeaster South Dakota and I presume that's where he was from. I suppose these are minor issues to some people but it leads one to question the whole intent of the film. Is it just to tell what someone thinks is a good story? If so, why did they appropriate a ground-breaking and respected book as a basis for the story and then simply cast aside any attempt at accuracy. It would be different if the true characters weren't terribly interesting but that is certainly not the case.
In any event, please don't accept this version as anything close to being the real story, whatever that is. Read the book and any number of other good ones. As for me , I'm still waiting for someone to tell this story on film with sensitivity and respect for the truth and the people who lived it.
An arrow launched bravely, but falls short December 22, 2009
Jean E. Pouliot (Newburyport, MA United States)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
An arrow launched bravely, but falls short
I read Dee Brown's classic story about the brutal, tragic history of White-Indian relations back in the early 1970s when I was in high school. Ranging as it does over 400 years of American history, from Columbus to the early 20th century, the book seemed impervious to adaptation to television. But HBO has done a creditable job of bringing a slice of Brown's blood-soaked tale to the small screen. To do so, HBO had to cut away much of Brown's wide-ranging narrative, and might have cut even more to keep from confusing the audience with too many characters. HBO spliced onto the story the tale of Charles Eastman, a Dartmouth-trained doctor who grew up as a Sioux. Eastman's story functions as a splint that holds together the disparate shards of Indian history that culminate at Wounded Knee. It also serves as a bridge between the worlds of Washington DC, where decisions about Indian affairs were made, and the distant battlefields and reservations where those decisions were implemented.
"Bury My Heart" focuses mostly on the stories of chiefs Red Cloud and Sitting Bull, who lead some of the last bands of Indian holdouts against assimilation into white society. The film depicts Sioux life as harsh, yet happy and robust. Tepees sprout in harmony along rivers and streams. Children play happily, hunters bring home the abundant game and families sit cozily around campfires. But all goes awry when whites encroach on Indian lands, and especially when gold is discovered in the Black Hills, sacred to the Sioux. Suddenly, the iron-clad treaties that whites had negotiated with the Sioux are treated as fungible, and deal after deal is shoved down the throats of these bands whose firepower is vastly outbalanced by white guns and rapaciousness. The final "battle" -- if gunning down hundreds of unarmed and sick Indian men, women and children can be ennobled by that word -- occurs with horrifying finality at Wounded Knee Creek.
The film is strongest where it shows important events that rarely make it into the history books. The "education" (really, indoctrination) of young Indians by white teachers, Little Bighorn, Sitting Bull's death (assassination is not a stretch), the Sioux emigration into Canada, and the final battle are well-depicted. The ongoing debates between government "progressives" (who wanted to save Indians from extermination by forced assimilation into white ways) and the militants (who wanted to kill them off outright) shows the lack of understanding and respect that hampered white's ability to deal with the Indians fairly. Where the film falls short is in depicting the emotions and subtleties of the interaction. There are no scenes showing gold-crazed whites pushing into Indian lands. Treaties with Indians are shown, accompanied by maps, but it's hard for the uneducated viewer to quite understand the issues. An interaction between Sitting Bull and Phil Sheridan gives the American general the opportunity to trash the Sioux version of its history, but gives next to no space to the Sioux view, suggesting that Sheridan was correct. Most importantly, the film skirts the issue of race. This was especially evident in the love story between Sioux Charles Eastman and his white wife-to-be, Elaine Goodale. Everyone seems thrilled that these two young people were getting together. But given the tenor of times, it's hard to believed that a red man marrying a white woman would have been acceptable to most people.
Still, the film provides indelible images of the campaign of white atrocities and duplicities that drove the outgunned Indians from their lands. An Indian chief's frozen body is flipped on its back to facilitate a photographer; an endless series of tepees stretches along the Little Big Horn as the battle rages; Indians literally "touch pen" to the implements that signify their assent to a document; Hotchkiss guns hurl deadly shells at fleeing Indians; an old man drags young boy after he has been cut down.
In spite of its many deficiencies, "Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee" is worthy of watching -- especially for an amazing performance by part-Mohawk August Schellenberg, who gave his role of Sitting Bull the ferocity, gravitas and dignity that made him completely believable as the fearsome Sioux war chief.
 "Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee" DVD October 19, 2009
Patricia Matteson
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
"Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee" DVD should be required viewing for all high school students in both English and Social Studies/American history classes. Of course most adult Americans may never see it but still they OUGHT TO. I'm working on getting all my family members to view it. One important virtue is that it doesn't simplify the different perspectives in the usually dumbing-down style of Hollywood. Yes, much of the history included is selected as is necessary, but at least this film tries to present the complexity and background of the massacre and the principal people involved. With a deep background in 19th century American literature and history & Native American studies, (PhD.) I would highly recommend this film. Kudoes to the director, producer and actors for doing it. It's based on Dee Brown's classic book by the same name. I particularly appreciated the film's attention focused on peoples' difficulties with language and culture barriers, the consequences of many misunderstandings, and the powerful clarity of the Sioux leaders as they continually resist the genocidal, murderous, and racist forces arrayed against them.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 62
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