Review: "Fancy Dance" is a showcase for Lily Gladstone
Friday, June 28, 2024 at 9:00PM 
Four years ago, Erica Tremblay's Little Chief provided a fascinating sketch in little more than ten minutes. Through smart writing and direction, not to mention Lily Gladstone's performance in the lead, the short conveys a complex sociopolitical milieu while also insinuating a whole lot about its characters' situation. Their lives stretch beyond the narrative frame, and we can grasp them even if their particularities elude the viewer. As a cineaste's calling card, Little Chief is a tremendous little thing, far from innovative yet promising great features in its maker's future. And so it is, and so has happened, with Fancy Dance fulfilling that pledge.
Not that this feature debut is exclusively a proof of Tremblay's potential. It's much more, including one hell of a showcase for Lily Gladstone...
Gladstone plays Jax, a queer member of the Seneca-Cayuga Nation who we first meet in the middle of a con. It's a honeytrap of sorts, with the woman baring her nakedness by the creek while a white man looks on. Distracted by the sight, lost in some lascivious daydream, he doesn't notice when Roki, Jax's teenage niece, takes his car keys. It's a smooth operation that ends with both women driving down the Oklahoma road on their new vehicle, ready to sell it for parts and make a tidy sum out of it. Tremblay and co-writer Michiana Alise have devised a bracing introduction for their leads, denying capitulations of easy sympathy and aiming for something more robust.
The mostly wordless sequence also serves to lead us down a path of careful observation, as if the film were training its viewer on how to approach the characters. Notice, for example, how Jax moves with quiet confidence, every gesture laden with purpose, her silence as meaningful as the well-chosen words she directs her ward. She's a survivor above all else, a fighter bent on resisting the sodden hand life has dealt her and her people, constantly undermined by systems that mistake assimilation with kindness. Though others in the film speak only English, Jax insists on keeping her Cayuga roots alive, and her niece follows suit.
In comparison, Roki is much more innocent, looking up to Jax with hero worship. She acts along the older woman's defiance, too, mayhap without realizing the resistance implicit in those choices. Even their costumes echo one another, a sign of an adolescent's imitation of her idolized aunt. Tremblay paints a vast mural through such details, trusting the audience to appreciate the bigger picture without too much didacticism. Even the exposition is given gradually. For example, one first sees glimpses of missing person posters with a Native woman's face plastered on them before her identity is revealed in relation to this family.
One learns that she's not just any lost soul but Wadatawi, Jax's sister and Roki's mother, who has disappeared many times before but never for this long. Though the Tribal PD is sympathetic to Jax's plight from beginning to end – she's his half-sister, after all – he and his department have been most inefficient. The FBI is no help either, denouncing how uninterested the authorities are in the fate of Native women. They're an afterthought unless there is pressure from white people or someone in power. That's why, soon enough, child protective services come a-knocking, taking Roki from Jax's care so that she can go to her white grandfather.
One scene shared between Gladstone and Shea Whigham as the patriarch is enough to bring suffocating tension into Fancy Dance. There's a thick resentment in the air, the woman's hatred of a man who left his Native Family the moment his wife was gone, abandoning that side of his life to build a new existence in white society. Now, remarried to Nancy and long gone from the reservation, he is keen on reconnecting with Roki, but it's too little too late. At least, that's what's going through Jax's mind, a whirlwind storm evident in the actress' gaze. But of course, she knows when she's overpowered. A beloved niece slips beyond her grasp and away from her heritage.
Throughout this family drama, Tremblay introduces a new motif that gives Fancy Dance its title. The thirteen-year-old girl pours over footage from mother-daughter dances in traditional garb, putting on Tawi's heels as she imitates the women on-screen. It's a powerful juxtaposition, showing an ancient legacy perpetuated against all odds and the life some have had to take in order to survive. The plastic Pleasers are a great contrast to the ceremonial dress, but there's a sense of connection between Roki and her troubled family history when she dons them. This is a form of honoring the missing woman the world has seemingly forgotten.
It might not be solemn or what others would deem appropriate, but it feels right in this daughter's heart. In this and other ways, Tremblay maintains judgment out of her movie, dignifying sex workers and Jax's criminal activities, looking beyond what polite society would use to marginalize these marginalized women even more. Roki is similarly without moralism, though she doesn't always understand what the older women do or why they do it. She follows them out of trust, so when that bond is intruded upon, the audience can't help but jump as if zapped by a livewire. That's the only way to describe the scene when Nancy comes to Roki.
In an old box lays a pair of ballet shoes and an offer of dance classes would Roki want to pursue them. In the step-grandmother's mind, the Native regalia and the rites are part of a dance like any other, failing to comprehend the profound meaning they have for those in the culture. Seemingly well-intentioned, the present is emblematic of a barrier between legacies and a systematic erosion of indigenous identity through forced assimlation. The misunderstanding isn't played to highlight Nancy's antagonism, though it sets the scene for what happens later when the older woman calls the police on Jax after she decides to take Roki to the Oklahoma City Powwow, where Tawi has gone every year.
From then on, Fancy Dance becomes both a road movie and a distended chase. There's no suspense or excitement, however, for this is a march toward disappointment – just like Jax, the viewer knows Roki won't find Tawi at the gathering – and an unraveling of the bond between the teen and her aunt, her other mother. It's both a simple affair and a complicated portrait, honing on the tragedy of these women as they face against a world hellbent on taking away the most important thing they have left – each other – and cutting the thread between the future generations of Native people and their ancestry.
Tremblay uses their journey to chart a community's struggle, the unjust systems of greed and prejudice that were imposed on them and remain destructive even after the colonialist project has supposedly ceased. It's all in Fancy Dance, whether implicit or explicit, and it's all in Gladstone's performance, too. Young Isabel DeRoy-Olson holds her own as Roki, and there's much to love about the performances by Crystle Lightning and Ryan Begay. Nevertheless, the film belongs to its Oscar-nominated star who can hide a galaxy of meaning in the variations of Jax's disillusionment, her dedication to protecting Roki and survive.
Gladstone articulates the scars of her people's history and the specificity of this woman, both a representative of something bigger and a three-dimensional person on screen. Just the contrast between an expected humiliation and a surprise betrayal is enough to take one's breath away. And when the real vulnerability comes, it's difficult to withstand the history Gladstone brings to the forefront. The dimensionality of Jax further makes us aware of Roki's inexperience, youth, her optimism, and how unaccustomed she still is to what society has in store for her. Because we understand these characters so well, the threat of their separation hurts, and their pain hits us like a sledgehammer.
And so, it's also a miracle beyond belief when Fancy Dance reaches its end, choosing to leave the audience with the beauty of tribal community, and even hope. In the dancing bodies, Tremblay sees a beacon of light amid the darkness and the sorrow, giving her characters a final mercy and a burst of pride. It's a show of generosity, appropriate to close a most generous feature film debut. And it's an offer of visual ecstasy in a story that, until then, had been mired in the unassuming realism of so many other indies. When she focuses on the uniqueness of her Seneca-Cayuga heritage, Erica Tremblay stakes her claim on the future of American cinema.
Fancy Dance is now streaming on Apple TV+ after enjoying a limited theatrical run. Don't miss this indie gem.
Reader Comments (3)
This review has me interested.
I hope to see this real soon. I'm glad there's a lot of love for Lily Gladstone.
thevoid99 -- Between her Oscar nomination, UNDER THE BRIDGE, this release, and the incoming JAZZY, she's having a great year.