I’d like to believe that I’m more educated than the average person, but I know very little about Native American history or painters who are women such as Catherine Weldon. When I heard about Woman Walks Ahead, I immediately placed it in my queue with the additional incentive that I adore Jessica “I’m the motherfucker who found this place” Chastain (Zero Dark Thirty). Even my mom was interested inchecking the movie out.
Woman Walks Ahead is a movie that wants to do many things, but instead of seamlessly blending the elements together, it feels as if they put a number of genres side by side and hoped for the best. Weldon is similar to a Disney princess at the beginning of the movie, eager to get out into the world and have adventures. If she had busted out singing, I would not have blinked. There is a King & I element when Weldon meets Sitting Bull, and initially they clash, but ultimately are attracted to each other, but can never be together because you don’t want to sully the white woman’s reputation. Then there is the historical story of the tensions between Native Americans and the US government over issues of sovereignty and the veneer of democracy. Then there is the rough man and the lady story in which our first impression of one of the leading men is disapproval, but you realize that his brusqueness is a way to protect the lady from the harsh world. This character also plays this role with the Native Americans and becomes the one soldier who learned the right lessons after experiencing war first hand. Unsurprisingly, Humphrey Bogart did not rise from the dead to play this role, but Sam Rockwell, who seems to be stuck though handsomely rewarded in the honorable and lovable awful man roles from this movie to Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri.
If it sounds like Woman Walks Ahead is less a biopic of Weldon than an excuse to make a classic Hollywood movie with dashes of modern brutality set on the frontier, you would be correct. Even a cursory dive into Weldon’s life story makes the movie seem like complete fiction, but I am not an expert. She seemed to be a far more scandalous woman than the movie’s innocent adventurer and ended her professional relationship with Sitting Bull in anger. If they were star-crossed lovers, they ended it, not society. As the movie unfolds, Chastain becomes a supporting player in her own movie, but not to the eternally charming Rockwell.
Michael Greyeyes, who plays Sitting Bull, steals the entire movie from two of Hollywood’s best and brightest actors. Only racism can explain why this actor is not better known or a leading man. He single-handedly focuses Woman Walks Ahead into a better film than it actually is with his subtle, sensitive and strong performance. His transformation from a defeated warrior accepting his fate to a commanding presence ready to wield new weapons of nonviolence in one last effort to help his people salvaged this mess of a movie. It felt like the story’s real leading pair in this movie was Sitting Bull and General Cook, played perfectly by Bill Camp, who seems less vengeful than his men, but is actually cleverer.
It is one thing to theoretically read about all the restrictions for clothing depending on class and race. Woman Walks Ahead shows why those restrictions are necessary to enforce a white supremacist system. You can’t pretend that you are superior to someone if he or she looks better than you, and suddenly those navy blue uniforms seem shabby next to Sitting Bull in full regalia. He just looks better than everyone else.
Weldon works better as a place setter for Native Americans allies, which is unfortunate considering that she is supposed to be the titular character, but paralleling the oppression of white women in the nineteenth century and Native Americans never quite works though there can be legitimate grievances and parallels. The scenes that were the most powerful was when Weldon got fired from white womanhood for her beliefs as such brave women as Viola Liuzzo and Heather Heyer can sadly illustrate as probably one of the more realistic points in the movie.
Woman Walks Ahead misses an opportunity to explore a more instinctual intersectional concept of feminism between Weldon and other Native American women, which reveals more about the filmmaker than Weldon. The movie depicts her as awkward around them and a bit of an insulting nuisance. The movie shows a criminal lack of interest in the plight of Native American women during the nineteenth century. The filmmaker is capable of doing better because fairly early in the film, Native Americans are not shown as a monolith, but are people with different beliefs, positive and negative traits, and Weldon shouldn’t paint them with the same broad brush.
The parallels work better when they stop playing the oppression Olympics and compare interests. Painting as autobiography was a missed opportunity to create a strong theme in Woman Walks Ahead and would have been an equally plausible reason that Sitting Bull and Weldon were able to bond and find common ground through a shared interest. I find it mildly insulting that a biopic about a woman threw in a romantic story line that didn’t exist.
Woman Walks Ahead is a bit of a mess so I can’t exactly recommend it, but it is beautifully shot, and it was nice to have an introduction to a great Native American actor playing a substantial role since movies usually shuffle around the same few and rarely have them stating more than a few lines. If it is on, don’t rush to find the remote.