So we start out this series with a very unassuming film to be among my 12 favorite movies of any kind, though I suppose the standard is a bit lower for what I'm calling "one-timers" -- films I've seen only once.
To call a film a "one-timer" implies that it is very difficult to sit through a second time, either for length (such as The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King) or for subject matter (such as Requiem for a Dream, which I have actually seen at least four times.) That's not the way I'm using it here. There's no judgment, it's just a literal fact: the 12 films in this series are the highest ranked on my Flickchart that I have seen only once. Yes some of them will be long and some will have difficult subject matter, but those are merely secondary factors in their inclusion in this series. (Though they may be primary factors in why I've seen the film only once.)
And that 12th favorite, with a current ranking of #175, is Chris Eyre's Smoke Signals, which I watched for the first time just about 13 years ago, give or take a few weeks.
The film was significant for me in that year of 2013, which ended up being the year I moved to Australia, though I didn't know it at the time I watched Smoke Signals. Eyre's film was the first in a weekly series I wrote for the Flickchart blog called Flickchart Road Trip, which involved me watching a movie set in each of the 50 states, driving along an imaginary path that started from where I lived in Los Angeles at the time. I'd then "duel" that movie, just in the blog post, against five other movies from that state that were already in my Flickchart, seeing where it landed among them.
It was a very harrowing commitment because I'm the guy who refuses to miss posting deadlines on a project like this, even if real-world reasons gave me a good excuse to do so. Such as moving to a new country and not having internet at my house for a few weeks, meaning I'd have to go to the library or a nearby hospital to do everything I needed for each post, as well as continuing to source one new movie per week to watch from each new state -- which was far less easy back in those largely pre-streaming days. I got to the end of the year with a sigh of relief and a vow to never do anything like that again.
The first stop on the road trip, geographically after California, was Arizona, where the second half of Smoke Signals is set. So that's the film I chose. (I had already decided that I wasn't going to start with California, but save it for #50 -- though I can't remember now if I "flew" to Alaska and Hawaii before or after California, so it might have been #48.)
And I was floored by Eyre's movie. In fact, it kicked off two straight five-star movies to begin the series, as Billy Wilder's Ace in the Hole would be up next in New Mexico. That movie might also be in this series because it's ranked high enough, but I've already seen that one a second time. After those two movies, the series never got close to reaching those heights again, but it was helpful in providing an immediate endorsement of this project I'd taken on.
The thing I remembered most from the first viewing was how the ending absolutely socked me, leaving me in tears. You always remember the tears.
When I got to the ending this time, after the movie flew by (it's only 90 minutes), I could see the part that had made me cry, and I could feel some facisimile of the same emotions welling up maybe as a sense memory. But the ending of the movie is not really constructed as a big make-you-cry moment, so I feel like the tears may have been the result of an accumulation of subtle moments in the study of its two main characters. That speaks very well of the movie, its construction and its perfromances, but perhaps it made me a little less likely to cry this time around, and indeed I did not.
Jeez, I haven't even really told you anything about the movie while already talking about its ending.
It's the story of two teenagers on an Idaho reservation, who are siblings by adoption and who we see at multiple ages through flashbacks. I'll list the actors who play them as the teenage versions, who are Adam Beach as Victor, the biological son of Arnold (Gary Farmer), and Evan Adams as Thomas, the adoptive son of Arnold after Arnold saved the baby from a house fire that killed Thomas' parents. Thomas naturally views his adoptive father as a hero, but there's more to this story and Arnold is a complicated man living with demons. He eventually leaves the reservation, abandoning the boys' mother Arlene (Tantoo Cardinal) to relocate to Phoenix, which happens before the start of the narrative. In fact, the narrative starts with a report of Gary's death in the lonely spot outside Phoenix where he was living in trailer and seems to have struck up a friendship with one younger woman, Suzy (Irene Bedard), but was otherwise living alone with those demons. Victor and Thomas need to road trip to Phoenix to take care of Gary's affairs, such as they are, and make peace with the memory of this absent father, whom they each see differently.
There isn't much more to the story on a plot level, but there's much more on the level of character and emotion. Still, watching the movie, you are struck by the intentional smallness of its scale. I should say, I was struck by it on this viewing, especially since I knew how highly I regarded the film.
The relationship between Thomas and Victor is fertile. Thomas is a bit of a dork, a bespectacled kid who is given to great storytelling skills but is not cool in any respect that would be rewarded socially. Victor much more fits that profile as he's more traditionally handsome and is the star of the basketball team. However it's Thomas who is more at peace with his place in the world and it appears that Victor may be wrestling with the start of some of his father's demons.
If I were to forcibly re-rank Smoke Signals on Flickchart -- which I am not going to do, even though that might be a logical accompanying action for this blog series -- it might fall a little bit. It would certainly end up outside my top 200. Instead, it will only slowly drop over time as it loses duels to certain films that are currently ranked in the next 100 spots behind it.
But that's not the same as saying I regret the ranking. The effect the movie had on me this time might only be 80% of what it was the first time, but it reminded me specifically of the value of a movie like this, which underplays most of its emotions in getting you to a very emotional spot by the end. I also really loved the look inside an American community that we don't see enough of on film. This week in particular, watching the film made it a good companion with the film I watched on Monday for Australia Day, Bran Nue Dae, since there's obviously a lot of overlap between the experience of indigenous Australians and indigenous Americans, particularly in terms of things like the way alcohol impacts their communities.
And to think, the first time I saw Smoke Signals, I wouldn't have even made that connection as I was still seven months away from moving to Australia.
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