| T O P I C R E V I E W |
| Carter |
Posted - January 22 2006 : 7:10:36 PM
Arts/Life > a&e today Face of a Nation
Wes Studi once again takes command of the screen as a Native American warrior in 'The New World'
By Michael Sragow
Sun Movie Critic
Originally published January 22, 2006
Robert Redford once called Wes Studi "our greatest living actor." You may not be able to match his face to his name or know how to pronounce it (like "Stoo-dee"). But if you've seen the best frontier movies of the last 15 years - Walter Hill's Geronimo: An American Legend (1993), Michael Mann's The Last of the Mohicans (1992) - and the most popular and honored one of them all, Kevin Costner's Dances With Wolves (1990), you've watched Studi take command of the screen as Native American warriors who are at once intelligent and unappeasable.
After a spate of TV work and small films, he returns to major motion pictures as Opechancanough, the bellicose, hyper-observant battle chief of the Powhatan tribes, in The New World, Terrence Malick's recently opened version of the John Smith-Pocahontas story.
He acts with the muscles of his torso, with each fleeting glance of his laser-like eyes and with every millimeter of his long face and flinty profile. And he once again incinerates the screen.
Born in Oklahoma, in the Cherokee Nation, this veteran of Vietnam and the American Indian Movement amassed a wealth of real-life experiences before becoming an actor. He's been everything from a dry-cleaner to a columnist for a Cherokee newspaper. For years, he bred and brokered horses. He's taught Cherokee and written Cherokee-English children's books and composed a play and directed a short film. And, in 16 years of acting in movies, he's won a reputation as a consummate professional with a nonpareil talent for capturing character in motion.
Performers with this diversity of experience don't often break into contemporary film. Studi has landed in the great tradition of performers from Clark Gable to Sidney Poitier to Steve McQueen who filter fresh American attitudes through their own hard-won, often idiosyncratic art.
For the role of Magua, the renegade Huron in The Last of the Mohicans, he cut his hair in a cross between a Mohawk and a mullet and made himself a smoking dry-ice image of accusation and condemnation. He took what could have been a cliche of the bloodthirsty Indian and turned him into a modern leader with a keen sense of his own brutality.
For decades, stock movie Indians have been scarily stoic and enigmatic. But Studi's Magua projected a force that was equal parts primal emotion and ruthless intellect. He transformed acts of violence into proclamations. Holding a British officer under the knife, he said, "Grey Hair, I will cut your heart from your living chest in front of your eyes. As you die, know that I will put under the knife your children and wipe your seed from this earth forever."
Righteous violence
Magua acts in an appallingly cruel way. Studi, though, is unapologetic: The character he plays has been wronged and considers his violence righteous.
"I played Magua as the good guy," Studi says, over the phone from Santa Fe, N.M. "You have to put yourself in his situation: He was a professional soldier in a war. He wasn't just a fighter. He was trying to manipulate the people engaged in the war."
That's the key to Studi's portrayals of Indian leaders. No matter how outrageous their deeds, he goes beyond simple heroism or villainy to forge visionary men of action. With a lyrical, audiovisual terseness - no muscle flexed without necessity, no line shouted without warning - his very being seems to declare: "By any means necessary."
Studi's Geronimo rides into Hill's movie on a white horse. No actor has ever been more centered on that animal or sat straighter in the saddle. The synchronicity of steed and rider conjures an effect more magical and potent than the gallops and gambols of any fairy-tale centaur. Studi is 5 feet 11 inches tall, but onscreen as Geronimo he seems huge |
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| caitlin |
Posted - January 23 2006 : 12:40:08 PM
Thank you for the article, Carter. That was very interesting! |
| Wilderness Woman |
Posted - January 22 2006 : 7:58:39 PM
That is an awesome article! I don't know how that guy came up with the words to describe Wes's acting so well. But he sure hit the nail right on the head. |
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![The Mohican Board! [Bumppo's Redux!]](images/wwwboard.gif "The Mohican Board! [Bumppo's Redux!]")
