Everyone i've talked to about this film has said to me, "Oh, it's just like the book". No, it is not! True, the gist of many of the scenes in the film resemble scenes in the novel, but only in the most rudimentary way. As cinematic as the book seems, it actually presents a major problem to any adaptor who wants to do anything like justice to it in a screen adaptation: I would say over two-thirds of the entire book is narration, and most of its scenes, as cinematic as they may seem, are embedded in this narration, and while there is also a great deal of dialogue, these scenes are tempered by passages where key things that happen are rendered in print only through vague description in the narration, of the "Oh, and then this happened" sort - meaning that anyone who wanted to turn this book into a movie where there is any kind of successful narrative flow that does justice to the book's sustained vision and creativity would have to do a LOT of creative work filling in these gaps, turning Berger's intermittent vagueness into specific screen action that matches in tone the dialogue and action Berger has already supplied. It's the kind of problem one can only envision being solved satisfactorily by bringing in the author himself to do the adaptation. In this respect, the filmmakers have failed utterly - there is not one second of this film that is anywhere near as inspired or witty as anything in the book. As craftsmanship, the film is mediocre; the film looks like it was shot on a soundstage, and gives the viewer no feeling for nature or the absurd, crazy poetry of American Indian life that is so much a part of what makes the book so successful; Berger's superbly sophisticated and imaginative moral absurdism has been turned into crude, ugly, cheap, cartoonish left-wing caricature that resembles the work of Oliver Stone; and, aside from the one glorious exception of Chief Dan George, in his wonderful turn as Old Lodge Skins, the performances are gross, sloppy and impersonal, with Dustin Hoffman terribly miscast, his innocent, square, adenoidal man-child persona subtly but completely wrong for the sketchiness and semi-amoral pragmatism of Jack Crabb, a man who drifts between two opposed lifestyles, American and Indian, forming no loyalty with either – a character which would require a projection, not of guilt or corruption, but of simple adult knowledge, something Hoffman is incapable of.
Review of Little Big Man
