I'm probably not in the right demographic for this movie. Although I am gay, I am not an American Indian, and this movie depends heavily on an appreciation of their culture, their history and (if this movie is at all authentic) their overwhelming love of melodrama.Not a single word in the very stilted and contrived screenplay sounded to me like an actual human being talking, but like a person reading a proclamation about something very profound. The many poetry readings, funeral speeches, etc - even ordinary conversations between lovers and friends - sound so forced and pretentious that they're nearly unbearable. That's probably because the movie was written by a poet about himself. When the same poet also directs the movie, the combination practically guarantees a mediocre result.Very, very few successful movies are written and directed by people whose subject is their own lives and whose primary interest is in poetry rather than in movie-making. In fact, I can't think of a single one.If Sherman Alexie had allowed someone else to write and direct his story, it might have worked very well, because it's not an uninteresting story - but this movie doesn't work at all, not for me. It's too unnatural, and Native Americans ought to be MORE natural than the rest of us, not less.If you have a soft spot for overblown melodrama, stilted dialog, declamatory acting and/or Native Americans, then The Business of Fancydancing may be just right for you. But if you're looking for a good movie, keep looking.

Sherman Alexie is simply an amazing writer. His poems are amazing, his movies are amazing... and yet I'm a white guy. How do I know how true they are to The Rez? Besides, how do Native Americans feel about his portrayal of them? After all, that's a very difficult matter to contend with. Some of the few Native Americans filmmakers that deal with this issue are often forced to purposefully make their movies self-conscious (including cameras in them, etc.) just to show that they recognize that their portrayal is still through a popular, Anglo ethnocentric medium. Besides that, Native Americans aren't just one group, one ethnicity... each tribe is a nation, and they all have separate constructions of their identity. One Indian nation may be represented well in a film, and it confuses the white viewer as to how Indians "really are" because other nations "aren't like that." Thus, this film. Sherman Alexie has bound to have suffered criticism for making Indians portray-able to white folk, and this movie shows a Native American writer who has forsaken his tribe in order to write all about it, keeping in mind that the pop culture needs a tragic Indian, one that's half-white in order to relate to the white community, one that's attracted to white people as well. The entire film is a series of mirrors reflecting it's own problem of identity, which most of the time becomes really tedious but this time is actually really well done.One of the ways he succeeds is in admitting the simple truth: writers are frauds. Their writing stems from real pain, but in the end they are all just pathological liars. They make up stories either to make themselves seem more interesting, or to pretend their pain is okay.And the pop culture eats it up while the ones that feel that pain are ignored.--PolarisDiB

I was impressed with "The Business of Fancydancing. " I thought it was very well made, with beautiful cinematography, excellent development of several believable key characters and a sensitive treatment of a tragic but important personal story with profound socal implications. The movie was complemented with a wonderful soundtrack and the juxtaposition of conflicting styles of music that helped to tell this paradoxical story. The ending was particularly poignant and extremely well done. Certain plot subtleties and finely nuanced multi-layered scences were evident during my second viewing. It offered moments of exquisite irony and heartfelt soul-searching. It was an intelligent treatment of the interaction of several layers of delicate personal issues. I was deeply moved by this film.

At cost of risking the authorial fallacy, I'll say that I took this film to be autobiographical. One advantage of having a talented writer do a film about a talented writer is that, when the protagonist reads his writing, you don't cringe (we should also have first-rate musicians write the score in movies about fictional musicians). In "The Business of Fancydancing" the writing is gorgeous and is what gives the film substance and shining power. Seymour Polatkin/Sherman Alexie's poetry makes up the bulk of the screenplay, whether in the form of actual poems (read by the protagonist or other characters, printed on still frames, or rendered in song), or as part of the dialogue. The film is non-linear and non-realistic: people don't always speak like real people and events don't follow one another in chronological fashion. But Alexie is brutally honest in his portrayal of the truth of his characters, and the film finally feels much more authentic than most made-to-look-realistic, traditional movies. It is one of the paradoxes of fiction that realism is frequently better achieved through non-realistic means."Fancydancing" is a wrenching and angry movie about identity, belonging, and race. Leading one's life as a Native American is clearly no easy job, and Alexie takes a very unsentimental look at the ordeals and dilemmas that come with a Native heritage. His characters are not especially likeable, and all make questionable choices. As Alexie makes clear, however, there are no "right" choices. Whether you stay or go, conform or depart, life's going to getcha and people are going to be mad at you.The poetry beautifully depicts the pain of this dilemma while at the same time showing the redemption that comes with living the dilemma, sticking with it, not giving in. The images are occasionally hokey, and some sequences could have been cut without any loss to the overall effect of the film. But this is a brave film with a brave, unsparing vision, and it deserves a wide viewership.