Sherry Chandler

A Thief of Time

I have a friend, a visual artist, who thinks the three film-adaptations of Tony Hillerman novels that Robert Redford produced for PBS’s Mystery! are superior to the novels themselves.

I can’t go that far.

I love the texture of words on the page and to me a film is always flatter and over concrete. I think there’s an element of time, too. A novel takes time and gives you time to absorb and savor and think. A film moves on. I’m not always bright or quick enough to catch nuances in film.

Time also to realize the great distances on the rez and the difficulty in performing any investigation in such a sparsely populated vast geography.

Plus, I just like to form my own picture of the characters and I don’t always like to have other faces and body-types overlaid. Adam Beach, for example, though he gives a good performance, is just too cherub-faced and smiley to be Jim Chee. He looks considerably less cherubic two years later as Ira Hayes in Flags of Our Fathers. Fresh-faced but not cherubic, but maybe that’s just because the milieu is darker.

In the case of Hillerman’s novels about Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee, a lot of the texture is in the clash between traditional Navajo ways and modern American culture and the ways the characters deal, or fail to deal, with it and the way that conflict reveals the character of each. The conflict is all there in the film but there’s just no way it’s as fully developed.

What the films do offer is visual and cultural authenticity, gorgeous cinematography, great soundtracks with Native musicians, and decent performances.

In the case of A Thief of Time, there are also charming guest appearances by Gary Farmer, Graham Greene, and Peter Fonda.

Gary Farmer was wonderful as Nobody in the Jim Jarmush film Dead Man. As Navajo Police-Captain Largo, he makes an all too brief appearance in A Thief of Time.

Graham Greene is always delightful and here as trickster evangelist Slick Nakai he turns in a neat comic performance. Green and Wes Studi both had breakthrough roles in Dances with Wolves, a movie I have never been able to stomach. I prefer Greene in roles like the one he has in Transamerica, a movie that doesn’t take itself quite so seriously.

Peter Fonda doesn’t need me to say anything much about him.

Studi and Beach, with the reservations (ahem) I have voiced, are fine as Leaphorn and Chee. It’s nice to see Studi in a role with some nuance. (He can smile, Tommy.) And I just learned that he was “The Indian in the Desert” in Oliver Stone’s The Doors, which I’m afraid I considered a fairly silly sequence in a fairly overblown movie.

Hubby thinks the Mystery! films try too hard to be bantering buddy movies and so go for some cheap and clichéd jokes. Certainly I never got the idea that Leaphorn and Chee were buddies.

So my take is that there is much to like about these films. But they are no substitute for reading the novels.

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Okay, I’ve found a Ry Cooder soundtrack that I think is mediocre in a film that is just as mediocre. That film is Johnny Handsome. It scores a well-deserved 5.7 on IMDb and 5.5 on Rotten Tomatoes. And it manages this in spite of a stellar cast that includes Morgan Freeman, Forrest Whitaker, Lance Henrikson and Ellen Barkin.

Tony Hillerman (1925 – 2008)

Tony Hillerman has died, and I am diminished.

His Navajo police procedurals, centered around Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee, were a joy, a comfort, and a much-needed distraction to me over the years. There is a gentleness to these novels, though they deal with violent deeds, and a respect for the earth and the Navajo culture, a poetry.

His NYTimes obit is here.

A list of tributes to Tony Hillerman at Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind.

A list

Asked to pick something as simple as a favorite color, I am apt to be catapulted off the Bridge of Death by the Old Man from Scene 24. About books I am as fickle as Gin (see comment to previous post). I can�t even claim to be serially monogamous because there�s genre to be considered. In mysteries alone, I have run through Agatha Christy, Dorothy L. Sayers, Ngaio Marsh, Rex Stout, John D. McDonald, Ross McDonald, Raymond Chandler, Dick Francis, Tony Hillerman, Edith Pargeter, Martha Grimes, P.D. James, Colin Dexter, Ian Rankin, and now I�m looking to James Lee Burke.