Doc Duo Creates Uneven Drama about Dakota Access Pipeline Contoversy
Although there is much to admire in “On Sacred Ground,” the first dramatic feature by environmental activist documentarians Josh and Rebecca Tickell, this technically polished indie effort is overall more admirable in its intent than compelling in its narrative. And there’s really no way of getting around the fact that many viewers will be put off by the abundance of “white savior melodrama” in a movie putatively focused on 2016 protests by Native Americans and their allies against construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline.
To be sure, it can be argued that telling the story through a non-Indigenous protagonist’s point of view is an efficient way to expose a wider audience to pressing social issues about land use, water rights and cultural imperialism as the lead character gets his eyes opened and his conscience stoked and blah, blah, blah. It is difficult to believe that so many scenes in the movie focus on Dan McKinney’s domestic, professional and psychological crises.William MapotherThe conservative Houston newspaper assigned a freelance reporter to cover the Standing Rock Indian Reservation events in North and South Dakota. He is so dominant that everything and everyone around him seems to be overshadowed. Are you familiar with this scene?
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McKinney is hand-picked by the editor of the fictional Houston Daily (Frances Fisher) as the perfect journalist to provide the “right perspective” while covering the problematical protesters threatening to impede progress of the pipeline because (a) he’s a Republican, (b) his credit rating is below sea level and (c) his very pregnant wife (Amy Smart) is about to give birth to the couple’s first child. This got me thinking: What can editors learn? That You can learn a lot about a writer by doing a casual internet search. Yikes.)
Sure enough, McKinney is so desperate for a paycheck, he expresses only mild concern when he’s flown to Standing Rock on a private plane alongside Elliott Baker (David Arquette), a smooth-talking fixer representing oil company interests. Baker wants to ensure McKinney will tell his readers the truth about how unruly Native people and outside agitators are undermining a project designed to employ hundreds of workers and transport “500,000 gallons of crude oil a day.” When he’s not immobilized by jarring PTSD flashbacks to his wartime experiences as a combat journalist in Iraq, McKinney more or less performs on cue.
Indeed, his editor is so pleased with McKinney’s work that she sends him back to Standing Rock, to ingratiate himself with the protestors while pretending to be, if not an ardent supporter, then an objective journalist, and to expose them as threats to the American Way of Life. It is not surprising that something else happens.
In the long scene-setting prologues that display facts and figures on news footage, filmmakers often reflect their roots as documentarians. The same visual signaling style is used in a tension-filled lunch scene, where an overbearing Baker and an educated McKinney debate, among other topics, whether the pipeline could pollute tribal water supplies. Here and elsewhere, “On Sacred Ground” comes awfully close to erasing the line between igniting dramatic tension and preaching to the choir.
Supporting players cast as Native American protestors are impressive across the board, with particularly memorable contributions coming from Kerry Knuppe as a brassy activist who’s rightly skeptical of McKinney; Irene Bedard as a protest organizer whose dubiousness about the reporter curdles into contempt; and David Midthunder as a protestor who’s appreciably more accepting of McKinney until he has good reason not to be. (Credit Midthunder for powering one of the movie’s more emotionally impactful moments, when he brusquely informs the reporter that it’s time to face the music.)
But even these fine actors are hard-pressed not to come across as window dressing as Mapother’s potently implosive performance is spotlighted and underscored, and “On Sacred Ground” places its prime emphasis on his character’s redemption. The movie is not only disappointingly unbalanced, but it is also irredeemably uneven.
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