The Business Of Fancydancing

A film that wants badly to be a stream-of-consciousness poem cycle, based on Native-American writer-director Sherman Alexie's 1992 collection of short stories, verse and prose fragments of the same title. Alexie's directing debut combines flashbacks, images of dancers in traditional costumes and poetry (written and spoken) to examine the divided loyalties of Seymour Polatkin (Evan Adams), a successful writer whose heart remains on the Spokane Indian reservation he fled 16 years earlier. But as first-time filmmaker, Alexie might have been better served by conventional narrative structure; this string of fragmented scenes often feels trite and polemical. Seymour and hi...