Printer Friendly Version - Two Powerful Actors Propel Woman Walks Ahead

Sitting Bull (Michael Greyeyes) and artist Catherine Weldon (Jessica Chastain) forge a bond when Weldon paints his portrait and joins his struggles to save the Lakota Sioux people in Woman Walks Ahead. Photograph courtesy of A24

In 1890, a widow travels from New York to the Dakota plains to rekindle her passion for painting and explore Native American cultures. She plans to paint a portrait of Sitting Bull, chief of the Sioux nation and survivor of many battles. Although Woman Walks Ahead (available On Demand and via Amazon) is not historically accurate, it doesn’t diminish Sitting Bull’s legacy and enriches knowledge of Catherine Weldon, the artist who traveled west without the permission of her family (which was required at the time). The film isn’t meant to be a documentary, but rather to capture the spirit of the era, and perhaps unintentionally parallels events of our own period.

In these tumultuous times, what director Susanna White (known for her TV miniseries, Bleak House and Jane Eyre) accomplishes is to remind us that conversation - to listen, take in another vantage point, and respond with empathy - can bridge cultures and forge understanding. Woman Walks Ahead does this without becoming sappy, but instead reverberates to bear witness to individual loss and the terrible loss of a whole culture.

That said, the exchanges between Sitting Bull, played by an intriguing Michael Greyeyes (Sunshine State, TV’s Fear of the Walking Dead) and Weldon, envisioned as less political than she actually was by Jessica Chastain (Molly’s Game, The Help), are often imbued with humor.

When Weldon meets Sitting Bull, now a potato farmer, she waxes poetic in the rhetoric she assumes is his. “I’ve traveled many miles from the East, across many rivers and hills, for the honor of speaking with you.”

Chastain and Greyeyes have the delicate chemistry needed for an evolving relationship, one that may be tinged with a little romance. Whether or not Sitting Bull and Weldon’s connection is enhanced for the screen, the actors’ abilities to add a spark to a doomed situation mark the intensity and complexity of the alliance. More than anything else, Sitting Bull instructs Weldon on a way of life that will soon disappear, which dominates the heart of Woman Walks Ahead. (Weldon walks ahead of Sitting Bull until he tells her that no one is supposed to walk in front of the chief.)

“Your society values people by how much they have,” he says. “Ours by how much we give away.” Sitting Bull knows how prophetic his thoughts are.

Also crucial is the fight against the Allotment Treaty, which will take away the lands of the people. Sam Rockwell (Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, Moon) plays the morally compromised, menacing Silas Groves all too well, as do the other actors in agent and regiment positions. Sitting Bull rises up one last time to give an inspiring speech to the tribes to vote “No”, but the powers use the vote as an excuse to wage war against the people.

Real history intervenes. Sitting Bull is killed. When his old circus horse, Rico, dances and prances around his body, his people take it as a sign to flee into the Badlands. It is there that the Seventh Calvary slaughters 300 men, women, and children. Pictures of the actual massacre loom on screen to remind us that history is not linear, but can be brutally cyclical.

Only the spirit is left to soar. Sitting Bull was once able to endure jail, he said, because “I made myself into an eagle.”