Last of the Mohicans a visual feast

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What Michael Mann's direction brings us in the Last of the Mohicans, a script adapted from the James Fenimore Cooper novel, is a well crafted visual feast of images about "the frontier." This is imagery that is embedded in a tradition of Romanticism about the "new world." This is not to say this film avoids the violence of Black Robe - there are generous portions of that, in new varieties.

To imbibe the texture of the visual quality of this film, one need only gaze at a Frederick Turner oil painting from the same era. This movie masters through lighting, set design, framing and acting on film what Turner accomplished through oil paint on canvas Turner's paintings of the same period are dark oils intensified by the contrasting orange light of sunset or fire. This is from our "Romantic unconscious." In Last of the Mohicans many of the scenes are shot in the shadow of trees, interiors of dwellings of exterior night shots. For example, the viewer's introduction to Fort William Henry, the British fort, is a night shot lit by canon fire. This camera framing maximizes low light and heightens the drama.

The canvas for Mann is the screen and his palette is shadow and dark warmed by orange light of fire and ochre skin. Shafts of light streaming through stands of trees or through a window and catching the edge of a profile are all masterfully replicated from the Romantic period when Native North Americans were thought to be a vanishing race. And we the viewers are engaged in these images because we know the menu from our past diet of film, art and literature of this period. This is a meal not to be turned down but be ingested while one is mindful of its content. We should be conscious when we partake

of it that it evokes our existent storehouse of impressions about Natives as exotic, noble, physically superior and vanishing.

If you partake of this feast, do so for its well crafted imagery and its acting or to marvel at the magnitude of its production size and period reconstruction. For the film required extensive reconstruction and manufacture of period dress, dwellings and weaponry, not to mention its impressive set size of 38 acres and the 1,200 extras that

were employed to stage it. The magnitude of this production is epic in proportion.

The Native casting is astute, which makes me presume that just maybe the skills

of Native actors are finally being recognized. Alongside this, the Native casting business is becoming a lucrative profession. The role of Chingachgook by Russell Means in his acting debut is a strong first performance. Eric Schweig as his Native son, Uncas, is sound. Schweig is poised and convincingly comfortable with this role, to the point that it does not appear as acting and Maua played by Cherokee actor, Wes Studi, is poignant. However, Studi, a strong force in the role, is weakened by a script that denies him behaving other than a treacherous stalking warrior. The finest slice of acting is a wordless exchange between Magua (Wes Studi), and Alice Munro, played by Jodhi May, who made her debut in A World Apart. This is a riveting scene which tests and matches the acting skills of both actors.

The weakness of this movie is in its characterization. I am not convinced that two hunter/gatherer, tribally oriented males, would choose as partners two females who know nothing of the environment and its attendant survival skills. Such a choice for a partner, if we are to sustain our belief that this is a "savage and beautiful" land they inhabit, would be inviting danger and a burden to any hunter/gatherer. Oh, but of course, this is the Harlequin/Hollywood frontier, not the historical frontier, where miscegenation occurred because the socio-economic conditions supported the union of European males and Indian females. However, the reverse union of Indian males and European females rarely occurred, except of course in Harlequin or Hollywood, because these unions had little basis in reality.

I am not suggesting you astain from this feast but to just be mindful when you partake that you know what you are being fed because this film does adopt some refreshing relations between Native and European relations. In one of the early scenes, Natives visit and interact with European settlers as equals in a domestic scene. But is this enough to break the subtle spell of racism cast by our imagery diet of Romanticism? No, because the main character is genetically European even if he is culturally Native. And any viewer who might be tempted to help themselves to seconds and be persuaded that this is a story by and about Natives is being enticed, because this is a Eurocentric feats of images and a drama about Eurocentric perceptions with a lot of Native extras.