Its the late 19th century, and Catherine Weldon, freshly widowed, feels free—freer than she was while married, at least. Weldon, played by Jessica Chastain, studied painting when she was young, but had to give it up when she tied the knot: it was improper for a woman to work. When her husband dies, her interest in painting resumes, and at the start of Woman Walks Ahead, written by Steven Knight (Eastern Promises) and directed by Susanna White (Our Kind of Traitor), Weldon sets out to travel from New York to North Dakota to paint her dream subject: the famously resistant Hunkpapa Lakota leader, Sitting Bull.
Much of this history is well-known. Sitting Bull, played here by Michael Greyeyes, will be killed amid an arrest attempt as payback for, among other things, the Battle of Little Bighorn, at which the Northern Cheyenne, joining the confederated Lakota tribes, went head to head with Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custers 7th Cavalry Regiment—and won. Sitting Bull was killed mid-December; later that same month, the 7th Cavalry Regiment would massacre over 150 Lakota Indians, at Wounded Knee.
This is all backdrop to the Weldons story in Woman Walks Ahead, which balances the politics of the era with Weldons growing ties to Sitting Bull and his ilk. Weldon, seen as a potential agitator by Indian Service agent James McLaughlin (Ciarán Hinds) and by Silas Groves (Sam Rockwell), whos come to manage a treaty meant to further strip the Indians of their land, is outcast from white society, beaten in the streets, and called an “Indian-loving bitch.” Shes welcome amongst the Lakota, however, and has interactions with Sitting Bull that verge on meet-cute.
Some troubling slippages between fact and fiction here betray this movies intentions, confirming that were in for the same old. The real Catherine Weldon had in fact become an activist by the time she traveled out to the Dakota Territory, joining the National Indian Defense Association, teaching herself Lakota, and deepening a life-long passion for Native American culture spurred by meeting an Iroquois man in Brooklyn when she was young.
The movie renders her into a sympathetic, well-intentioned, but initially somewhat ignorant friend to the Natives: in contemporary terms, wed simply call her a white liberal. Youd never know she was so taken with Native culture from a young age that it spurred her stepfather to marry her off with haste; what you get, instead, is a bland backstory detailing the seeds of her vague, cookie-cutter feminism. Shes stripped of her advocacy, agitation, even obsession, in favor of being a woman whos converted to the Natives political cause after meeting and getting to know Sitting Bull and others of his tribe.
Fictionalized accounts of historical figures neednt always stick strictly to the facts, but when they deviate, its worth wondering why—and in this case, its worth wondering what made the same old story of white sympathy favorable to Weldons richer, stranger political passion. This movie sat in pre-production hell for 12 years. Maybe theres your answer.
Its too bad. Chastain is fine here, but overly mannered, hemmed in by a role that resists her natural spark precisely as it resists Weldons. This movie renders a towering figure of her time into any old outsider, and drags Chastain into that snoozefest alongside her. As Sitting Bull, Greyeyes fares a smidge better. His Sitting Bull is elegant to the point of seeming equine, somewhat noble, but mostly sharp-witted and quietly fierce—and unexpectedly funny, especially when he and Weldon first meet. The movie resists making him into an easy mark for the usual, overly noble Hollywood hagiography, but that isnt to say it goes out of its way to make him feel lived-in, specific.
Woman Walks Ahead is too small and picturesque to hate, and too full of talent to disregard outright. But I have little fondness for its endgame. It makes a great fuss of seeming more sophisticated than the movies of its kind to come before it, when really all its here to do is replace old, boring tropes with new, equally boring ones. Weldon and Sitting Bull deserve better. So do we.
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