The road to Utah

HE'S ALREADY Seattle's most famous writer. But Sherman Alexie wants more. Acclaimed as a poet and novelist, Alexie is now adding another page to his prodigious r鳵m魭as film director. This week his debut feature, The Business of Fancydancing, screens at Utah's Sundance Film Festival (Jan. 10-20). If it's a hit, like 1998's Smoke Signals (which he wrote and helped produce), some indie distributor like Miramax will have it playing in theaters by fall. In that optimistic scenario, the movie could be seen by more people than have read all his books combined. TV, cable, and DVD would reach even more viewers. Clearly, Alexie is only going to get more famous.

But would that make him mainstream? Would it—after the success of his novels Reservation Blues and Indian Killer, after just receiving his second PEN/Malamud award for short fiction—make him an assimilated, crossover artist courted by Hollywood?

To some extent, he already is. "Reservation Blues is wrapped up in rights issues at Miramax," the funny, friendly, voluble 35-year-old Alexie explains in his Seattle office, sounding like a jaded showbiz survivor as he plans to next direct Indian Killer himself. He recounts a lucrative but "unhappy experience" during a brief period of post-Smoke Signals Hollywood screenwriting. Those scripts might have helped pay the bills (he's married with two kids), but the experience only strengthened his determination to call his own shots from behind the camera. "I always got accused of stream of consciousness," he says of his screenplays. He remembers being told, "'You can't write like you think!'"

Laughing off such criticism, Alexie now faces a different sort of challenge with Fancydancing, as he explained in a lengthy chat last month after completing marathon editing sessions on the digital-video film. "The ultimate conflict for an Indian artist is greater than the conflict for other artists," he says. "Because the Western civ idea of the artist has always been about the individual, the eccentric vision. One man against the world is a good thing and admirable. But in a tribal sense, it's not. Being the only one is not a good thing. It's a bad thing. Being a good artist and being a good member of the tribe are often mutually exclusive. I think that's the primary conflict in my life."

IN OTHER WORDS, what tribe are you with—the Indians or the artists? In a 1998 Salon interview, Alexie declared, "Good art doesn't come out of assimilation—it comes out of tribalism." Four years later, the tension in Fancydancing reflects his competing allegiances to those two camps.

His movie addresses that clash directly and self-consciously. Loosely derived from his 1992 collection of stories and poems, Fancydancing concerns a successful Seattle writer who returns to the res for the emotionally charged funeral of an old friend. Played by Smoke Signals' memorably goofy Evan Adams, Seymour Polatkin is a slick, confidently citified figure estranged from his reservation roots. His white lover tells him, "I'm your tribe now."

Meanwhile, Seymour debates his cultural authenticity with a half-Jewish/ half-Indian former girlfriend and his two old pals from the res, Aristotle and Mouse. Flashbacks to childhood hint at memories both sweet and sour, also recalling Smoke Signals, but Fancydancing is a more internalized and impressionistic affair with fewer of Alexie's signature comic riffs. (Although the list of 33 non-Indians whom Indians wish were Indians is pretty damn funny, including Judy Garland, Bob Marley, and Xena, the Warrior Princess!)

"This place is a prison," Seymour laments of the res, but it's also the wellspring of much of his inspiration, as Aristotle angrily reminds him. What actual responsibility does the artist bear to his sources? In Fancydancing's least successful device, a hostile journalist interrogates Seymour and his cronies about such matters (shades of the interview scene in Magnolia), but the movie refuses to provide glib answers or happy endings to the artist's divided soul.

Of Seymour, Alexie explains, "I used the material of my own life, certainly exaggerated in some cases, altered a bit; I added other elements to the character that made him more interesting to me." Seymour isn't exactly an authorial surrogate, adds Alexie (who amusingly acts in the film as a reservation local who grouses that the returning writer is "thinking he's too good for us"). Yet Seymour awkwardly straddles the same two cultures Alexie tries to bridge.

But for either Seymour or Alexie, isn't a solitary perspective necessary to create art? "Absolutely. Exactly. For Indian artists, we play at it. We talk a good game. We talk like we're still tribal and we still belong, but we don't. Every word contradicts that. Regardless of what education I have, or where I've been, or what awards I win, what circles I travel in occasionally, I'm still an outsider and will always be an outsider. Because of my ambitions. And because of Seymour's ambitions, he's an outsider to the place where he came from. Always on the in-between."

Does that make Seymour a tragic figure? "I think he thinks it's tragic. I aimed to make a tragic movie. I think it's a tragedy in the sense that I don't think he's a member of that tribe any more. And that is tragic. That's what colonialism is doing. It used to be shooting us. With every book I read or every movie I watch, or with every book Seymour reads or every movie Seymour watches, he's farther and farther away from the Spokane tribe.