One Paragraph Movie Review: Little Big Man

Three hundred and twenty-seventh film: Little Big Man, a 1970 sort-of Western that demonstrates, through silliness and violence, what American history looks like when it’s not written by the loudest voices. Based on a novel by Thomas Berger, it’s like an early Forrest Gump, with the hero telling his remarkable life story from, in Dustin Hoffman’s case, his very wrinkly present. A white man brought up in a native American tribe as a child when his parents were killed, we follow him from white man world to native world and back, observing his inability or unwillingness to fit neatly into either. This is a movie for Americans, who would probably get more of a kick out of General Custer’s depiction as a van fancy-boy idiot than I did, but still enjoyable despite its smudgy themes. It doesn’t quite know or assert what it is, so the messages get a bit mushed together, but somewhere in there in takes a stab at racism, colonialism, genocide, homophobia and mindless machismo, so I’m on board. It’s weird to see Dustin Hoffman being seduced by an older woman who isn’t drinking a cocktail in leopard-print, but it wasn’t bad. Two and a bit randy soda fountain shopkeepers out of five.