Fancy Dance

Oscar nominee Lily Gladstone leads a noir-like thriller with two indigenous women at its heart, now streaming on Apple TV+.

In a pivotal scene of “Fancy Dance,” the new film by Erica Tremblay, premiering this week on  Apple TV+, a song is lifted to the “missing and murdered” from the Native American communities of Oklahoma. It’s a telling moment, at a powwow where Native people gather to celebrate their cultures together, that there are so many such people that they take the time at a celebration to sing out in remembrance of them. Ringing the celebration are white police officers working security, looking on impassively, on business of their own. They don’t hear the voices right in front of them, calling out for justice. 

“Fancy Dance” stars Lily Gladstone as Jax Goodiron, a woman struggling to hold her family together on the Seneca-Cayuga reservation in Oklahoma, even as all the systems that are supposed to protect her and ensure justice fail her at every turn. As “Fancy Dance” opens, Jax’s sister Tawi has already been missing for several weeks, and law enforcement has done little to help, from the tribal police (including her own brother) to the FBI. If not for Jax papering the town with missing posters and interrogating everyone she meets, it seems nobody might be looking for her at all. 

Meanwhile, Jax is trying to care for her 13-year-old niece Roki (Isabel Deroy-Olson), Tawi’s daughter, who has her hopes pinned on going to the powwow upstate to dance with her mother, as she has many times before. It’s the center of this girl’s world, which is about to become larger and harsher. When CPS tries to remove Roki from Jax’s custody and place her with Jax’s estranged white father Frank (Shea Wigham) and stepmother Nancy (Audrey Wasilewski), she takes matters into her own hands, sweeping Roki away to take her to the powwow and continue the search for Tawi. 

What follows seems for a moment to be heading for a road trip adventure/coming-of-age story about two Indigenous women, but veers instead into a kind of Native noir, as Jax and Roki find themselves on the run and at odds with the white-dominated world around them. From the official world of social workers, the police, and Federal authorities, to drug dealers and a violent nearby encampment of oil field workers, Jax and Roki are surrounded, with nobody to protect them but each other. 

Lily Gladstone rose to fame and an Oscar nomination in last year’s “Killers of the Flower Moon,” another story of the intersection between Native people and the law enforcement of white America. But whereas “Killers” faced complaints from some critics about its focus on the white characters, “Fancy Dance” tells its story resolutely from the inside out, centering the experience of the Indigenous women at its heart. 

A member of the Seneca-Cayuga nation herself, writer-director Erica Tremblay stays tightly focused on the perspectives of the people on and from “the res,” placing us directly in the middle of this world from the first frames and not stopping to explain much to a viewer from outside. This works mostly to the film’s benefit, as it does not give the audience the luxury of distance, but draws us quickly into sympathy with Jax and her niece.

Dialogue is spoken both in English and in Jax and Roki’s own tongue — which Jax identifies as Cayuga to an outsider, but they simply call “the language” — and cultural details like a ceremony performed when Roki has her first period are presented without unnecessary exposition. These details are simply there, taken for granted as part of the world of these characters. 

It is from this strong identification with the point of view of Indigenous characters that the film derives its growing sense of tension and dread, as Jax and Roki follow Tawi’s trail, increasingly in the eye of agents of the outside world who wish to put them back in their place on the reservation.

In one nail-biting encounter, an ICE agent explains politely that his job is “making sure everyone is where they’re supposed to be.” His world requires that Jax and Roki stay put, out of sight and out of mind, despite the lack of opportunity on “the res” for them to make a satisfying life for themselves. But even he doesn’t see them. He’s watchful for encroachment from without, even as he occupies a state that was once promised as “Permanent Indian Territory” before it, too, was colonized by people who didn’t much care to stay where they were “supposed to be.”

It isn’t all doom and dread, though, and indeed, “Fancy Dance” does have at its core the relationship of these two vulnerable and very real women.

Lily Gladstone is grounded and direct, in a no-frills performance that nevertheless hints at the deep well of emotion that Jax tries doggedly to keep under control. Isabel Deroy-Olson is a great discovery, walking the edge of girlish innocence and the dawning awareness of womanhood on Roki’s journey. In one early scene, she totters like a baby deer as she tries on her mother’s platform heels and watches a recording of a previous dance. Together, Gladstone and Deroy-Olson share a tender, fragile, sometimes brittle bond that heightens the tension as a hostile world closes in around them – you don’t want anything to jeopardize this bond, though it seems inevitable that it will. 

“Fancy Dance” is Erica Tremblay’s first feature film, and it is a confident debut, fully immersed in the world of its Native characters from the beginning and charging straight into a gripping cat-and-mouse game. As the story progresses, the palate of the film changes from harsh light to ever-deepening shadows, pulling on a stylish cloak of darkness that retains a hard edge. An inventive score by  Samantha Crain uses a palette of human voices to explore Jax and Roki’s inner worlds without sentiment in the film’s quieter pauses, and provides a welcome release in its final moments.

As I watched, I found myself strongly reminded in places of 2010’s “Winter’s Bone,” the film that introduced most of us to Jennifer Lawrence. Like “Fancy Dance,” “Winter’s Bone” also features a noir story led by a fiercely protective young woman, among another group of people seemingly forgotten by America, in the Ozarks. That tense, evocative film rightly won a great deal of acclaim and, as with Gladstone last year, another early-career Oscar nomination.

It’s good company to be in - and in both, we get the strong sense that the ones doing the searching may just be lost themselves. Jax and Roki are among the “missing” commemorated at the powwow even as they stand right in front of us. “Fancy Dance” makes us see and hear them.