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Thursday, July 15, 2004 ( 7/15/2004 08:11:00 AM ) Bill S. BROKEN POTTERY AND BUSTED LIVES – Caught the American Mystery special broadcast of Thief of Time, the third in a series of TV movie adaptations of Tony Hillerman's Navajo mysteries, last night. Over the past three teleflicks, Adam Beach and Wes Studi have thoroughly made Hillerman's cop detective heroes, Jim Chee & Joe Leaphorn, their own. Studi has especially captured Leaphorn's cranky impatience and irritation with suspects and colleagues who are still enmeshed in the "old ways," while all of the other series regulars – on again/off again Chee girlfriend Janet Pete (Alex Rice), doomed spouse Emma Leaphorn (Sheila Tousey), and hardnosed Captain Largo (Gary Farmer) – are also believably recreated. Too, director Chris Eyre does a great job capturing the starkly eerie desert settings so prominent in Hillerman's books. The mystery in Thief isn't all that much, especially when the story gets pared down to two hour length: poor Peter Fonda (playing a figure central to the story's investigation of Anasazi pot thievery and murder) doesn't get more than a few minutes of screen time, though the ads on PBS sure played up his presence. Better served is Graham Greene, as "Jesus Indian" Slick Nakai, a canny con artist who dabbles on the side in stolen artifacts. Watching Greene verbally fence with our hero reservation cops made me wish the guy wasn't spending so much of time stuck in basic cable hell, doing voiceovers for true crime shows. If the actual identity of the story's murderer is fairly obvious, what makes the telemovie (and Hillerman's whole series of books, for that matter) is its revealing blend of character and cultural conflict. Tousey's Emma Leaphorn, who is about to undergo chemotherapy for cancer (something that happens, if memory serves, much earlier in the book series), provides a good representative of these conflicts: married to a man who has turned away from traditional beliefs, she also connects to the religiously conservative Chee. Where Leaphorn sees Chee's ambition to become a tribal shaman as an unnecessary hindrance to his work as a policeman, his wife is capable of speaking to Chee in both roles. (I'm not looking forward to her inevitable exit from the series, since Tousey definitely makes her character appealing.) This conflict also extends to the story's main mystery, in which newly converted Christian Navajos think nothing of violating a protected burial ground because their newfound faith makes them immune to the soul-snatching chindi that, according to old beliefs, haunt the area. I suspect the simpler Hillerman mysteries work better as telemovies than some of his more convoluted constructions (Skinwalkers, the first of the "American Mystery" adaptations, got rather lost near the end even though the identity of the killer was never in doubt). And though Hillerman fanatics may take issue with the liberties that writers of this teleseries have taken with timelines and significant character events, in most cases (a heartbreaking husband/wife scene between Leaphorn and Emma, for instance), they enhanced rather than detracted from the story. I continue to look forward to future adaptations of the Leaphorn/Chee books. Talking God, perhaps? (Mssrs. Chee & Leaphorn go to Washington!) # | |
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