Reception
Defying expectation, Dances with Wolves proved instantly popular, eventually making $184 million in U.S. box office sales, and $424 million in total sales worldwide. The movie won the Best Picture Academy Award against strong competition, notably Martin Scorsese's Goodfellas.
As of 2011, the film holds a positive review score of 78% on Rotten Tomatoes. Because of the film's popular and lasting impact, the Sioux Nation adopted Costner as an honorary member.
In 2007, the Library of Congress selected Dances with Wolves for preservation in the United States National Film Registry.
Native American activist and actor Russell Means was less kind about some aspects of the film's technical accuracy. In 2009, he said "Remember Lawrence of Arabia? That was Lawrence of the Plains. The odd thing about making that movie is that they had a woman teaching the actors the Lakota language, but Lakota has a male-gendered language and a female-gendered language. Some of the Indians and Kevin Costner were speaking in the feminine way. When I went to see it with a bunch of Lakota guys, we were laughing."
According to other sources the gender specific Lakota words were used correctly in the movie. Some of the criticism was inspired by the fact that the pronunciation is not authentic since none of the actors except for one were native speakers of the language. However, making the movie with dialogues in the native Language has been lauded as a remarkable achievement.
It's not impossible to conceive that the character Stands With a Fist would have been taught the feminine side of the language, and that this is what she would have been most familiar with using. As an interpreter struggling with a personal language barrier, she would have used her most familiar form of language and so most of the interpretation would have been through the Lakota feminine tongue. As a result, the Lakota would have come to use the feminine tongue with Dances With Wolves as a matter of convenience and also because a person with more mastery of the masculine tongue who also knew English would not have been in the offering. Therefore, it is entirely realistic to assume that the Lakota would have come to almost exclusively rely on the feminine tongue when speaking with Dances With Wolves.
Read more about this topic: Dances With Wolves
Famous quotes containing the word reception:
“I gave a speech in Omaha. After the speech I went to a reception elsewhere in town. A sweet old lady came up to me, put her gloved hand in mine, and said, “I hear you spoke here tonight.” “Oh, it was nothing,” I replied modestly. “Yes,” the little old lady nodded, “that’s what I heard.””
—Gerald R. Ford (b. 1913)
“Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody’s face but their own; which is the chief reason for that kind of reception it meets in the world, and that so very few are offended with it.”
—Jonathan Swift (1667–1745)
“To the United States the Third World often takes the form of a black woman who has been made pregnant in a moment of passion and who shows up one day in the reception room on the forty-ninth floor threatening to make a scene. The lawyers pay the woman off; sometimes uniformed guards accompany her to the elevators.”
—Lewis H. Lapham (b. 1935)