Stories come to life

Given that television is usually content to reflect and flatter only its fattest demographics, ABC is to be congratulated for putting up the money, and no little bit of it, to make “Dreamkeeper,” a sprawling, four-hour cavalcade of Native American legends-come-to-life that airs Sunday and Monday nights. Produced by the team of Robert Halmi Sr. and Jr., who have made a career of converting folk tales and literary classics -- from Dostoevsky to Dickens to “Dinotopia,” from “The Odyssey” to Orwell -- into high-gloss television events, it bears all the hallmarks of their house style, being sympathetic, sincere, scrupulously researched and sumptuously mounted, but also sentimental, simplistic and overlong.

Old Pete Chasing Horse (August Schellenberg, of “Black Robe” and the “Free Willy” franchise), is an aged Sioux storyteller living on South Dakota’s Pine Ridge Reservation. He is being driven to a big pow-wow in Albuquerque by his reluctant and troubled teenage grandson, Shane (Eddie Spears), a classic at-risk type in a “Custer Died for Your Sins” T-shirt. (They are doing it all off the interstate, apparently, the way people in movies do.) Foxy grandpa has ulterior motives, and as they travel along -- in an old truck he calls Many-Miles-With-No-Muffler -- he tells ancient tales in a pointed attempt to get his grandson back on “the red road.”

“Dreamkeeper” starts out well, in scenes rich with telling domestic detail. Writer John Fusco (“Crossroads,” “Young Guns”) who lived for several years at Pine Ridge, researching the film “Thunderheart,” was given his own Indian name and speaks Lakota, and obviously knows, and loves, his subject. But if his characters are not the stereotypes of westerns past -- gangs and alcohol and tribal casinos and other realities of present-day life on “the rez” are at least alluded to -- they are nevertheless cut from cardboard. Brightly painted cardboard, to be sure, bent into a semblance of three dimensions, and given decent life by the actors, but subject to a script that follows the industrial logic of screenwriting -- which is to say, it gives viewers what it is assumed viewers want.

Only someone watching television for the first time will not be able to see from the earliest moments exactly where grandfather and grandson are headed. The ease with which conflicts are finally resolved is almost distressing, and not a little ironic in a film whose subject is the power of storytelling. “A people without stories,” says Old Pete, reaching into his bottomless bag of aphorisms, “is like wind in the buffalo grass.” Got that?

The interpolated native legends themselves are nevertheless splendidly rendered. Drawn from several Indian nations, each has its own visual scheme and palette -- director Steve Barron, who also helmed the Halmis’ “Merlin” and “Arabian Nights,” got his start in music videos, and it shows, sometimes a little too much. The stories encompass the magical, the historical, the farcical and the moral: Have pride but don’t be proud; put the community before yourself; be careful what you wish for; and if a spirit or any other magical being tells you to do something, follow the instructions to the letter.

Especially well done are the tale of how Quillwork Girl and her seven adopted brothers became the Big Dipper; the cross-planar romance of Thunder Spirit and She-Crosses-the-Water; and a couple of comic stories involving trickster Coyote and Iktome the spider, played by John Trudell and Gary Farmer (“Adaptation”).

Spread in installments across the breadth of the film is the story of Eagle Boy and his misguided vision quest, and though the intercutting seems to suggest a parallel between him and Shane, that doesn’t quite pan out. What it does suggest is that a good cliffhanger knows no cultural bounds.

As in many other Halmi productions, special effects are key -- we get a giant snake monster, witches and ghosts, a mountain that turns into a bear, a flock of ravens forming a spirit’s face, and the watery domain of the Thunder Spirit -- and here they have the appropriate quality of blurring the lines between the other world and this one.

But much care has also been lavished on the unspecial effects, from tepees to buckskins to face paint. Most impressive is the way the camera captures the landscape and what fills it; shot on location from Arizona to Canada (by Jon Joffin), “Dreamkeeper” is beautiful to look at, and it is in this that it best expresses the invaluable aboriginal notion that all things -- men and women, horses and buffalo, rock and tree and water -- are alive and equal and worthy of respect.

*

‘Dreamkeeper’

Where: ABC

When: 9-11 p.m. Sunday and Monday

Rating: The network has rated Sunday’s Part 1 TV-PGLV (may not be suitable for young children, with advisories for coarse language and violence) and Monday’s conclusion TV-14 (may not be suitable for children younger than age 14).

August Schellenberg...Old Pete

Chasing Horse

Eddie Spears...Shane Chasing Horse

Gil Birmingham...Sam

Sheila Tousey ...Janine

Chaske Spencer...Eagle Boy

John Trudell...Coyote

Gary Farmer...Iktome

Teneil Whiskey Jack...Quillwork Girl

Michael Greyeyes...Thunder Spirit

Executive producers, Robert Halmi Sr. and Robert Halmi Jr. Director, Steve Barron. Writer, John Fusco.