‘Fancy Dance’ Review – Lily Gladstone Leads An Intimate Look At A Damning Cultural Epidemic

A long-standing national cultural epidemic shames every function of the American legal and justice system.

The epidemic is the cases of missing and murdered Indigenous women across the United States. The numbers are staggering in any context: The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) found in 2020 that American Indian and Alaska Native women experienced the second-highest rate of homicide and that homicide was one of their leading causes of death. Despite the prevalence across North America, there seem to be few solutions and fewer acknowledgments from the cultural zeitgeist. One could argue, unconvincingly, that the statistics, stories, and historical circumstances that allowed this crisis to continue unabated are too complex to understand fully.

Fancy Dance exposes the fallacies of that argument with a simple but profound story that carefully unspools the limitations that Native and Indigenous women face. The film by Erica Tremblay follows Jax (Lily Gladstone), a Native woman living on an Oklahoma reservation with her niece, Roki (Isabel Deroy-Olson). Jax’s sister and Roki’s mother, Tawi, has been missing for two weeks. Despite numerous inquiries to law enforcement and the local community, there are no leads on her disappearance and little sense of urgency from the FBI (who are responsible for investigating such cases). Jax’s efforts to find Tawi are complicated by the arrival of her father and his second wife, Nancy, who seek custody of Roki in Tawi’s absence, planning to move her off the reservation. Fearing the loss of her two closest family members, Jax takes Roki on a road trip to a powwow where Roki was supposed to participate, sparking a statewide manhunt and revelations about their family.

For us to understand what’s at stake for Jax, her family, and her community overall, director and co-screenwriter Erica Tremblay constructs her film with intimacy as its driving force. She prioritizes tight, small-scale conversations between her characters, captured in unfuzzy atmospheres, conveying day-to-day simplicity and strife within a close-knit community. When Tremblay does deploy stylistic flourishes, such as monochromatic color palettes at night, it serves intense character connections, from the electric blues that bathe Roki watching a video of Tawi performing at a powwow to the purples overlaying Jax’s private dance with a stripper at a local club. Whatever the style, Tremblay communicates a powerful sense of history and connection between her characters: protagonists, antagonists, and everything in between.

Tremblay has wonderful allies in her cast, especially Lily Gladstone and Isabel Deroy-Olson as the film’s central duo. Anyone familiar with Gladstone’s Oscar-nominated performance in Killers of the Flower Moon will be unsurprised by her sterling work here. As is her specialty, Gladstone conveys miles of emotion through her eyes, and Jax affords her a broad spectrum of them, from anguish to desire. Her command over the camera, which smartly captures her in frequent close-ups, is peerless. Brilliant as Gladstone is, Deroy-Olson is the film’s great find, a revelation of a young actor. She feels so acutely, closely tracking throughout the film, the loss of Roki’s innocence and the perseverance of her joy. 

Fancy Dance’s overarching goal is to demonstrate how our society actively and passively undercuts that sense of history and connection. Within the first few scenes, Jax lays out for us the absurd bureaucracy involved in the cases of missing Indigenous people, with local law enforcement and federal investigators passing the buck back and forth, treating her case like an afterthought. (One of the most infuriating moments is when an FBI investigator describes Tawi’s case as a distraction compared to Roki’s, implying that Roki’s case matters more because the person who reported her, her grandfather, was white.) The prejudice extends beyond the investigation: during a stop at Target while on the run, Jax and Roki are racially profiled by an ICE officer, escaping by communicating in their Native language to align their stories.

What may ache worse than the failures of the legal system is the failure of one’s family members. Roki treats her heritage and community with intensive care, sewing clothes for the powwow early in the morning. However, she seems to be an island in this regard. Jax encourages her interest, but her checkered past and searching for Tawi don’t allow her much space to participate. (Language is her strongest tool in keeping close to Roki.) Roki’s grandfather and step-grandmother aren’t cruel but wholly unequipped to support Roki’s cultural development. One night after Roki moves in with them, Nancy brings her a pair of ballet slippers, intending to enroll her in lessons. Roki explains what the dancing at the powwow means to her, subtly rejecting the ostensible good gesture. Instead of asking to learn more or offering to support Roki, Nancy walks away defeated, casting herself as a victim. It’s a powerful examination of cultural clash with a family unit and how minorities are often asked, or required, to carry the burden of soothing the aches.

Fancy Dance is filled with simple interactions that carry complex meanings and are powerful enough to serve as the film’s dramatic thrust. Even when the stakes begin to rise on the outside, it’s the interpersonal moments that keep us engaged while touching on broader societal conflicts like drug abuse, sex work, and puberty. It’s strange and slightly disappointing when the story that Tremblay has painstakingly built swerves towards melodrama in the third act, with a moment of violence that feels emotionally out of touch with the rest of the film. While it does grant a much-needed confrontation between Roki and Jax about the truth of Tawi’s disappearance, it’s a jolt that nearly kills the film’s intimate momentum. It ultimately lands in a great place, figuratively and literally, but it feels like it would’ve made it there regardless.

It’s a minor hiccup in a unique and vital journey down one path of the Native experience. Fancy Dance lays out, in the clearest possible terms, the astonishing crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous women and the complex system of failure that feeds it. Alongside it, but just as powerful, is how resilient a family, community, and culture can be within such a crisis. Seeing Roki and Jax still finding the spirit and resistance to dance through it all is inspiring and only bolsters the urgency, as they, and millions of other Native women, deserve more than to have to.

Fancy Dance is currently playing in select theaters and is available to stream on Apple TV+.