Netflix has gone woke and is most definitely putting some morally questionable content out there, but every once in a while they pick a winner. Or so I thought, while initially watching “Frybread Face and Me.” Only after sitting down in a Brooklyn coffeehouse to write the review did the light-bulb go on over my head about it’s under-the-radar woke message. More on this later.
Writer-director Billy Luther, who is of Navajo, Pueblo, and Hopi heritage, gives us a semi-autobiographical story of Native-American life—heritage, family history, and destroyed nuclear families—with “Frybread Face and Me,” a sweet coming-of-age tale.
No Fleetwood Mac for You
It’s 1990, and 11-year-old Benny (Keir Tallman) a Navajo “city Indian,” had planned to spend his hard-earned piggy-bank savings seeing his favorite band, Fleetwood Mac, in his hometown of San Diego.However, due to parental marital strife, Benny is suddenly sent to spend the summer at maternal grandma Lorraine’s (Sarah H. Natani) generator-powered single-wide trailer on her small sheep ranch, which sits on the Navajo Nation reservation in Pinon, Arizona.
Hers is the high desert sanctuary that grandkids are banished to when their parents’ lives teeter on the brink or are already in a shambles. His departure allows Benny’s unhappy mom and cheating dad the space to sort out their coming divorce.
Bitter, broke, mean uncle Marvin (Martin Sensmeier) tends the sheep, fixes the fences, and shames young Benny for playing with dolls that his nephew utilizes to reenact soap opera plots. (“They’re action figures!” says Benny). “You a cowboy or a cowgirl?” Uncle Marvin queries, slapping Benny’s mom’s cowboy hat off his nephew’s head. Marvin has resigned himself to continuing the family business of being a sheep farmer, the “last in the bloodline,” with his dream of becoming an “Indian Rodeo” star a hair’s breadth away from getting demolished by an errant, bad fall off a bucking bull.
From Fleetwood to Frybread
Benny potentially might have had an ally in his gorgeous Aunt Lucy (Kahara Hodges), a free-spirited “jewelry artist” who is really more of a local couch-surfer-with-benefits (life is hard on the Rez), but she’s rarely around.
Benny and Dawn don’t exactly hit it off, but slowly grow on each other. They bond, play dress up, do dances that are little mash-ups of hip-hop and Native tribal, wear flowing scarves and skirts like Fleetwood Mac’s heroine Stevie Nicks, and watch the only video they have in their collection—the sci-fi epic “Starman,” part of which was shot in nearby Meteor Crater. Dawn carries an ancient cabbage-patch doll she’s named Jeff Bridges, in tribute to the actor’s “Starman” character.
Young Ms. Hogan as Frybread is a natural actress with tremendous charisma, part of which is that, regardless of needing to hit the gym (being a pro personal trainer I’m allowed to say “hit the gym”), she’s stunningly beautiful. (I’m not using woke euphemisms like she’s a “big girl.” No. She’s unhealthily obese and needs to lose weight—end of story). After learning that Benny is from San Diego, Frybread Face christens cuz Benny “Shamu” after Sea World’s star orca.
Over the course of the summer, granny weaves sheep-wool rugs and explains the Yin and the Yang of the loom: The space between the yarn’s warp and weft is female, and the shuttle is male, and one must take care to shepherd one’s thoughts, as they will connect with and affect the outcome of the woven product. Dawn speaks Navajo and helps Benny understand his grandmother, who can’t (or refuses to) speak English. That’s beautiful stuff.
What with wandering dads, beater trucks, barely running cars with busted-out windshields, a growing companionship between the two cousins and their aunt, and grandma’s gentle Navajo-only guidance and eldership, “Frybread and Me” succeeds in immersing us, wistfully, in this low-rent world of desert poverty. The kids figure out their own worth, consider whether they will choose paths well-worn or less chosen, and start to draw boundaries on which parts of their traditions they will embrace and which they will discard. And the elders will have to live with the choices.
Forget Most of What I Just Said
I started out giving Netflix the benefit of the doubt, because, like I said at the outset, I found the film’s earnest, innocent, and somewhat whimsical tone enjoyable. And so I sat down and wrote half this review. Then, a small delayed-fuse time-bomb of awareness exploded out of my subconscious: “Frybread Face and Me” is, in addition to all of the above, also quite the sneaky, agenda-pushing, woke propaganda-disseminating vehicle. With a busted-out windshield.I decided to have a look at what the increasingly woke Rotten Tomatoes critic community is saying. It’s getting to be almost like a foreign language out there, and I’m personally taking a page out of granny’s Navajo book: She refuses to learn the white man’s language, and I refuse to learn the woke man’s language.
Consider, for example:
“There’s a subtle LGBTQ+ thread that runs through “Frybread Face and Me.” It’s stated a few times in writer/director Billy Luther’s script that adolescent Benny struggles to live up to expectations of what a Diné man “should” be, and one scene sees Fry and Benny dancing together in traditional Diné women’s clothing. But the characters—and the movie—never press Benny too hard on the specifics of his still-developing identity, giving him the space to figure things out for himself.”
And this:
“Luther does a deft job of showing how indigenous men adopt and perpetuate Western normative masculine roles, whereas Benny is less occupied with gender. At times he dresses up like Stevie Nicks, and later he joins Grandma and Dawn in their routine of weaving and washing their long hair as if it’s an instinctual communal act, not a grand statement about identity.”
Add to all this the overt emasculation of Uncle Marvin, who, in times long past, would have been a splendid, traditionally masculine warrior chieftain but is here reduced to a pathetic, long-suffering shadow of a man, living with his mommy. Don’t even get me started.
I’m still holding out, hoping that Netflix can provide some decent entertainment here and there, but it’s a minefield, folks. However, the readership of the Epoch Times doesn’t need me to tell them that. Most cancelled their Netflix subscriptions a long time ago.
