With Her New Indigenous Drama, Lily Gladstone Is Unstoppable
Watching a diligent artist and actor finally get their due is one of the rare gratifying, non-toxic experiences that Hollywood can offer an outsider. Success is afforded to few, and too often, performers who achieve it end up wasting their talents as the years rush by. That’s why watching Lily Gladstone rack up hit after hit has been so damn enjoyable: She’s put in the work to earn it, and none of her performances is exactly the same as the last.
Just two months after her marvelous turn in Under the Bridge, and three months after Emma Stone stole her Oscar for Killers of the Flower Moon (sorry, Stoners!), Gladstone returns with a third knockout in Erica Temblay’s debut feature Fancy Dance, which lands in theaters June 21 before streaming on Apple TV+ June 28. As Jax, an Indigenous woman caring for her niece, Roki (Isabel Deroy-Olson), after her sister Tawi goes missing, Gladstone carries the film with the same effortless stoicism she brought to her recently lauded roles. But here, she employs a necessary urgency not seen in those other two performances, one fitting for the first project in Gladstone’s recent slate that’s set in the present day.
The film is an observant meditation on the modern realities of Indigenous life, set on the Seneca-Cayuga reservation in Oklahoma, which is in disarray after Tawi’s disappearance. The gnarled roots of Jax’s family only become more contorted when the state interferes with her care of Roki, and what begins as a tense family drama unspools into a pensive road movie. While Tremblay and co-writer Miciana Alise’s screenplay is occasionally bogged down by its reluctance to engage with much levity, that’s also where Fancy Dance finds its singular point of view. Tremblay emphasizes the ephemeral beauty of specific moments, and how the light we receive from these fleeting instances of pleasure and connection can brighten the darkness that so often consumes our lives. It’s in these moments where Gladstone does her most exceptional work, and where Tremblay’s thoughtful direction commands the audience, repeatedly asserting that she’s a talent to watch.