We learn this story through Chief Big Bear (Saginaw Grant), when the Lone Ranger meets with the Comanche in an attempt to prevent war between the tribe and the white settlers. As a result, all of his family and friends were slaughtered. When he was a kid, he naively told two white men where they could find his tribe’s primary source for silver, in exchange for a pocket watch.
#The lone ranger cast series#
Whereas in the original series his tribe was almost never identified, Depp’s Tonto is explicitly a Comanche who has a rather serious guilt complex. Is Tonto crazy? Does he possess a heightened, “natural” sense of this world and perhaps the beyond? The screenwriters attempt to address the mysticism more or less inherent in the character by giving him a complicated origin story. It feels awfully similar to what we saw at the beginning of the movie. But later another young boy, this time John Reid’s nephew, watches Tonto, locked in a jail cell, perform a mysterious chant his eyes suddenly snap in his direction and the boy runs away, frightened. He speaks in incomplete sentences and repeatedly “feeds” a dead bird that sits atop his head his presence is accompanied by the sound of pounding drums and rattles, a tired cinematic cue to invoke “Native American” or “tribal.” The filmmakers, it appears, are counting on us to recognize that they know these are terrible stereotypes that a museum of that period would employ, and that they themselves are not presenting them uncritically. A young white boy dressed as the masked hero wanders into a museum exhibition and lands in front of a display called “The Noble Savage in his Natural Habitat.” This ancient specimen turns out to be an elderly Tonto, and he comes to life in order to tell the boy the legend of John Reid, the Lone Ranger. The film begins with, ends on, and occasionally returns to a San Francisco carnival in 1933 (the same year that the original radio series created by Fran Striker premiered). The most troubling aspect of the film is its framing device. But they were also obligated to remain at least somewhat faithful to their original source - and sometimes they end up reinforcing the stereotypes they’re trying to subvert. Depp and the screenwriters Justin Haythe, Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio have gone to great lengths to reverse some of the antiquated tropes found in many classic westerns.
To start, “The Lone Ranger” does its best not to marginalize Tonto: For the majority of the story, this is his film, not the Lone Ranger’s. To the filmmakers’ credit, what we get on screen is more complicated than that. (The “white people are the ones who have the problem,” apparently.) All in all, for anyone who may be sensitive to - or at the very least culturally aware of - the poor history of minority representation in Hollywood, the promotional buzz surrounding this film can cause sincere dread about what awaits us this time.īut is Depp’s Tonto as racist a caricature as the stars’ uneasy sound-bites have made it seem?
Then there was his noble attempt to seek approval from the Comanche Nation, and co-star Armie Hammer’s insistence that the American Indians in the cast and crew were “thrilled” and “loved” the experience.
But I wanted to be able to show these kids, ‘F- that! You’re still warriors, man.’ ” Ugh. “They’re living without running water and seeing problems with drugs and booze. “I wanted to maybe give some hope to kids on the reservations,” he told Rolling Stone. But those comments certainly didn’t help. NEW YORK - Even if Johnny Depp hadn’t made some rather boneheaded comments about his intentions in bringing back Tonto, the American Indian sidekick in Gore Verbinski’s “Lone Ranger” reboot, the resurrection would have faced scrutiny for reinforcing ethnic stereotypes - and it did. Johnny Depp and ‘the race issue’ in ‘The Lone Ranger’ – The Mercury News
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