In Smoke Signals there seems to be pressure on Alexie and Eyre to conform to a Hollywood road movie format. It is not that the film shies away from such problems as drunkenness or hopelessness. We see pervasive, everyday racism once they leave the reservation. We see Lester Fallsapart's car, broken down in the same spot for 20 years. What we don't see so much, which we do see in the book, is the banal cruelty of such a relentless life of isolation without a future.
Basketball is a good example.
In the book basketball is described as the ultimate Indian sport, but also as the only chance that most youth on the reservation have of doing anything. Perhaps the only time we see that balance between the hope of shooting hoops and the despair it conceals is in Arnold's finely performed and edited monologue about playing two on two against a couple of Jesuits. Instead the film centres on a notion of redemption, of resolving the tensions between father and sons. Arnold is trying to apologise across the miles to Victor and to Thomas, while the final voice-over asks how we forgive our fathers, and whether we forgive them in our age or theirs. The film succumbs to a commercial and sentimental notion of universality which tears it away from showing the specific issues in a more affecting way.