When it comes to titles, few are as appropriate in describing a film as Little Big Man, a film of staggering length about a very small and supposedly inconsequential individual whose voyage through various stages of American history have made it one of the more cherished works of the New Hollywood movement. Directed by Arthur Penn in collaboration with screenwriter Calder Willingham (who had penned several iconic scripts around this time), both setting out to adapt Thomas Berger’s epic western novel of the same title, which has to be seen as an act of incredible audacity, since this is not a particularly easy text to bring to the screen. Unfortunately, it bears significance to mention from the start that there are enormous problems with this film that prevent it from reaching greatness – it is undeniably overlong, to the point of exhaustion, and it feels cobbled together from a set of unrelated moments forced into close proximity, under the guise of being a sprawling tale of the decline of the west. Rather than being the vivid tapestry of American history that looks at roughly a century of the political and social climate of a country in rapid flux, Little Big Man becomes an exercise in perseverance, the kind we have to endure, since the promise of a reward at the end of this lengthy story is enough for us to pay attention, even when it starts to dwindle and we find ourselves trying to make sense of a film of such enormous scope, which eventually does become worthwhile once we sit with it long enough.

Little Big Man is a film that works better in theory than it does in execution. As 140 minutes in length, there is a lot of content that was covered here, and while this isn’t particularly long for a historical epic, especially one that aims to look at over a century in America’s past, the film is a slight chore to get through. This is very much the result of the pacing, which is deliberately quite slow – but rather than being meditative and reflective on the events it depicts, whereby the viewer is invited to witness these historical moments and marinade in their significance, it becomes quite jagged and unreliable in terms of sticking to a consistent tone. Penn was a decent journeyman director, but his talents really depended on the extent to which the material was able to offer him something valuable to say, which is not always the case here. There’s certainly enough in terms of a narrative to keep the director busy – but perhaps fatally so, since we are voyaging between decades without much guidance, and where we are forced to fill in the gaps that would have otherwise been covered by a more precise attention to detail, which is mainly what the film is missing. The idea of a revisionist western requires a film that knows how to draw correlations between the historical events and the more modern context – every introductory text to Little Big Man mentions how it was created as an analogy for the US involvement in the Vietnam War – but unless you are either from that period and could spot the sardonic references, or you were outright told that this was the intention, it’s difficult to see these details, which makes us wonder exactly how effective the film was at conveying this intriguing concept.

However, Little Big Man is not necessarily a bad film, since there are many admirable qualities. The problem isn’t that the film is without merit, but rather that there are an equal number of flaws that may not invalidate it, but rather softens the impact it would have otherwise had with a more assured director at the helm, and not one that often took a very literal approach to his filmmaking (which does work in films like The Miracle Worker, but not with something as complex as this), and we find ourselves scrambling to make sense of it. To his credit, Penn knew how to blend genre effectively – Little Big Man contains elements of action, adventure, comedy and romance, all of which are compressed together into this film, which draws a lot of inspiration from the epic western, but more aligned with the slightly off-kilter elements that are often left on the cutting-room floor, rather than making it into the more polished productions. There’s a grit to the film that warrants our praise, even if only to a certain extent – Penn’s ability to weave together several different ideas in tandem is one of his strengths, even if it does start to veer slightly out of control after a while, which is why the film needed a more comprehensive understanding of its material, since the components of a great work are present, they’re just presented in an order that doesn’t make much sense, which isn’t enough to disqualify this film from being worth our time, it just feels like it is grasping onto certain ideas that don’t always make as much sense in practice as they do in theory, which is one of the primary issues that we find peppered throughout the film.

If there’s one way to describe Dustin Hoffman at this particular point in his career, it is most certainly nothing short of dedicated. He hails from the generation of actors who go for broke with every performance, and while this could be seen as excessive, its difficult to not admire the hustle with which these actors approached their careers – every film had to contain the most thoroughly complex performance the actor had ever given, out of fear that even a slight amount of internal emotion could result in a certain scene not having much impact. For the most part, this worked for Hoffman – his career is filled with memorable performances. However, a film like Little Big Man required someone who was not only exceptionally gifted enough to play the character, but also had the ability to blend in with his fellow actors, rather than outshining them. Hoffman’s performance here is not bad, it is just thrust too much into the centre of the film, which distracts from the genuinely great work being done by the likes of Faye Dunaway and Chief Dan George, who are given fascinating characters, but always feel like they’re just peripheral to Hoffman, who seems to struggle to allow anyone else to share the screen with him. A film like this needed someone who could stand as a surrogate for the audience, an active observer into the changing face of American culture, rather than the figure that guides it. Little Big Man overestimates the merits of its protagonist, and ultimately doesn’t serve any of its characters nearly as well as it should have, which is part of the inherent problems associated with this film.

Little Big Man represents the kind of excessive filmmaking that we don’t find being produced anymore – it was the first attempt at a New Hollywood epic, a film of considerable scope that both hearkened back to the days of the event film, but filtered through the more subversive lens of the more critical and scathing approach taken by younger filmmakers at the time. The results, while not a failure, are certainly mixed, and you can’t be blamed for losing focus, especially since the film itself struggles with the specific elements that would be the difference between a radical success and a deflated, overlong chore of a film. It’s never quite clear what Little Big Man was trying to be, or specifically what it was attempting to say. Instead, we have to view it as a series of moments tied together by a strong concept, and while it may not be sufficient in regards to fully encapsulating the entire gamut of emotions present in the film, we find a film driven by ambition more than narrative, which may seem like a fair trade, but only to the extent that the viewer is able to invest in the story. Entertaining, but within reason, and certainly very well-made, Little Big Man is a decently enjoyable film that may not deliver everything it promises, but does well enough to convince us of its merits, and gives us a couple of hours of solid entertainment, which is at least somewhat worth our time, even if it could’ve been spent on something much more engaging.