A mark of the overall quality of Dances with Wolves is that it survives repetitious commercial breaks, reduction of images and relocation from the dark magic of the movie theater to a distracting living room. Overseas when the film was released in 1990, I did not catch golden boy Kevin Costner’s directorial début until years afterwards, only a few minutes’ worth at that and dubbed on the small screen. So two evenings ago was my first real viewing of all three hours plus one minute.

Often when the Academy goes gaga -- twelve nominations in this case, seven Oscars -- the years reveal shortcomings in a film not nearly so good as its momentary bandwagon. But here the whole holds up quite well, even the director-star’s voiceover commentary seeming appropriate, not as lazy exposition, but as the loose journal in which his Lt. John W. Dunbar writes down thoughts and sketches people, animals and landscapes.

Better than Sydney Pollack’s Jeremiah Johnson, which it superficially resembles, but more like the unfairly neglected Western/loner-themed Will Penny, the work was scripted by Costner associate Michael Blake from his own novel, scored by John Barry and brilliantly Color DeLuxe photographed by Dean Semler around South Dakota’s sacred Black Hills and Badlands. (The latter two effects are much diminished on television.) One of few realistically sympathetic portrayals of Native Americans as people, it has its loose ends and sore points -- the deaths of wolf Two Socks and horse Cisco, the Leone-like stereotypes of cavalrymen, and the forced Caucasian origin of the hero’s lady love -- but its attention to external detail and its male leads’ quiet dignity, played out against the sadness of our hindsight, compel admiration for the essence of the worthy individual in both races.

Self-sufficient rather than strong, and silent, Dunbar is differentiated from your standard-issue cowboy/frontiersman by a capacity for wonder and a New World innocence that sometimes verge on the cloying. The hero’s boyish, distinctively American voice is appropriate, for this is an unsullied Christ figure, not in the direction of Mel Gibson’s masochistic self-flagellation but, rather, in a capacity for emotional over physical suffering and a respect for earth, nature and life in all its forms. Cruel violence does exist, and he is not so ethereal as to deny its necessity: blood is answered with blood, be it Pawnee raiding parties or the Federal troops who, as history and one simple end-title tell us, in time will be victorious.

From a suicidal Christ-gesture that makes him a bloody Civil War hero, the young officer requests assignment to the furthest frontier, at Fort Phil Kearny, whose madman commander dispatches him even further afield, where he becomes Man Alone in the heart of nowhere. But this is the land of the Lakota Sioux, buffalo hunters without the buffalo that are already reduced by materialistic white civilization. Riding to visit “neighbors,” this pure-of-heart naïf stumbles across severely wounded Stands with a Fist (Mary McDonnell) and returns her to the tribal village.

Like tourists believing their language universally intelligible -- “She’s hurt. She’s hurt.” -- each side is curious but wary, waiting for the other to commit. With sometimes wry humor at linguistic misunderstanding, the story from this point is predictable but, while not probing the complexities of Amerind culture or spirituality, nevertheless compelling in its sincerity. Chief Ten Bears (Floyd Red Crow Westerman) is laconic and open, but it is holy man Kicking Bird (Graham Greene) who emerges as the newcomer’s friend and champion. Warrior Wind in His Hair (Rodney A. Grant) has his own noble reasons for taking longer to be won over, while Stands with a Fist conveniently remembers enough childhood English to serve as unwilling interpreter and eventual romance interest.

Without the excruciating Sun Vow torture ceremony of these same Dakota-area Sioux of A Man Called Horse, but through accidentally finding bison, saving a young brave, and “good trad[ing]” bits of his uniform for native dress, the lieutenant is accepted, and married, into the tribe. Facile in dividing these “good” Indians from the “bad,” the Pawnees -- who in fact did not war with the white man and often served the Army as scouts -- the story has nowhere to go, aside from waiting for the inevitable coming of the totally bad guys, the whites as numerous “as the stars.”

For all his prestige, Costner found no takers at home and had to look for backing abroad, thus saving his project from the studios’ overriding commercial concerns. Vindicated at the box-office and the Academy Awards, and prompting Costner’s admission to full tribal membership, Dances with Wolves has proved, with an even greater irony, the high-water mark of the director-star’s career.

(Released by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and rated "PG-13" by MPAA.)