“Dancing Ground” takes place in the midst of Montana’s vast wilderness. A small-town sheriff (Randall Newsome, wearing a Nicolas Cage-worthy hangdog expression) faces little criminal activity put plenty of domestic problems. The sheriff is a weekend father and his teenage son (Miles Gravage) loathes him and constantly talks joyfully about his mother’s new boyfriend. The sheriff’s senile father (Ron Crawford, looking like Gabby Hayes) is wandering about the plains shooting at imaginary coyotes who are supposedly threatening his cattle – never mind that the cattle were sold ages ago. The sheriff finds himself at a supposedly sacred Indian site where he had a weird boyhood incident – he sneaked off to go dancing on the rocks, but his father punished him for that action.
Yeah, this makes little sense. But the film’s Montana grandeur makes this more than passable as a travelogue and the film’s denouement (an improvised baseball game using rocks and antelope bones) is arguably the weirdest example of male bonding to find its way on camera.
