Nightmarish excess ruins potential of `Dreamkeeper'

"Dreamkeeper" happens, and it's a big disappointment. This ABC miniseries could have been a sharp two-hour journey into Native American lore and the importance of family ties. Instead, in the hands of executive producers Robert Halmi Sr. and Robert Halmi Jr., whose TV events have ranged from the grand ("Merlin") to the grueling ("Noah's Ark"), it's a bloated, four-hour example of misspent energy and lost potential. Call it Digital Baroque, and call it very annoying. That's why ABC is burying the miniseries, which airs tomorrow and Monday nights at 9, in the post-Christmas programming void. Even the network appears to realize that "Dreamkeeper" is neither a dream nor a keeper.

The present-tense drama finds a troubled young man named Shane (Eddie Spears) driving his storytelling grandfather, Old Pete Chasing Horse (August Schellenberg), from their South Dakota reservation to the All Nations Powwow in New Mexico. As Grandpa shares Lakota myths with Shane along the way, the miniseries presents these tribal legends to us in hallucinogenic and oh-so-magical segments, reducing all their richly symbolic figures to literal images. Indeed, the majority of the action in the miniseries takes place in these fragments, which are set in different time periods and rely on a deluge of trippy editing techniques. There is, of course, a giant faux-Spielbergian snake whose slithering evokes about as much terror as a video-game villain.

Amid all this hoo-ha, the central, unifying drama of Shane and his grandfather gets lost, at least until the final hour. Alas, few viewers will probably make it that far.

The ambition of "Dreamkeeper" is conventional but worthy. It tries to illustrate the value and importance of the myths we invent and how they serve to hold cultures together and empower individuals. There's a lot at stake in whether a Lakota youth will open up to his grandfather's stories. But by presenting these stories with mind-numbing excess, the miniseries defeats its own message. Perhaps with a few million dollars less, the filmmakers might have done "Dreamkeeper" justice.

Matthew Gilbert can be reached at gilbert@globe.com.