Winning and losing
Philosophically committed to film being made for the big screen, I make it a point to see all the Oscar nominations, in a theater. Except this year. Due to its length - three and a half hours - I waited to stream Killers of the Flower Moon.
Martin Scorsese has made 27 films and been nominated 10 times for Best Director but has won only once, in 2006 for The Departed. In my mind he absolutely should have won Best Director for Killers of the Flower Moon. No doubt Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer was a fantastic film, but there have been at least 10 films on the subject, whereas Killers of the Flower Moon is about a little known and shameful part of American history. Not that that in itself is criteria, but in Flowers, Scorsese, grapples with an epic story of murder betrayal and greed that foreshadows the ills that plague us today.
Early in film we see oil gurgle and gush out of the parched earth, splattering a half-dozen Osage men with the black gold, as they dance in ritual ecstasy. Scorsese and co-writer Eric Roth have crafted a story from the first part of New Yorker writer David Grann’s 2017 best selling non-fiction book of the same name. In Oklahoma in the 1920s, the Osage people became the richest people in America, living in beautiful homes, owning expensive cars, and employing white servants as white men came to marry the women and inherit the land rights.
Scorsese and Roth paint a large canvas of treachery and beauty as the film flows seamlessly between tender intimacy and blood curdling horror and the viewer is never boxed in by obvious narrative cues, we’re never sure where the story is headed or why, which adds to the tension and overall mystery and makes the story evermore ominous and dangerous. Killers of the Flower Moon is a heartbreaking masterpiece.
The entire cast give outstanding performances. Robert De Niro is sinister and charming as the cattle baron William Hale as he steers the story through its grisly murders. But it is the complicated love between the weak-minded Ernest Burkhart, played brilliantly by Leonard DiCaprio, and Mollie Kyle, played with magnetic stillness by Lily Gladstone, that tethers us to the story. There’s emotion in every camera move, every darting look, every frown, in silence and in gesture, as the story builds to the bone chilling betrayal.
Movies are a visceral experience that allows us the richness of a shared humanity and the life altering power of creativity.
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