Stories of cowboys and Indians aren't all about gun fights and raids. In the 1920s, in the Osage Nation in Oklahoma, a different kind of war took place as depicted in 2023's Killers of the Flower Moon. It's a subtle war of slow, gradual degrees, occasionally punctuated with sudden violence. Director Martin Scorsese tells his story with marvellous economy. Mainly it's a story about stupid people, or, to put it more kindly, people who aren't especially smart, but the movie itself may be too smart for general audiences to-day.
I was reminded of reading Quentin Tarantino's recent book, Cinema Speculation, in which he recalls the experience of first seeing Taxi Driver in the 1970s. He talks about how often the audience laughed at Travis Bickle, at how stupid he was to take Cybill Shepherd to a porno theatre, or how stupid his little karate move was in the election office. Leonardo DiCaprio's character, Ernest Burkhart, isn't so different. His stupidity is a key part of his character though he's less introspective, less philosophical, than Travis. The flaw in this film may be that Ernest's character lacks complexity. The movie really is about him.
The question of how we're supposed to take Ernest, what we can conclude from the actions he takes, is what makes the story interesting.
It's a murder mystery and it's not clear from the start who all the culprits are and one feels sympathy for the Osage characters. But while the film is never as trite as Dances with Wolves or Pocahontas, its Osage characters are never especially complex. Lily Gladstone plays Ernest's wife, Molly, who is passionate enough about solving the murders that she travels to Washington and manages to speak to President Coolidge. It's only natural, many of the people getting killed are her family and friends. Which is to say, there's nothing especially interesting about her motive there nor her methods. What is interesting is her relationship with Earnest. Why did she marry him? How much did she know about his connexion to the murders?
The answer to neither question is ever made clear. Gladstone's demeanour suggests a perceptive, intelligent woman who's attracted to Earnest because his stupidity makes him seem safe and childlike. As events unfold and make it clear to us, the audience, just how dangerous stupidity can be in even the most seemingly affable puppy, one might expect to see Molly's anxiety or attempts to question her husband on thorny matters. But throughout the film, she mostly remains as serene and inscrutable as the Mona Lisa to which she bears an uncanny resemblance.
Meanwhile, Earnest's lack of capacity for self-reflection makes him a fascinating subject of study. When he conveys an order for the killing of his wife's sister and her husband, he's nonetheless shocked and horrified when their house, down the street from his own, blows up in the middle of the night. His horror is genuine enough that Molly is able to read on his face everything that's happened before he's said a word. You can see that they have an emotional bond, and an honest one, even as he's undermining her whole world. You watch him and you wonder, when is he going to start making connexions in his mind? When is any semblance of morality going to show him the contradiction in his nature?
Robert DeNiro plays his uncle, another interesting character, who's a celebrated benefactor of the Osage Nation who's also undermining them for his own profit under the table. DeNiro never really sounds like a guy from Oklahoma. Of course, he's a great actor but he just can't be anything but a New Yorker. But he does seem like he genuinely cares about people at times even as he's calculating every possible way of funnelling Osage funds into his own pocket. He really does build schools and hospitals, he really comforts a woman whose husband has just died. He calls himself "King", he may as well say "God" with the way he's able to coldly shift loyalties. He's not in it just for personal greed. He thinks in long term, in terms of inheritance and generations. You wonder if he spent so much time focusing on one big picture, he lost sight of another. He warns the Osage against their friendship with the Ku Klux Klan.
Sometimes I found myself thinking of Twin Peaks. This is a story about a small community with characters who may be heroes in one context and villains in another.
The climactic scene is a confrontation between Earnest and Molly and she finally becomes a sort of avatar for the audience as she questions him and seemingly tries to figure out if she can love him. Here I felt the movie just fell a little short. Earnest just isn't as interesting as Travis. It may be DiCaprio's performance, which is fine for Rick Dalton, but there's a necessary sense of depth that doesn't quite come across here. I don't know. Maybe it'll improve for me on another viewing. In any case, it was a pleasure spending over three hours absorbed by the visual narrative Scorsese's woven. A lot of it is pure cinema, that is, the act of telling a story by a sequence of juxtaposed footage, judiciously edited, using as little dialogue as possible. I worry too many people have been conditioned by compulsively expository media to appreciate this. Again, I find cause to lament the decline of the humanities.
Killers of the Flower Moon is now in theatres.
X Sonnet #1781
A rust hull contains a ruddy room.
The silly captain orders butter knives.
The merry dots are scrambled fast for doom.
And thus concludes the cruising caution lives.
A gentle warning rots below the deck.
Through purple foam, the goddess roughly dreams.
A chain of violence claimed the fragrant wreck.
A fire damned the valley's shadow teams.
Resplendent X-es dot the country flick.
A giant snack could kill a taste for life.
The native corn has learned a foreign trick.
As wheat, the husk can cut a butter knife.
For bloody rivers, wealth descends to dust.
For standing fights, the pipe commenced to rust.
