KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON
SPOILER ALERTS THROUGHOUT, NOT REVEALING PLOT POINTS, BUT YOU'LL KNOW WHAT THE FILM IS ABOUT
Last night we went to see Killers of the Flower Moon. First gripe: no ice cream on sale in the cinema foyer. We’d planned to sugar up for the long haul. 3 point 5 hours is a long sitting. We drank green tea in a nearby caff. The film was preceded by endless ads. We’d wondered how films make money, given there was less than ten people in attendance. The ads piled up shamelessly before the movie, while we wondered that. We’d purchased premium seats. We could have bought standing room only and used the premium seats anyway. The premium seats were all that anyone used. I felt like complaining, I suspect that some of the people sitting nearby migrated in from the cheap seats. The premium seats weren’t even comfortable, but it was good be in the cinema. The missus first time since Covid.
Loads of ads, and trailers. Napoleon looks great. Ridley Scott churning them out. Much more likely to be a hit than a miss. Then we argued in whispers about why I didn’t like Gladiator. The missus always misrepresents that and so we went at it.
Killers of the Flower Moon has that Scorsese look: it’s bold, it’s colourful and swirling with activity, and details. It's explicitly artful and worthwhile. The music by Robbie Robertson will get an Oscar, but not through pity that he's gone: it's so forceful and insistent it achieves a grandeur that elevates the tension. Leonardo diCaprio gets to look more like Jack Nicholson as he gets older. That earthy, cross-eyed virility. At times he even looked like Brando in The Godfather. He’s put on weight for the film, and his teeth are filthy and crooked. His mouth droops at the corners. The screen hunk as character actor, and he’s never been better. He plays an idiot, basically, but he makes the complexities of this simple-minded character so compelling and real, that you can hardly believe what he’s doing. Robert de Niro plays his uncle, and in this film he acts, rather than shrugs and pulls trademark de Niro faces. But the performance that most affected us was the excellent Lily Gladstone as Molly, Leonardo DiCaprio’s character’s wife.
Like Leo, she managed to hold contradictory spaces within herself and still function authentically. All of us should be glad to have a Molly in our lives. She had integrity and humility in every pore, but never was she pious or boring. She was regal without being aloof. She’s the tragic and moral focal point of the film, which covered typical Scorsese territory, relating to power and sin. The serpent slithering into paradise. A lot of the themes of the movie are familiar to Scorsese fans. It’s not as violent as a lot of his films, but there’s terrible mood of foreboding throughout. It’s hideous and actually creepy in parts. A shocking parasitical relationship between the Osage Indians and their white neighbours and friends.
At one point I thought Marty was going to go Blue Hair, and layer on the “Old Whitey Bad” SJW cards, but I pulled myself together swiftly because not only was Old Whitey bad here, the film at times didn’t even seem to be about that. It wasn’t about modern politics, it was about man’s eternal shame, which that he mistreats his fellow man, and always as if there’ll be no reckoning.
Marty’s a Catholic. There’ll always be a reckoning.
There's a great device used at the end to substitute for white ink on a black screen telling us what became of the characters. There's a cameo by Marty, which seemed in some sense to be himself actually, passing damning judgments, and not a character in the film, but it was great to see him.
The film is long and it lost a few points with me for that. The length in itself wasn’t the problem as much as the sense that the film would have been better if it had been more tautly edited. Example: in one scene a character tells others what happened. We already know what happened, but he takes time to tell us what we know. Then Marty shows us in flashback what we know already, and now know in triplicate. There are scenes unnaturally lengthened, and this was a problem with the Irishman too. Scorsese aiming for epic, but merely reaching long. It takes this film down a notch or two in his great pantheon of movies. That’s still very good though…
