Movie Details
| Title: | Killers of the Flower Moon | |
| Director: | Martin Scorsese | |
| Year: | 2023 | |
| Genre: | Western | |
| Times Seen: | 1 | |
| Last Seen: | 12.31.23 |
Other Movies Seen By This Director (11)
- After Hours
- The Aviator
- Casino
- The Departed
- Goodfellas
- The Irishman
- The King of Comedy
- My Voyage to Italy
- Raging Bull
- Shutter Island
- The Wolf of Wall Street
| Date Viewed | Venue | Note |
| 12.31.23 | Internet | One final oscar movie to close out the year. I have complicated thoughts about this one so hopefully they make sense to future-me if I ever go back and read this again. Also I think I have to have spoilers so... SPOILER ALERT On one hand, I think there's a fatal flaw with the structure of the movie in that it's a real buried lede sort of deal where... I dunno maybe I'm just dense but to me the most insidious thing is that these killings were endemic like there were 30 of them and basically all the white folks were in on it in an almost-government sanctioned annihilation in order to "legally" get this oil money, but I didn't get the gist of the scope of it until reading the book's wikipedia entry afterward. It makes me think back to the random scenes of violence early in the movie and now they make sense, but the movie almost presupposes that you've already read the book or something because it takes such an awkward focus in telling the story. I get that these roles that De Niro and DiCaprio play are good meaty roles, probably more meaty than playing a straight-arrow investigator (indeed Jesse Plemmons' performance is basically just standing there), but I spent most of the first hour wondering what the hell kind of movie this even was. I suspect De Niro basically in his first scene but to me the dramatic tension of the movie is wondering the balance of malice and stupidity in DiCaprio's character. In the lens of a thriller, this movie is pretty good because DiCaprio does play it real well where sometimes you believe he's being sincere, other times you believe he's lying, and other times you believe he's being manipulated. But that's one specific person in a scene of much greater injustice! It's like "yeah aliens are landing in the background but let's focus on this gas station attendant doing a crossword." OK that's not entirely fair because I guess the sisters and family dying are noteworthy and it's hard to cover things in generalities, like learning about every poisoning and murder I guess. you have to focus somewhere, but I just felt like the larger story didn't get any attention. The movie relies on two narrative devices to deliver exposition - the silent film at the beginning and the radio play at the end - but both feel lazy and inadequate at the same time to me. I've liked the format of a radio play ever since the trailer for a film noir called The Big Clock so I liked seeing it here, but when the director is literally on screen wrapping up the story... ugh. Now, some of my feelings might be due to me working as a subcontractor for the Bureau of Indian Affairs in the early 2000s. This was right after a lawsuit was filed where untold monies were missing from the trust fund that the bureau is charged with managing. Basically, no one knew who took it, when it was taken, or how much got took. The judge ordered the entire bureau to be cut off from the internet until they could get their ducks in a row. It was eye-opening for me personally to see a glimpse of how government works (or doesn't) but also how the US government has taken every opportunity to screw over indigenous peoples. So to connect the dots and learn that the Osage oil money was the basis of BIA's trust just reignites all those feelings from 20 years ago for me. Even when given a lucky draw, predators invented laws and mechanisms of which they could exploit to swindle what they could behind cover of law and politics. The problem is I got all that from wikipedia not this movie. Basically I guess I need to read the book. Maybe once I read the book this movie will make a good companion piece, if I ever care to sit through it again. It's so long. It's even structured like a miniseries. Ok so that's a bunch of bad. Now for some good. I really liked the last hour, basically once the feds show up. That's when De Niro is basically a gangster and Scorsese shoots that stuff so well. Setting up accomplices to tie up loose ends, Brendan Fraser's lawyer character. The shot of all the old white guys staring at the camera where the teaser puts the voice-over "can you find the wolves in this picture". All so great. And maybe the first two and a half hours is also good now that I know what kind of movie it is and I can watch without trying to follow the plot so hard. And I'm writing this the next day because the movie was so damn long that I couldn't stay up to write this note immediately afterward, so I should also note that some scenes have really stuck with me and affected me, dredging all this stuff around. The scenes of violence are so sudden and brutal and well-depicted that putting the pieces together and, like, realizing that the scene of the guy shooting the mother from the window and taking the baby was probably a husband who murdered his wife now that they had a baby, making it look like a suicide to get the headrights... so disturbing! And all the millieu stuff of Fairfax as a western town was so well done. I'm guessing that's where the budget came in... it looked like they basically made a main street and train station and filled it with wonderful casting and wardrobe to have them all look so scheming and conniving in Mollie's eyes. So I do think it was a good movie... I just think there might've been a better movie hiding in there, or a 6-part mini-series where we get the human, insidious reveal of De Niro's and DiCaprio's characters but we could also get a little more scale from the feds side of things. |
