Photo:Paramount Pictures
Paramount Pictures
Nearly two centuries ago, the historian Francis Parkman wrote that the fate of Native Americans had always been a forlorn and foregone conclusion: Indigenous man “will not learn the arts of civilization, and he and his forest must perish together.” DirectorMartin Scorsese’s impassioned,fact-basedKillers of the Flower Moonshows how those arts of civilization included greed, subterfuge, murder and the patience to put them all into practice — in the case ofKillers,against one tribe in the 1920s.
This is the most sinister movie ever made about the West, and probably the most coldly pessimistic portrait of the American character sinceThere Will Be Blood.
In the decades before World War I, members of the Osage Nation in Oklahoma had become rich — millionaire-rich — after oil was discovered on their lands. What could be more tempting to White ranchers (whose rolling acreage promised no such fortune) than to marry Osage women and gain control of their oil shares? This is what cattleman William Hale (Robert De Niro), the devil’s notion of a life coach, lays out as a plan of action for his aimless young nephew Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio), just back from the war.
Killers of the Flower Moon.Melinda Sue Gordon/Apple
Melinda Sue Gordon/Apple
And if Mollie herself should die prematurely…
Lily Gladstone with DiCaprio as her husband.Melinda Sue Gordon/Apple
JaNae Collins, left, Gladstone, Cara Jade Myers and Jillion Dion.Apple Tv+
Apple Tv+
You may have heard thatKillersislong— 3 hours, 26 minutes — and it moves at a grave, measured pace. But exactly how fast should a story of systematic genocide go?
Unlike Christopher Nolan, director of the year’s other great historic epic,Oppenheimer,Scorsese doesn’t try to create an invigoratingly, restlessly kinetic experience.Killer’sbreathing rises and falls naturally, allowing Scorsese to lead us quietly into completely unexpected moments. A brief scene in which we see a dying Osage woman’s vision of the afterlife — she’s led away, laughing, into the forest — is one of the most beautiful, mysterious things he’s ever filmed.
Then, in an arrestingly strange coda, the director himself steps forth and, with a sad fatalism that Francis Parkman might have appreciated, brings the saga to its close.(In theaters Oct. 20, R)
source: people.com
