Review of The Killers of the Flower Moon
Jan. 14th, 2024 10:24 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shadowkatJust finished watching Killers of the Flower Moon on Apple Plus. It's streaming on Apple for free now, well free if you already have a subscription. (I've an All-in-One subscription that includes unlimited music and the Cloud. )
This is the film adaptation by Martin Scorsese of the non-fictional work "The Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI".
Anyhow, I think when Martin Scorsese read the book (being Martin Scorsese) - he became fascinated with Hale and Burkhart, how they committed the murders, why they did it, and the relationship between Burkhart and his wife (who Burkhart was poisoning on Hale's orders), also how the murders kind of fell by the wayside. He kind of saw it as an opportunity to comment on American Cinema and the romanticization of the mobster, and the white guy crook - and felt by showing how pathetic and horrible these men were, yet also charming and sympathetic - he could comment on that here? And he uses a lot (self-indulgent in my opinion) film scholar approaches to do that - and I'm not sure it's that successful, because I only know he was trying that from the film critics - I did not feel it myself.
While when I read the book, I became fascinated by the Osage's struggle for Justice, and the Pinkertons, Hoover, and the Investigator, White, that Hoover sent out to investigate the murders. Hale and Burkhart weren't interesting to me at all, nor were they that interesting to David Grann, who wrote the book, since he focused mainly on the FBI and Molly Burkhart. The character that is the most developed in the book is White, Burkhart isn't developed at all, and Hale, just slightly more so. The book is also flawed in a way - because it too focuses far too much on the white men, and not enough on Molly Burkhart, and also has a heavy white male savior theme. (Agent White and David Grann provide the Osage with the Justice they seek, and are counterpoints to the evil Hale and Burkhart, but Molly and the Osage almost get lost in the shuffle - that's the flaw in the book. )
Watching the film is...a bit cringe inducing, for a lot of reasons. Mainly because Scoreses tells the story of an attempted genocide from the perspective of the Killers? Then tacks on a little radio show telling us what happened to everyone at the end (the Killers get life imprisonment, then get out in twenty years on parole), and then coming out as himself to announce the travesty of the situation. If I was the Osage, I'd be furious. And, Scorsese doesn't come anywhere close to conveying the number of Osage who were killed by people like Hale, enabled by the US government over a 20-30 year period to do it. It was genocide. There's no other word for it. They wiped out half the tribe for little more than money and land. Scorsese kind of smooths over that - the book does not. The other reason it is cringe-inducing, is we get about thirty minutes of replays of how several of the people are killed. (I thought I already saw this happen one way, why do I need to see it done again, but more ineptly? WTF Scorsese?).
I think Scorsese meant well, but honestly? I think his decision to tell the film from the perspective of Ernest Burkhart (Leonard DiCaprio) and William K. Hale (Robert Deniro) was unwise. Particularly if you are a white guy director, and not a Native American. Instead of being a story about the victims, it becomes a story about the killers. And as a result, there's a lot of unintentional "blaming" of the victim interwoven into the mix. The Osage are painted as kind of naive fools. We barely know some of the victims. But we spend a lot of time with the two lead killers, far too much time - since we are mainly in their point of view, and to a lesser degree Molly's.
Two examples of tedious film gimmicks, that serve no purpose:
* There's a sequence that stretches for about twenty minutes where Molly is flailing in bed, while Ernest watches her, guilt-ridden, and watches his uncle's (Hale's) grounds burning. It goes on for seemingly forever, the camera shifting from Molly shifting and moaning in bed, Ernest trying to figure out what to do, and shadows of thin ranch hands in cowboy hats dancing in the flames trying to put the flames out. Or causing them, I wasn't sure which.
* Another scene that goes on forever and seemingly has no point to it, a long camera tracking shot through the Burkhart household or the Hale house, that finally stops on Lizzie Q, who is dying. We go through all the rooms and see all these faces of people that we don't know or care about, nor do we really care about Lizzie - because we've only seen her three times. If I didn't have close captioning on - I wouldn't know who she was.
Most of the movie is littered with these and other film scholar touches. (Old movie reels, still photos, etc - Scorsese spends a lot of time honoring and doing a homage to 1920s film-making.) I can see why various film scholars and film critics praised this - but they don't serve much purpose outside of maybe conveying the idea that romanticizing violence through film is not a good idea or how the Osage have been belittled through American Cinema while mobsters and gangsters have been glorified? That was the overwhelming message that Scorsese conveyed through the film touches - which if that was his intent, he succeeded? But for this viewer it felt a bit too much of style over substance.
We also have a lot of intense scenes between Hale (Deniro) and Burkhart (DiCaprio) where they kind of repeat themselves. One is an interminable scene where Hale is trying to convince Burkhart to sign a piece of paper that Burkhart is questioning. This scene goes on for about twenty minutes. It's almost comical.
Scorese makes the same mistake that most filmmakers make in regards to Native Americans - leaning a bit too heavily on the mysticism, and not allowing them to be full-fledged characters in their own right. We have a lot of scenes of them seeing owls, or dancing, or smoking, or sitting in full gear for pictures or in counsel. I felt like I was seeing them through the eyes of Hale and Burkhart (their killers), not their own. And while this may work to get across Scorsese's larger message of why these murders were forgotten, and how our country has celebrated their killers over time - I'm not entirely sure it does the Osage Justice? The difficulty with meta-narratives, is the technique distances the audience from the story being told. As a result of this, the film is kind of empty emotionally.
The one bright spot in the film is Lily Gladstone who plays Molly Burkhart, but most of the time she's lying in bed moaning, or sitting silently fading away. She's ill through most of the movie. Also, she's kind of presented as a saintly other-worldly character, not quite real, and as a result difficult to relate to or feel empathy for - again the filmmaker puts a distance between the audience and the character. We don't really see Molly Burkhart through her own eyes, we see her through the eyes of Hale and Ernest Burkhart. And that's a travesty, because I honestly think the film would have been better - if we'd seen her story through her own eyes, not theirs.
I will state, that Scorsese does something innovative at the end - in that he wraps up the film with a surrealist and somewhat comical 1930s style radio program, as if the whole film is told in that setting. It appears to be airing from Berlin, with stark red and black colors. It may even be a Nazi broadcast - giving the impression that the tellers of this story are in fact the villains of it. And it in of itself is almost an apology for the way American Cinema has kind of white washed the minority experience, in particular the American Indian aka Native American experience.
The film is slow to start - I fell asleep and had to rewind. Again too much time spent watching Hale play King of Fairview, and wander about, while Burkhart attempts to romance a bemused but skeptical Molly. The romance part isn't too bad, but it is hard to understand why she falls for him. (I admittedly am not attracted to Leonardo DiCaprio and his appeal is kind of lost on me. I may have felt differently if Austin Butler or someone else played the part.) And it drags throughout. It needs an editor - because it has serious pacing issues and Scorsese is overly indulgent and a touch too in love with his leads for his own good.
Overall, the film is a bit too clever for its own good, and by leaning too heavily on the villains of the piece, loses its focus along the way.
Edited 1/15/24
This is the film adaptation by Martin Scorsese of the non-fictional work "The Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI".
Anyhow, I think when Martin Scorsese read the book (being Martin Scorsese) - he became fascinated with Hale and Burkhart, how they committed the murders, why they did it, and the relationship between Burkhart and his wife (who Burkhart was poisoning on Hale's orders), also how the murders kind of fell by the wayside. He kind of saw it as an opportunity to comment on American Cinema and the romanticization of the mobster, and the white guy crook - and felt by showing how pathetic and horrible these men were, yet also charming and sympathetic - he could comment on that here? And he uses a lot (self-indulgent in my opinion) film scholar approaches to do that - and I'm not sure it's that successful, because I only know he was trying that from the film critics - I did not feel it myself.
While when I read the book, I became fascinated by the Osage's struggle for Justice, and the Pinkertons, Hoover, and the Investigator, White, that Hoover sent out to investigate the murders. Hale and Burkhart weren't interesting to me at all, nor were they that interesting to David Grann, who wrote the book, since he focused mainly on the FBI and Molly Burkhart. The character that is the most developed in the book is White, Burkhart isn't developed at all, and Hale, just slightly more so. The book is also flawed in a way - because it too focuses far too much on the white men, and not enough on Molly Burkhart, and also has a heavy white male savior theme. (Agent White and David Grann provide the Osage with the Justice they seek, and are counterpoints to the evil Hale and Burkhart, but Molly and the Osage almost get lost in the shuffle - that's the flaw in the book. )
Watching the film is...a bit cringe inducing, for a lot of reasons. Mainly because Scoreses tells the story of an attempted genocide from the perspective of the Killers? Then tacks on a little radio show telling us what happened to everyone at the end (the Killers get life imprisonment, then get out in twenty years on parole), and then coming out as himself to announce the travesty of the situation. If I was the Osage, I'd be furious. And, Scorsese doesn't come anywhere close to conveying the number of Osage who were killed by people like Hale, enabled by the US government over a 20-30 year period to do it. It was genocide. There's no other word for it. They wiped out half the tribe for little more than money and land. Scorsese kind of smooths over that - the book does not. The other reason it is cringe-inducing, is we get about thirty minutes of replays of how several of the people are killed. (I thought I already saw this happen one way, why do I need to see it done again, but more ineptly? WTF Scorsese?).
I think Scorsese meant well, but honestly? I think his decision to tell the film from the perspective of Ernest Burkhart (Leonard DiCaprio) and William K. Hale (Robert Deniro) was unwise. Particularly if you are a white guy director, and not a Native American. Instead of being a story about the victims, it becomes a story about the killers. And as a result, there's a lot of unintentional "blaming" of the victim interwoven into the mix. The Osage are painted as kind of naive fools. We barely know some of the victims. But we spend a lot of time with the two lead killers, far too much time - since we are mainly in their point of view, and to a lesser degree Molly's.
Two examples of tedious film gimmicks, that serve no purpose:
* There's a sequence that stretches for about twenty minutes where Molly is flailing in bed, while Ernest watches her, guilt-ridden, and watches his uncle's (Hale's) grounds burning. It goes on for seemingly forever, the camera shifting from Molly shifting and moaning in bed, Ernest trying to figure out what to do, and shadows of thin ranch hands in cowboy hats dancing in the flames trying to put the flames out. Or causing them, I wasn't sure which.
* Another scene that goes on forever and seemingly has no point to it, a long camera tracking shot through the Burkhart household or the Hale house, that finally stops on Lizzie Q, who is dying. We go through all the rooms and see all these faces of people that we don't know or care about, nor do we really care about Lizzie - because we've only seen her three times. If I didn't have close captioning on - I wouldn't know who she was.
Most of the movie is littered with these and other film scholar touches. (Old movie reels, still photos, etc - Scorsese spends a lot of time honoring and doing a homage to 1920s film-making.) I can see why various film scholars and film critics praised this - but they don't serve much purpose outside of maybe conveying the idea that romanticizing violence through film is not a good idea or how the Osage have been belittled through American Cinema while mobsters and gangsters have been glorified? That was the overwhelming message that Scorsese conveyed through the film touches - which if that was his intent, he succeeded? But for this viewer it felt a bit too much of style over substance.
We also have a lot of intense scenes between Hale (Deniro) and Burkhart (DiCaprio) where they kind of repeat themselves. One is an interminable scene where Hale is trying to convince Burkhart to sign a piece of paper that Burkhart is questioning. This scene goes on for about twenty minutes. It's almost comical.
Scorese makes the same mistake that most filmmakers make in regards to Native Americans - leaning a bit too heavily on the mysticism, and not allowing them to be full-fledged characters in their own right. We have a lot of scenes of them seeing owls, or dancing, or smoking, or sitting in full gear for pictures or in counsel. I felt like I was seeing them through the eyes of Hale and Burkhart (their killers), not their own. And while this may work to get across Scorsese's larger message of why these murders were forgotten, and how our country has celebrated their killers over time - I'm not entirely sure it does the Osage Justice? The difficulty with meta-narratives, is the technique distances the audience from the story being told. As a result of this, the film is kind of empty emotionally.
The one bright spot in the film is Lily Gladstone who plays Molly Burkhart, but most of the time she's lying in bed moaning, or sitting silently fading away. She's ill through most of the movie. Also, she's kind of presented as a saintly other-worldly character, not quite real, and as a result difficult to relate to or feel empathy for - again the filmmaker puts a distance between the audience and the character. We don't really see Molly Burkhart through her own eyes, we see her through the eyes of Hale and Ernest Burkhart. And that's a travesty, because I honestly think the film would have been better - if we'd seen her story through her own eyes, not theirs.
I will state, that Scorsese does something innovative at the end - in that he wraps up the film with a surrealist and somewhat comical 1930s style radio program, as if the whole film is told in that setting. It appears to be airing from Berlin, with stark red and black colors. It may even be a Nazi broadcast - giving the impression that the tellers of this story are in fact the villains of it. And it in of itself is almost an apology for the way American Cinema has kind of white washed the minority experience, in particular the American Indian aka Native American experience.
The film is slow to start - I fell asleep and had to rewind. Again too much time spent watching Hale play King of Fairview, and wander about, while Burkhart attempts to romance a bemused but skeptical Molly. The romance part isn't too bad, but it is hard to understand why she falls for him. (I admittedly am not attracted to Leonardo DiCaprio and his appeal is kind of lost on me. I may have felt differently if Austin Butler or someone else played the part.) And it drags throughout. It needs an editor - because it has serious pacing issues and Scorsese is overly indulgent and a touch too in love with his leads for his own good.
Overall, the film is a bit too clever for its own good, and by leaning too heavily on the villains of the piece, loses its focus along the way.
Edited 1/15/24