REVIEW THREAD:93 RT (428 reviews) 89 MC (26 100s/63 reviews)

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www.theringer.com/movies/2023/5/25/23736768/killers-of-the-flower-moon-film-martin-scorsese-cannes-review

SPOILER: Click to show

Scorsese steps out of time and space for the film’s penultimate sequence. On a ’50s-style stage, a radio show about what happened after the then-nascent FBI finally intervened is being recorded. The tone is odd, between irony and pity, an appropriate climax for what has been an uncanny, amusing, but disturbing film. Of course, there is no real conclusion—in the years since the Osage affair, the plight of Indigenous people has barely been addressed. Then something both devastating and curious occurs: the filmmaker himself steps onto the stage and narrates the rest of the story. Perhaps Scorsese felt compelled to show how he understood that the oppression of Native people goes far beyond his film, and could hardly be captured in three hours and 26 minutes. Yet this extended appearance is also tinged with melancholy and a general gasp was heard in Cannes’ Debussy theater: Is the director anticipating his own ending? Or perhaps this is a demonstration of love for the art form he’s had the chance to work with, and a way to express his gratitude for all the films that have led him to make this wildly ambitious and significant one.

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‘Killers of the Flower Moon’ Premieres at Cannes: First Reaction
Martin Scorsese directed this harrowing and deeply American true-crime drama set in the 1920s. Leonardo DiCaprio, Robert De Niro and Lily Gladstone star.

A man in a gray suit and cap helps a woman out of an old-fashioned car with no roof. She's wrapped in a pink, brown and green blanket, and smiling at him.
Leonardo DiCaprio and Lily Gladstone in “Killers of the Flower Moon,” directed by Martin Scorsese.Credit...Cannes Film Festival

By Manohla Dargis
Reporting from Cannes, France

May 20, 2023
Updated 8:59 p.m. ET

On Saturday, “Killers of the Flower Moon,” Martin Scorsese’s harrowing epic about one of America’s favorite pastimes — mass murder — had its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival, screening out of competition. It’s Scorsese’s first movie at the event since his nightmarish screwball “After Hours” was presented in 1986, winning him best director. For this edition, he walked the red carpet with the two stars who have defined the contrasting halves of his career: Robert De Niro and Leonardo DiCaprio.

Adapted from David Grann’s nonfiction best seller of the same title — the screenplay was written by Scorsese and Eric Roth — the movie recounts the murders of multiple oil-rich members of the Osage Nation in Oklahoma during the 1920s. Grann’s book is subtitled “The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI,” while the movie primarily focuses on what was happening on the ground in Oklahoma. The name of the young bureau chief, J. Edgar Hoover, comes up but largely evokes the agency’s future, its authority, scandals and that time DiCaprio played a closeted leader in Clint Eastwood’s “J. Edgar” (2011).

“Killers of the Flower Moon” is shocking, at times crushingly sorrowful, a true-crime mystery that in its bone-chilling details can make it feel closer to a horror movie. And while it focuses on a series of murders committed in the 1920s, Scorsese is, emphatically, also telling a larger story about power, Native Americans and the United States. A crucial part of that story took place in the 1870s, when the American government forced the Osage to leave Kansas and relocate in the Southwest. Another chapter was written several decades later when oil was discovered on Osage land in present-day Oklahoma.

When DiCaprio’s Ernest Burkhart arrives by train at the Osage boomtown of Fairfax, oil derricks crowd the bright green plains as far as the eye can see. Still wearing his dun-colored doughboy uniform from the recently ended war, Ernest has come to live with his uncle, William Hale (Robert DeNiro), along with a clutch of other relatives, including his brother (Scott Shepherd). A cattleman with owlish glasses and a pinched smile, the real Hale had nurtured such close relations with the local Native American population that he was revered, Grann writes, “as King of the Osage Hills.”

With crisp efficiency, soaring cameras and just enough history to ground the narrative, Scorsese plunges you right into the region’s tumult, which is abuzz with new money that some are spending and others are trying to steal. The Osage owned the mineral rights to their land, which had some of the largest oil deposits in the country, and they leased it to prospectors. In the early 20th century, Grann writes, every person on the tribal roll began receiving payouts. The Osage became fantastically wealthy, and in 1923, he adds, “the tribe took in more than $30 million, the equivalent today of more than $400 million.”

“Killers of the Flower Moon” is organized around Ernest’s relationship with both Hale and a young Osage woman, Mollie (Lily Gladstone), whom he meets while taxiing townspeople around. Much like Fairfax, where luxury autos race down the dirt main road amid shrieking people and terrified horses, Ernest is soon hopped up, frenetic, all wild smiles and gushing enthusiasm. He keeps on jumping — it’s as if he’s gotten a contact high from the wealth — though his energy changes after he meets Mollie. They marry and have children, finding refuge with each other as the dead Osage start to pile up.

Gladstone and DiCaprio fit persuasively even if their characters have contrasting vibes, temperaments and physicalities. When she’s out and about, this pacific, reserved woman turns her face into an impassive mask and wraps a long traditional blanket around her, effectively cocooning her body with it. With her beauty, stillness and sly Mona Lisa smile, Mollie exerts a great gravitational force on Ernest and the viewer alike; you’re both quickly smitten. DiCaprio will earn most of the attention, but without Gladstone, the movie wouldn’t have the same slow-building, soul-heavy emotional impact.

Ernest is a fascinating, thorny character, especially in the age of Marvel Manichaeism, and he’s rived by contradictions that he scarcely seems aware of. DiCaprio’s performance is initially characterized by Ernest’s eagerness to please Hale — there’s comedy and pathos in his mugging and flop sweat — but grows quieter, more interior and delicately complex as the mystery deepens. It’s instructive that Ernest is frowning the first time you see him, an expression that takes on greater significance when you realize that DiCaprio is mirroring De Niro’s famed grimace, a choice that draws a visual line between the characters and the men who have been Scorsese’s twin cinematic lodestars.

I’ll have more to say about “Killers of the Flower Moon” when it opens in American theaters in October.

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Manichaeism?

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Code for 'I use a thesaurus,' when writing a simple film review. Why even mention Marvel?

Having read all the reviews online at the moment, they seem quite reminiscent of the ones for The Irishman. Lots of praise, but those few criticising the film fall on its run time.

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CANNES 2023 MAY 20, 2023
Killers of the Flower Moon Turns Out to Be the Simplest and Slipperiest of Things
By Bilge Ebiri, a film critic for New York and Vulture

It’s not Martin Scorsese’s western, and it’s not another gangster epic. It’s his marriage story.

The early scenes of Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon are a symphony of pointed dissonance. The director revels in the frantic bustle of the Oklahoma boomtown of Fairfax where most of the film is set — a world of fast, shiny cars; hollering cowboys; and seemingly endless oil fields. World War I has recently ended, and the turn-of-the-century discovery of black gold in this region, to which the Osage were moved from their ancestral homes along the Ohio and Mississippi River valleys, has unexpectedly created immense wealth, making the Osage “the richest people per capita on earth.” But the new money has also led to a series of unsolved murders, and Scorsese grimly interrupts the action at regular intervals to show the faces, and say the names, of the Native American dead. It’s a somber historical accounting, but it also happens to be a familiar western movie trope: One is reminded of Charles Bronson’s Harmonica hauntingly reciting the many victims of Henry Fonda’s aspiring-capitalist gunslinger Frank in Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West.

It would be tempting to say that Killers of the Flower Moon is Scorsese’s attempt at a western, and in some of its sweeping vistas, particularly early on, you can sense him luxuriating in the open spaces and lawless frenzy of this world. The story would obviously also lend itself to yet another gangster epic from a man who’s made his share of them. But in adapting David Grann’s acclaimed 2017 nonfiction history, whose subtitle is The Osage Murders and the Rise of the FBI, Scorsese and screenwriter Eric Roth have shifted the scope of the story, pulling the timeline further back to show the growing relationship between Mollie Brown (Lily Gladstone), a member of a large and wealthy Osage family, and Ernest Burkhardt (Leonardo DiCaprio), a WWI veteran who arrives in town to work for his uncle, William Hale (Robert De Niro), a local godfather type. For all its extravagant running time (three hours and 26 minutes!), its big-swing history lessons, and its tale of an Old West giving way to the regimentation of a modern police force, Killers of the Flower Moon turns out to be that simplest and slipperiest of things: the story of a marriage. And a twisted, tragic one at that.

Ernest’s growing relationship with Mollie is at first an extension of his bond with “King” Hale, who takes a great interest in his nephew’s prospects for marriage. (“You like women?” “Sure.” “You like Red?” “Don’t matter to me. I’m greedy.”) Hale and the people around him have taken advantage of the restrictive laws governing Native American wealth. Full-blooded Osage do not actually control their own money; they are declared officially incompetent, and require white guardians to oversee their riches. Quickly, and almost imperceptibly, the impressionable and weak-minded Ernest is coaxed into Hale’s running, murderous plot to accrue even more Osage wealth.

The first half of Grann’s book is structured as something of a mystery. But Scorsese mostly does away with all that, backloading the second half of his film with the investigation by Bureau agent Thomas White (Jesse Plemons), long after we already know the contours of the crime. What was a revelation in the book is here treated in matter-of-fact fashion early on as a casual, quiet, gathering conspiracy. It’s fueled by greed, but also by the notion that the people being killed, robbed, and exploited — the Osage families living in fear of this slow-rolling crime wave (referred to at the time as “the reign of terror”) — aren’t really people at all. The most uncomfortable aspect of Killers of the Flower Moon is not the spectacular criminality on display, but rather how it’s treated by so many of the characters as no big deal.

These are typically Scorsesean ideas: our offhand capacity for evil, the inherent violence of relationships, the strain of serving two masters. Ernest doesn’t have a spine, or even much of an identity. He’s defined by his malleability — which can become wearying over the course of nearly four hours, especially as the film moves toward a stripped-down, minor-key austerity in its later scenes. DiCaprio is a fine actor, but he needs space to maneuver. He’s at his best when he can go big. Here, his character shrinks the more he’s onscreen, and the actor sometimes feels lost. De Niro, by contrast, has a grand old time as the smooth-talking Hale, imparting his ghastly plans with avuncular chumminess, as if they were bits of folksy wisdom. It’s a return to the quiet menace of some of his classic characters.

In so many ways, though, this is Lily Gladstone’s movie. She plays Mollie with a mix of standoffishness and exhausted hope. She can tell early on that Ernest is out for her money. So is every white man around her. But she comes to see charm and slivers of decency in him, too. As the horrors mount around her, Mollie navigates her queasy, gathering suspicions as well as her affection for her husband. Ernest is … well, he’s earnest. When he tells Mollie he loves her, she believes him. And so do we.

That is, in many ways, the great, cruel, unreconciled tragedy at the heart of this tale. It also perhaps explains Scorsese’s decision in the later scenes to go in a heartbreakingly intimate direction. As Ernest continues to ping-pong between his loyalties to Hale and Mollie, seemingly too weak and too plain to find anything resembling a moral backbone, we feel like we’re watching someone slowly being tortured to death by his own inadequacy. Maybe that’s also why the story never really achieves closure, or anything resembling redemption. By the time Scorsese himself comes onscreen to deliver the picture’s final lines — in an incredibly moving cameo, placing himself alongside the showmen and sensationalists who’ve told the story of the Osage murders over the decades — we may actually find ourselves surprised that the movie is over. It feels like an open wound right up to the end.

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Alfonso Cuarón calls KotFM a "masterpiece."

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Edgar Wright...

Am in awe of KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON. A profoundly powerful & disturbing film on an open wound subject. It's both intimate & epic, vividly tangible & exquisitely rendered by Martin Scorsese on incendiary form. Perhaps his best of this century. A must see on the big screen.

The cast, led by DiCaprio, Gladstone & Robert De Niro, are exceptional, the latter in one of his wiliest performances, right down to his final seconds. To see this epidemic of insidious gaslighting brought to graphic life, is urgent & sobering. You won’t stop thinking about it.

There's much, much more to talk about. But the headline is: see it. I was lucky to watch it a few weeks ago and I cannot wait to see it again. It's quite the feat of cinema.

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Osage News reviews KotFM.

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joysauce.com/killers-of-the-flower-moon-turns-journalism-into-cinema/

DiCaprio and De Niro deliver rigorous, soul-chilling performances that could easily be called “career-best,” but more vitally, they seem to reach into their respective pasts in order to create not just individual characters, but compendiums of their own onscreen careers, drawing similarities and allusions to their previous works with Scorsese. Ernest’s wide-eyed glare, when he makes his greed for money known, recalls DiCaprio’s performance as fraudulent stockbroker Jordan Belfort in The Wolf of Wall Street. Meanwhile, De Niro—who vacillates between southern charm and silent chills—lies somewhere between the deceptive smiles of violent charmer Max Cady in Cape Fear, and the icy compartmentalization of mob hitman Frank Sheeran in The Irishman—another film in which Scorsese re-examines cinematic imagery by recreating scenes from both his own work and The Godfather. All three aforementioned Scorsese films are part of his recurring examination of the moral rot infesting American power structures (and structures familiar to him in general; Silence is about the colonial history of the Catholic church), themes immediately relevant to a story of white supremacy and white perpetrators killing Native Americans practically out in the open.

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www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/film/article-in-cannes-martin-scorsese-balances-carnage-with-indigenous/

Speaking to The Globe and Mail after attending the premiere, Enoch Cree Nation model and activist Ashley Callingbull said the film is a bold masterpiece. “It made me feel seen and heard and that’s exactly what representation is,” said Callingbull, before boarding a flight to Saskatoon.

“It was hard to watch but the world needs to see that this is a painful reality our Indigenous women still face every day,” says Callingbull, who has long been outspoken about issues surrounding missing and murdered Indigenous women. “To see the truth on the screen is a powerful statement because we are also showing that regardless of what issues Indigenous people face we are still here and we are rising.”

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www.thewrap.com/killers-of-the-flower-moon-review-leonardo-dicaprio/

There is then celebration upon hitting an oil line, which also introduces us to the brawniest segments of Robbie Robertson’s bravura score: drummy, pulsating and defiantly hair-rising, like the sounds of the earth brimming with liquid gold right before it ruptures.

Scorsese augments this intro with a playful short film shot on grainy black and white in the style of the era’s silents, showing the Osage in lavish clothes and on posh golf courses enjoying their wealth, while the white people run their errands and drive them around. It is in this climate that Ernest arrives in Oklahoma, with the film swiftly switching back to color as we notice his goofily mid-parted hair. His confusion is palpable when a wealthy Osage proudly tells Ernest, “This is my land.”

And that is why DiCaprio’s performance is titanic here in a role that asks a lot of him. Thanks to his commitment to the layers of Ernest, you buy the character both as a money-crazed, murderous and power-hungry pawn of Hale’s and someone who actually did fall in love with his wife once. That dichotomy is everywhere in DiCaprio’s acting and guilty body language; it’s even in his hairdo that swiftly loses its silly middle-part in due course and becomes a menacingly slick and subtle side-sweep. Of course, Mollie is no one’s fool—more a patient and clever seer than an empty talker, she knows immediately that Ernest’s after money. But she follows the love, believing in Ernest’s genuine need to get settled in a caring home.

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www.filmcomment.com/blog/cannes-2023-the-time-of-our-lives/

SPOILER: Click to show

{SPOILER: Click to show}In some ways, Killers of the Flower Moon plays out like just another one of Scorsese’s gangster dramas: De Niro oozes the sleazy charms of a mafia boss; DiCaprio grovels and schemes as a spineless sidekick to the big man; and Jesse Plemons plays a deceptively milquetoast agent from the Bureau of Investigation, dispatched by J. Edgar Hoover to look into Mollie’s case and save the agency’s face after a series of bungled investigations. By drawing on archetypes, the film traces the roots of not just modern-day capitalism and policing but also popular cinematic forms back to America’s original sin of settler colonialism. Right from the opening scenes, Scorsese foregrounds the narrativization of history, with silent movie–style intertitles, archival portraits of the Osage, and tabloid-like snapshots of the many Native victims of unsolved murders. Two moments in particular stunned me. In one, the residents of Fairfax watch newsreel footage of the 1921 Tulsa massacre, and within weeks, the incident becomes a kind of shorthand for the growing specter of white supremacy, invoked in panic by locals when Ernest and William blow up the home of one of Mollie’s sisters. At a later point, the film breaks the fourth of its many prismatic walls to stage a 1960s true-crime radio play—sponsored, as it were, by Lucky Strike—in which a cast of white performers in suits and ties recount the aftermath of the Osage case, replete with cheesy sound effects. No reflection on this film can be complete without referencing what happens next, so pardon the spoiler: Scorsese himself joins the play to read Mollie Burkhart’s real-life obituary onstage, noting that it made no mention of the murders of her family. The film’s layers of stylized, meta-narrative artifice all peel away to reveal something raw: a master storyteller’s reminder, perhaps to himself more than to viewers, that history is not just written by victors; it’s the writing of history that anoints victors.

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letterboxd.com/journal/best-of-cannes-2023/

There was a collectively held breath at the Debussy Theatre before the world premiere of Killers of the Flower Moon, Martin Scorcese’s sprawling epic about the horrific murders of the oil-rich Osage Nation in Oklahoma in the early 20th century. Perhaps the most anticipated title of this year’s festival, Killers of the Flower Moon did not disappoint, with Scorsese delivering an intelligent and hugely moving examination of power, greed and exploitation, largely through the lens of one marriage that captures just how deep the layers of betrayal against the Osage people ran.

Scorsese’s technical prowess as a director is as brilliant as ever, and Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro are outstanding, but audiences at Cannes were universally in agreement that Lily Gladstone is the film’s beating heart as Mollie Burkhart. Gladstone is captivating as a woman who carries an unbearable amount of pain as she loses her family one by one, and whose marriage to Ernest Burkhart (DiCaprio) is an enraging example of the insidious legal mechanisms that stripped Native American people of their agency.

It’s “monumental, scary, breathtaking, devastating,” says Robin,” while Tasha, “in awe at how brilliant Lily Gladstone is,” calls the film “beyond striking in its cinematography and also its phenomenal performances”. Honeymoondream goes even further: “DiCaprio and Lily Gladstone, oh my god, created one of the saddest and most mesmerizing couples in the history of American cinema.” GF

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Christy Lemire and Alonso Duralde exit theater.