It’s the slow motion that’s so annoying. For a 206-minute film, you can’t help but wish director Martin Scorsese would hurry up. moments in Flower Moon Killer What follows is a scene where the Osage Indians discover oil on their land in Oklahoma. We see black liquid gushing out of the ground, just like it did when James Dean generously hit it. GiantBut Scorsese deliberately slows down the pace.
It’s a very good movie Flower Moon Killer. It’s a shame that you have to remove so much padding to get there. Adapted from David Grann’s witty 2017 book about the Osage murders of the early 1920s, it explores corruption, racism and murder in the American heartland. But Scorsese turned it into a sprawling epic as bloated as any of the Marvel or DC superhero films he so disapproves of.
You might think this is a brisk 80-minute gangster film set in the Hollywood of James Cagney and Humphrey Bogart, but here the stories are told in more detail and the film risks being undermined by its excessive and completely unjustified length.
The director uses every imaginable rhetorical device. It includes black-and-white newsreel-style footage and stunning shots of flower-strewn landscapes. There are a lot of his signature long, sweeping camera movements. He ensures that documentary-like scenes show Osage rituals and their beautiful ceremonial clothing and headdresses.
The end result of all these details is to slow things down even further. As the death toll rises, the film risks becoming something of a dirge.
At the same level Flower Moon Killer this is a parable about the loss of innocence. Scorsese plays his two muses, and both give excellent performances. Leonardo DiCaprio plays Ernest Burkhart, a chancellor and petty criminal from Oklahoma after serving as a cook in the infantry during World War I. He likes gambling and women.
His uncle William King Hale (Robert De Niro) is the real villain of the story, a rancher who pretends to have the best interests of the Osage Nation at heart when in fact he despises all things Native American. He knows the oil wealth will soon run out, but he doesn’t want to wait. He wants to rob her, steal the “headlights” from her property and kill her to speed up the process. As he tells his cousin, “Most people here are corrupt.”
The usual hierarchy of Western films is turned on its head. All the wealth belongs to the Osages. Whites work as drivers, maids and legal advisers. They rob them at every opportunity.
DiCaprio often plays anti-heroes in Scorsese. His character here is one of the most corrupt, willing to betray his Osage wife Molly (Lily Gladstone) and kill her family if it will only make him a little richer. Molly sees right through him, but falls in love with his boyish, rich charm.
He is a strangely naive character who at times seems to genuinely love Molly. But he loves money more and is under the thumb of his cunning uncle. It’s a captivating performance in which DiCaprio somehow remains likable and attractive despite his shitty behavior.
On the other hand, De Niro’s “King Hale” exudes false good nature towards the Osage families. He speaks their language, but is constantly looking for ways to betray them. De Niro brings a mixture of unctuous concern, cunning and outright malevolence to the role. He tells his cousin to follow his orders and, in the film’s strangest scene, hits him with an oar when the young man dares to think for himself.
The menacing, metronomic and at the same time unusually seductive score by the late Robbie Robertson gives the film an increasingly dark tone. As Molly’s family is killed one by one, staged suicides, bombings and poisonings occur. But racist white authorities never bothered to investigate these deaths. Molly is resilient and stubborn—she fights back even as her health declines.
When the Osages themselves hire private investigators, they are quickly neutralized. Although Osage families have vast resources thanks to oil, whites still control all instruments of power. No matter how much jewelry they wear, no matter how many expensive cars they buy, the Osages will never stand a chance.
Scorsese brilliantly ends his film with a radio broadcast in which he himself appears. Using voice-over clips and superb sound effects, the film covers several years of events in just a minute or two of screen time. However, the main film goes on and on.
Despite the many highlights, there’s still a nagging feeling that the director would have been much better off telling his story in an episodic miniseries rather than turning it into an endless, stand-alone feature film.
Source: I News
I am Mario Pickle and I work in the news website industry as an author. I have been with 24 News Reporters for over 3 years, where I specialize in entertainment-related topics such as books, films, and other media. My background is in film studies and journalism, giving me the knowledge to write engaging pieces that appeal to a wide variety of readers.