It was the most anticipated film, the one that brings together, the legends of film in front and behind the camera, and a three-and-a-half-hour story about a historic event that points directly to the original sin of the United States of America. Killers of the Flower Moon is an intense exercise in historical memory in which its director, Martin Scorsese, goes above everything else, blending thrillers, westerns, tragicomedy and even romantic dramas, accounts with the greed of a country founded on carnage. To deal with…
It was the most anticipated film, the one that brings together, the legends of film in front and behind the camera, and a three-and-a-half-hour story about a historic event that points directly to the original sin of the United States of America. Killers of the Flower Moon is a torrential exercise in historical memory in which its director, Martin Scorsese, transcends everything, thriller, western, tragicomedy and even romantic drama, to settle accounts with the greed of a country Indian massacre to do.
Killers of the Flower Moon is based on the book The Killers of the Moon, (Penguin Random House) by The New Yorker journalist David Grann. For five years, Gran investigates a crime story that blends the best of crime fiction with a fatality that has ruthlessly plagued Native Americans: the disappearance of the Osage Nation. In 1870, they were displaced from their land in a corner of the Oklahoma Great Plains (the infamous Trail of Tears), a land that in the 1920s spewed black gold that changed everything again.
It was at the beginning of that decade that the Osage Reservation became the richest land in the world. In his historical fresco, Scorsese recounts another story that took place a few kilometers away and in parallel. Similarly, in the city of Tulsa, also in Oklahoma, members of the Osage Nation, the so-called Black Wall Street, arose who, like the Osage, lived in mansions, had white servants, cars and jewelry. That African-American prosperity was wiped out with the Tulsa race massacre, organized by city officials, which razed all the wealth of wealthy black Wall Street residents to ashes. Today, in Tulsa, there is a thrilling museum that pays tribute to that massacre, and now a torrential film will travel around the world to tell what happened in 1921 to other victims of a country that overcame slave-owning slavery. Took more effort to get past. Compared to the Indian destruction.
At the age of 80, Scorsese has embarked on an immense film, with which he returns to the festival he won in 1976 with Taxi Driver and to which he has not returned for nearly four decades, when his madcap comedy Joe, what a night! Took the award for Best Direction. Outside of the competition, the veteran filmmaker has offered up a feast of cinema and sensibility in a blockbuster whose greatness is in the service of a criminal history being investigated by the then newly created FBI, who has teamed up with a team of undercover police officers to uncover the mystery. What followed was an investigation into the poisonings, murders and deaths leading to the disappearance of the Osage, which revealed one of the most sinister conspiracies in American history.
Scorsese’s favorite actor Robert De Niro starred as William King Hale, the mobster mastermind who carried out the murders and poisonings of Native Americans who had become rich from the oil. He is the most obvious and repetitive character. The backbone of the film is Leonardo DiCaprio, in the shoes of a sneaky nephew of William King Hale, and the stunning Lily Gladstone, who plays Osage Indian Mollie Burkhart, a woman who lost her entire family to murder or poisoning. His oil and his fortune.
She is the heroine of the film, and Gladstone, who has already shone with a light of her own in Kelly Reichardt’s Wonderful Few Women, creates with extreme sensitivity, beauty and elegance a character that Scorsese pampers until the last second. Loves because in his noble gaze hides all the greatness and pain of the Indian people.
The relationship between her and DiCaprio is great metaphor for a story that doesn’t breathe and isn’t afraid of excess. Nor humor or caricature. In their seventh collaboration, DiCaprio and Scorsese employ a complex character, a poor man whom the actor knows how to navigate between the human and the grotesque. DiCaprio and Gladstone, she always with a moving dignity, are at the center of some of the film’s best scenes, tirelessly navigating their toxic love.
The Killers of the Flower Moon, for which Scorsese has reserved a thrilling epilogue, is not just a great movie, it is a movie that knows how to be great, showing all its power as the classic à la gigante by George Stevens , but directed in perfect self-examination to a country built on the shoulders of the weak in the service of money and sadistic murderers who believed they owned the land and all its fruits.
