NEOREALIST EPOCH FILM

SCORSESE DELIVERS ANOTHER PIECE OF THE MASTERPEICE

By PETER THOMAS BUSCH

Director Martin Scorsese explores the dark history on the western frontier long after the frontier had disappeared.

Killers of the Flower Moon (2023) deconstructs a series of mysterious murders occurring within the Osage nation along an oil rich tract of land in Oklahoma during the 1920s.

The Osage become rich from the oil royalties and begin to enter into interracial partnerships, including interracial marriages, with the white settlers who move into the oil towns for work extracting the oil and to service the boom towns sprung up around the oil economy.

Scorsese casts Leonardo DiCaprio as Ernest Burkhart and Robert De Niro as William Hale in lead roles, with Lily Gladstone as Molly Burkhart cast in a supporting role.

The camera takes a long time to sketch the characters and reveal the crime plot over a 3 hour 26 minute runtime. But all along the linear storyline DiCaprio, De Niro and Gladstone entangle their screen characters with the audience one string at a time. When the plot reverses, the audience is well invested in the authenticity and genuineness of the characters in this period piece.

The narrative tells the story of a unique setting for a distinct western frontier community facing a moral conundrum that would only occur in America.

This true story becomes part of the filmmakers’ stylized Americana picture puzzle masterpiece that began in earnest with the sketch of young men and women learning to survive on the streets of New York in Mean Streets (1973). Scorsese further develops a personalized voice for storytelling by shifting subjects to more organized Italian American crime families and mobsters in GoodFellas (1990) and Casino (1995).

The auteur continues to develop his artistry by filming detailed stories about different epochs that become major influences on the national fabric, such as the early years of governance and the New York City neighborhoods in Gangs of New York (2002) and development of Hollywood and American innovation in The Aviator (2004) and the Irish mob and the Boston police in The Departed (2006).

Scorsese’s unique ability to tell the stories of Americana while painting the heart wrenching relationships of the individual with the individual in the same room and the individual with the community on the living streets of the city defines him as a film artist.

DiCaprio’s Ernest character returns from service during World War I to work for his uncle in Oklahoma. Ernest’s uncle is William Hale, played by De Niro.

Hale has become totally integrated with the Osage nation as a businessperson. But when Hale’s nephew arrives to join his brother as part of the family business, the new business becomes marrying Osage women for their interest in the oil that keeps blowing black gold all over everybody, every day.

Lily Gladstone creates the character Molly Burkhart, an Osage heiress who quickly but carefully falls in love with Ernest. Ernest is truly in love with Molly, but his uncle has sway over him with the long term view of the white family inheriting all the Indian oil money through Ernest’s marriage with Molly.

Gladstone shows how Molly has a lot of dignity with her financial independence. This state of being is made all the more poignant when Molly momentarily losses her dignity when having to ask her white, government appointed guardian for an extra cash disbursement.

A TRANSPARENT TELLING OF THE OSAGE STORY

Scorsese creates a transparent telling of the Osage story by highlighting the continued colonization of the American Indian as well as the assimilationist influences that occur when life and business and humanity’s propensity for immorality, such as greed and vice, naturally form a nexus.

Molly should be happy, but she also has the hereditary illness known as diabetes, common among the community, that makes her just as vulnerable as if she was still living in poverty under the subjugation of the white colonialists.

A number of devices are used to bring the audience along as the story unfolds. Without any one element being too overwhelming, the trove of artistic skills becomes apparent, while Scorsese remains an American neorealist. The dramatization of a true story or at least true facts of a historical event appear as authentic as possible without taking on the shape and form of a documentary.  

DiCaprio provides a voice over for several scenes, while the camera frames other scenes as gallery artwork. Images are also important in how the story is told with several scenes having that kind of unorganized awkwardness of people standing still for 30 seconds while a carney photographer takes their portrait.

Similarly to the Aviator, Scorsese recreates the period by frequently panning or angling the camera to capture the set and all the props in the room, thereby creating an authentic tone and atmosphere. The characters drive the early roadsters of the oil rich on unpaved dirt roads through the center of town, but also the houses are filled with the furniture and trinkets of the era that wealthy people might buy.

An original score composed by Robbie Robertson gently wends through many scenes like the tapping of drums during an Indian dance heard far off in the distance.

The mystery of some 60 murders occurring over a short time span in a relatively small American Indian population is used as a narrative device. The compelling crime story becomes interwoven with the story of the American Indian and the unique blend of American capitalism, with all the flaws of humanity and guilt of the innocent bystanders that the story entails.

The Osage people succeeded on the land as early as 700 BC by developing the Ohio and Mississippi river valleys and then moved west ever so incrementally before being forced, through war with the Iroquois and settlement with the Americans, onto not yet named as such Oklahoma territory.

In the untold backstory, the Osage people bought their own 1,470,000 acre reservation land, and thereby owned mineral rights, eventhough the land and the rights were administered by the Bureau of Indian Affairs.

The oil find was like blowing black gold all over everybody with oil workers and other white settlers moving in and forming 30 boom towns to work and service the oil economy.

This filmmaker does not just want to tell this story though, he wants the audience to connect with the characters viscerally.

CHARACTERS CONNECT VISCERALLY

On one level, Scorsese directs facts and brings the story together in a genuine and natural way that seems authentic and as true to life as a dramatization can be, but on another level, the auteur directs emotions and shows the personal nature of relationships that are part of, and apart from, the compelling story.

In some sense, and at various stages of the film, the crime drama is the backstory while Scorsese brings into the foreground the characters and the uniquely and deeply compelling relationships.

DiCaprio develops this character of a war veteran who genuinely seeks personal relationships. And Ernest is not so simpleminded as much as he is swayed under the influence of his charismatic uncle.

DiCaprio shows more depth in his acting by developing a less sophisticated and humbler character than he has developed for previous films.

De Niro paints Hale as a generous, hardworking businessperson, who can instantly and unflinchingly step into the darker side of his nature if it so suits him, particularly if profit is involved. The white overlords are definitely manipulating the American Indian, but this way of conducting business might not be so different from that particular form of democratic capitalism being conducted everywhere else in America.

Hale can order the killing of an Osage heiress so that her oil money indirectly flows his way eventually, but then he can also commiserate with her family at the funeral a few days later.

De Niro gradually synchs up the corruption and the characters’ willingness to advance his self-centered cause through the immoral deeds of others under his sway.

And Scorsese whose life in films often involves either De Niro or DiCaprio in the lead role, brings the two acting icons together after the director has enjoyed previous success with ensemble casts and casting two or more marque stars within the same script.

Again, the filmmaker has this overall vision of disclosing a dark time in the treatment of American Indians, but also, he continues to move a complicated script forward through a deconstruction, perhaps one image at a time, of an important stage in the development of modern democratic capitalism.

The film also does not attempt to encapsulate a sweeping history of the American Indians being pushed West. Instead, the camera focusses on a small family of biopic characters involved in a specific event that is an important example of a much broader history of interactions and the shared human frailties that inevitably emerge to subvert the new partnerships.

Scorsese creates this film within the western genre but transitions the genre, just as America was transitioning at the time, from a western frontier into a crime dramas and film noir. The auteur also maintains his own ancestral heritage by unabashedly relying on the neorealism of Italian cinema while supplicating the distinct need of American viewers to be entertained. Instead of horses there are Henry Ford roadsters. Instead of cowboys and Indians, there are the entrepreneurs and the wealthy. Instead of the New York streets and the Las Vegas casinos, the camera enters onto the oil fields and into the sitting rooms of the boom town’s wealthiest citizens.

This Apple Studios Original production is currently playing in theatres.