Killers of the Flower Moon

Martin Scorsese’s “Killers of the Flower Moon” begins with a burial. Not of a body but of a ceremonial pipe, a few Osage elders placing it under dirt to mourn the assimilation of their people into the white man’s world, the latter marked by a subsequent scene in which the Midwestern American tribe forcefully relocated to Oklahoma literally strikes it rich by dancing in spurting crude oil. But this moment doubles as the first appearance of Robbie Robertson’s score. “Osage Oil Boom” is the official title of this musical selection, but the rhythmic drumming and slide guitar riff suggest a blues song, call it The Osage Blues, this moment giving way to a newsreel montage documenting how the indigenous tribe became the wealthiest people on the planet practically overnight. It demonstrates how Scorsese and his co-writer Eric Roth effectively dramatize their adaptation of David Grann’s book of the same name, not only conveying crucial information but using the newsreel device to evoke a feeling of distance while also subtly shifting the point-of-view from the Osage to our own, or maybe I should say, to mine, a white man’s. Indeed, not long after, a train rolls into the Oklahoma reservation, the camera gliding through the train car, finding Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio), returned from WWI, wearing his uniform and cutting the image of a hero even though in no time he will emerge as the villain. As he sizes up so many Osage on the train platform, it’s as if he’s a parasite who has just entered their bloodstream. 

Ernest moves in with his uncle William Hale (Robert DeNiro), passing himself off as ally to the Osage but insisting his nephew call him King, laying bare his dynastic intentions. The script might draw out King’s precise role as orchestrator of the Osage murders, but this no whodunit, both the devilish twinkle in DeNiro’s eyes and his character’s leading conversations with Ernest laying bare his two-faced nature and daring us not to see what Ernest fails to see. This requires Leo to do something he mostly hasn’t, play dumb. (DiCaprio was dumb in “Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood,” but not to this degree.) He virtually dims before our very eyes, improbably melding the thickness of John Turturro and Tim Blake Nelson in “O Brother, Where Art Thou” with Matt LeBlanc of “Friends.” (I swear, there is one DiCaprio reaction that is stolen straight from the Joey Tribbiani playbook.) And when King warns Ernest of speaking to the Osage without having something to say, what they call Blackbird talk, the way DeNiro and DiCaprio literally cheep back and forth is as unsettling as it is comical, like a predatory adult stringing along a hopeless child. There’s a sucker born every minute, the ruthless capitalist P.T. Barnum probably didn’t say, and this moment lives it. 

King gently browbeats Ernest into courting Mollie Kyle (Lily Gladstone), a romance with an ulterior motive, meaning to use marriage to acquire her oil headrights. It’s aesthetically tricky, this relationship, given Ernest’s established feeble-mindedness, though in some respect, this is where DiCaprio’s casting becomes key, because despite those fake teeth, bulging out his jaw, he still looks like Leo. But it also works because of Gladstone. Mollie gets a key line about being keen to Ernest’s desire to marry for money, but it’s the actress’s air that really sells it, that Mollie is on to him but also oddly charmed by his simpleness. When she invites Ernest home for dinner, Gladstone’s sloped smile and a small chuckle seem to crack open her character’s thought process, viewing him as a goofy innocent, begetting a grave mistake. 

As their relationship plays out, King’s scheme intensifies and widens, ordering the killings of not only Mollie’s sisters to intensify Ernest’s eventual financial windfall, but other Osage, too. These murders are not elaborately staged, just sudden, violent, and not thoughtless so much as unthinking, forcing us to see them as King and his minions see their indigenous counterparts, hardly as people at all, just specimens in the way. This trail of bloodshed can’t help but recall the “Layla” sequence of “Goodfellas,” in which DeNiro’s Jimmy Conway kills off participants of his Lufthansa heist, yet pointedly without the tension of that accompanying Derek and the Dominoes song against so much grisly death, leaving just the grisly death, reducing any mythological sense of the American West to its brutal truth. And these echoes of Scorsese’s own past mafia movies go even further by innately evoking the land of the free as a kind of mafia state. There are even references that go beyond Marty; one shot of King lying back in a barber’s chair recalls a similar one of DeNiro as Al Capone in “The Untouchables.”

The longer “Killers of the Flower Moon” goes, the more you feel its epic three hours and twenty-six minutes, designed to wear you down as it becomes an excruciating crucible in watching a white man squirm. King guides his charge to poison his wife to claim her riches, a plot point that DiCaprio’s performance has cleverly laid the groundwork for, making him seem just smart enough to grasp the evil of his act but also dumb enough to think he has no way out, a man virtually boiling in his own inaction, as one image of a fire burning just outside the windows of Mollie’s home essentially illustrates, trapping Ernest in his own emotional underworld. By the time the FBI shows up, their investigation hardly matters since we, the audience, already know everything anyway, the patient way Agent Tom White (Jesse Plemons) goes about uncovering the scheme suggesting he does too. The real drama is in seeing Ernest gradually made to grasp and confess his culpability. 

By yoking us so relentlessly to Ernest’s point-of-view, it’s true that Mollie’s perspective suffers. Only occasionally, and even then, only briefly, do we see “Killers of the Flower Moon” through her eyes. And no matter how much emotion, vulnerability, dignity, and disappointment Gladstone successfully imbues in her implicit symbiosis with the camera, she can’t help but come across at least partly as a symbol. But this also goes back to the very beginning, the shifting of the point-of-view from Osage, a recognition on Scorsese’s part of his own limitations in telling her story on account of the color of his skin. Perhaps that rules the movie out of order for you, even in spite of its aesthetic triumphs, but then, in a way, Scorsese rules his own movie out of order too through a stunning coda that, in a sense, leaves the movie itself behind, exposing its own artifice, not only summarizing how so many Native American stories were cheaply re-engineered for own amusement, or buried that like ceremonial pipe and deliberately forgotten, but implicates the storyteller, which is to say Scorsese himself.  

The Irishman

“The Irishman”, you might have heard, is long, running three hours and thirty minutes. That’s because of its scope, certainly, encompassing decades by telling a story within a story within a story – beginning in the present, flashing back to the past, and then flashing back to a deeper past – while providing a dramatized history lesson of how the mob and labor unions went hand in hand. The length, though, is also how director Martin Scorsese plays his most brilliant trick. Throughout, he will freeze-frame some mafia so and so, throwing up a title card denoting the stiff’s future date and cause of death. It’s a funny recurring joke but it’s also Grandmaster Marty foreshadowing what’s to come. He’s using not just the passage of time but passage of the movie’s time against us. That’s not to suggest “The Irishman” is ponderous, merely deliberate, as rather than gathering steam Scorsese stresses the length in the assorted characters and details and events so that just as it begins to feel like it – the movie and, more to the point, life itself – might be a drag, poof…it’s all gone and there’s no getting it back.

Scorsese opens with a trademark Steadicam shot winding not through the hallways of the Copacabana but down the corridors of an old folks’ home, giving the accompanying Five Satins version of “In the Still of the Night” a morbid spin, the camera eventually finding Frank Sheeran (Robert DeNiro), ex-mafia hitman and Teamster higher-up, confined to a wheelchair. At first, we hear him in voiceover until, a few sentences in, suddenly, he starts talking out loud. Not to us, necessarily, and certainly not to anyone around him. No, “The Irishman” is based on a 2004 book by Charles Brandt, “I Heard You Paint Houses”, in which the real-life Sheeran claimed to have been responsible for the legendary, unsolved demise of eminent Union man Jimmy Hoffa. Scorsese’s film presents that demise in stone-cold clarity, but this beginning calls that presentation into question, casting Frank as an unreliable narrator than in the form of an old guy babbling on and on.

Indeed, Frank is telling us his story, but very much in the vein of an Aged Fella with a wandering mind, which is why “The Irishman” jumps around so much, accentuated by how rather than casting younger actors for passages taking place as far back as the 1950s and 60s, Scorsese employs digital de-aging for his older cast. This has the eerie effect, intentional or not, of making it seem like a hazy, half-remembered dream, one where you can’t quite see yourself the way you really were. If occasionally entire past events are glossed over in just a few words, at other points “The Irishman” lingers, like Frank pouring over a road map, narrating the precise route he plans to take on a crucial car trip to Detroit, exactly the sort of impertinent but oddly precise details a senile narrator would ensure to include, all of which evoke how some memories evaporate and others remain crystal clear.

Though Frank begins as a simple delivery driver, he makes fast friends with a Philadelphia crime boss, Russell Bufalino, played by Joe Pesci like, all these years later, he’s graduated to Paul Sorvino’s level, not having to move for anybody, merely sitting still and twisting his lips into a variety of smiles illuminating each thought, good, bad, or in-between. And Russell puts in a word for him with none other than Jimmy Hoffa (Al Pacino), labor leader extraordinaire, an incredible contradiction of a character who stands up for his charges even as he indulges in petty slights and turns a blind eye toward violence, all embodied in Pacino’s bravado and bluster, a guy who can’t help but inexorably move toward pulling the whole kingdom down on his head. And so Frank exists in this world as a gangland Zelig, played by DeNiro with a poker-faced expression suggesting a guy just punching a clock, which gets us to the movie’s truth.

If there is a faded glamour to these middle passages, especially like Frank Sheeran Appreciation Night, a banquet honoring all his work for the Union, a virtual mini-movie, demonstrating the mob’s penchant for simultaneous business and pleasure, where the wheeling and dealing ostensibly going on behind your back is happening right in front of you, this is all a far cry from the doomed romanticism of Henry Hill’s voiceover in “Goodfellas” or Sam “Ace” Rothstein fondly remembering How It All Worked in “Casino.” No, Frank is just a cog in the Teamster machine, going about his work like a blue-collar laborer. In one extended sequence we see this hitman’s myriad guns laid out on the screen before us as he explains the effectiveness and purpose of each one, like a salesman briefing you on lawn mower varieties. Eventually he is called upon to use those tools on Hoffa, a sequence befitting this workingman vibe, noticeably stripped of any thrills, just a business trip charting every component, no different than him examining that road map.

Frank learns of Hoffa’s impending fate over breakfast, a scene where Russell pours him cereal, portraying them as akin to a married couple. That is just as true of an earlier scene, one where Frank and Hoffa share a hotel room, two men in fabulous pajamas discussing important things before bed, explicitly rendering work as family and vice-versa, as if re-editing Karen Hill’s observation in “Goodfellas” about how they “did everything together” to remove the wives. The children too, which brings us to Frank’s daughter Peggy, played as a little girl by Lucy Gallina and as an adult by Ann Paquin. Here Scorsese sort of metaphorically re-edits the scene in which Karen watches Henry brutalize the country club dufus who assaults her by having the young Peggy witness her father violently attack a shopkeeper. In “The Irishman” this moment is not intoxicating but ruining, cementing Lucy’s attitude toward her father as she essentially closes down around him forevermore, transforming Paquin into something akin to Jodhi May in “Last of the Mohicans”, visually recording everything she sees for posterity and withholding until she coolly erupts.

Peggy is pointedly not a reflective character, providing a means for Frank to see himself as he really is. Rather she’s more like a one-way mirror, evoked in shot where she looks down on him from above through her window, seeing him for who he really is, something he himself cannot process. And that’s the neatest trick of DeNiro’s turn, how its deep ignorance creeps up on you, brought home in the majestic, mind-numbing moment when he fields a call from Jo Hoffa (Welker White), Jimmy’s wife, at a moment I probably don’t need to spell out for you, and verbally bumbles his way through it, struggling to find not the right words, really, but any words, just uttering this heartbreaking mush. For all the notions of unorthodox family “The Irishman” exudes, the movie’s slow denouncement unmasks that as drivel, just machinations for power among important men and less important men who do the dirty work. This is not a “Benjamin Button” situation, exactly, but that’s sort of what “The Irishman”, in its own way, suggests as emotionally Frank gets smaller and smaller as the movie goes longer and longer.

In the closing moments, we see him from afar and then, for a flicker, in a shot looking up from directly below, as if wickedly teasing his own false sense of power. Then we see him from far away again, through a crack in the door. You can hardly see him at all.

Silence

There is an indelible shot early in Grandmaster Martin Scorsese’s long-gestating religious epic “Silence”, set in the mid-17th century, in which two Portuguese priests, Rodrigues (Andrew Garfield) and Garupe (Adam Driver) are aboard a boat bound for Japan in hopes of finding their spiritual mentor Father Cristóvão Ferreira (Liam Neeson) who, it is said, has renounced his faith. We do not see the priests in this shot. Instead Scorsese has the camera high above the water, looking down at the ship, which, for a moment, evokes Marty’s beloved God Eye’s Shot, in which the camera is meant to approximate the POV of the Supreme Being looking down on everyone and everything. But then, the camera tilts up, away from the ship, and then pans up, up through the clouds, where it finds the sun shining. This is not God’s POV at all. You can look at that sun and see whatever you want – a sphere of hot plasma or God Himself. It’s up for debate.

Not, mind you, that Scorsese is interested in questioning the existence of God; that would require an even longer, even more challenging movie than the long, challenging “Silence.” No, he is interested in taking a character whose faith in God is absolute and then challenging that character’s faith. The film is based on a 1966 book by Shusaku Endo, but you can see the roots of this movie all the way back to the famous shot of Harvey Keitel in “Mean Streets” holding his hand to the flame, testing himself against the fires of hell. “Silence”, in fact, goes a lot further than that, and does so right from the beginning with Father Ferreira and other Christians being tortured with boiling water from springs called jigoku, or “hells.” To see this is to understand why Ferreria might have renounced his faith and taken on Buddhism. Rodrigues and Garupe, however, young and idealistic, refuse to entertain such a thought. By faith alone they assume Ferreira was forced to turn and readily volunteer to go save him despite the inherent danger.

The landscape they find is similar to the one see at these boiling springs, short on sunshine, heavy on gray. They are forced to hiding throughout the day while they minister the sacraments to Japanese Christians who take them in. These Christians here are predominantly portrayed as one faithful, fearful mass with next to no shading. In one scene, Rodrigues baptizes an infant, prompting the child’s parents to immediately wonder if their baby is now in heaven? Rodrigues must explain that’s not how this works. But it is nevertheless a window into the psyche of these persecuted Christians, where the possibility of a paradise in the next world is all they have, which actually lends credibility to the single-mindedness of all these characters. This is all they have, why would they be anything else?

Japan, of course, is principally Buddhist and Shinto, though these religions truly mean to the populace go unaddressed. Christians in this 16th Century version of Japan may be forced underground but as far as “Silence” is concerned Christianity is all that matters. At first, that might seem a flaw, or at least a glaring oversight, but when Rodrigues is captured by Japanese authorities and imprisoned, both The Inquisitor (Issey Ogata), a caustic, comical figure tasked with rounding up Christians and forcing them to apostatize, as well as The Interpreter (Tadanobu Asano), who will eventually become the primary go-between for The Inquisitor, press Rodrigues on the arrogance of their Christian imperialism. He is, in other words, a White Savior, that old trope that gets unmercifully skewered when Rodrigues is forced to choose between renouncing his faith or letting other innocents die. As he wrestles with two unbearable alternatives, The Interpeter looks at him with equal parts annoyance and amusement. Precisely what he thinks of his country’s own religion is never said but his countenance leaves you wondering

This is all Rodrigues has too and his gradual unraveling is the most potent element in the film. Garfield, of course, also starred in 2016 in Mel Gibson’s “Hacksaw Ridge”, another movie that was about a devoted Christian whose faith was tested but for the fact that his faith was not really tested at all. He was so rock solid in it that everything he went through, from boot camp to bloody war, became mere white noise as he moved along unencumbered, always beholden to what he believed. Rodrigues, on other hand, has no such luck. His almost naive cocksureness as he and Garupe initially set sail gradually withers as he is put through endless trials until he is nothing but a wispy husk of the believer he once was. And if the concluding suggests that he still holds onto his faith, it nevertheless feels like a much more tenuous grip.

Wolf of Wall Street

Our exceptionally dastardly protagonist of the title, Jordan Belfort (Leonardo DiCaprio), a renegade but smart and swank Wall Street buccaneer, has just discovered his home is under FBI surveillance. As it happens, his lieutenant is making a call that could ruin both of them and everybody else. Two problems. One, Jordan is not home, having gone to the nearby country club to necessarily call from a pay phone. Two, he has popped a few too many of the Lafite Rothschild of Quaaludes and, thus, has lost all sense of motor skills. No matter. He crawls (literally) to his Lamborghini and somehow climbs in and somehow drives home to deliver the warning. "I'm lucky I didn't get an accident," he whimsically advises in voiceover.

Except the next morning he awakes to find a couple cops towering over him. They want to know if he drove his Lamborghini last night, the Lamborghini parked in his driveway that is smashed and dented to bits. The film flashes back and see what really happened - that is, a severely impaired Jordan ramming into cars and plowing into utility poles and running over mailboxes and up onto lawns. The implication is clear. The wheelers and dealers, the wolves of wall street and pups they are nurturing, are only receptive to the former rather than the latter, not merely indifferent to the destruction they leave in the wake of their sinful mayhem but blind to it.

Jordan is a product of Bayside, Queens, across the East River, which is not quite Bay Ridge, Brooklyn (though his eventual trophy wife, played by a flinty and bosomy Margot Robbie, hails from there), the mystical land in "Saturday Night Fever" from which young and desperate men would longingly gaze across the dirty water at Manhattan and what may well have been to them The Lost City Of Z. But whereas those men of another era were content to lose themselves in the lights of the disco floor, Jordan is determined to get rich quick and ventures deep into the canyons of New York City's financial district.

Landing a crummy job at a high line Wall Street firm, he meets his mentor, Mark Hanna, played in a delicious cameo by Matthew McConaughey as a laconically crazed Jedi Knight, who sets the template for the three hour ride to come by preaching the virtues of cocaine, which makes your fingers type faster, and "feeding the geese", which relaxes you, as a means to make money. Which Jordan does, until 1987's Black Monday when the firm goes under and Jordan is back on his own.

He quickly re-invents himself at a fly-by-night penny stock outfit in a strip mall in Long Island, discovering that his dive bomb sales tactics can easily persuade the poor and hungry to pledge scads of cash toward flailing investments. It's a perfect win-lose scenario - as in, Jordan wins, they lose, and screw 'em, because if they're dumb enough to give him his money they don't deserve to have it anyway. This is, more or less, Jordan's entire message encapsulated in a line, though he continually delivers it to his in-awe company minions in curse-stained monologues that are like a cross between Tony Robbins and a pentecostal preacher with white powder stains on his nose.

This would be an opportune moment to advise that while "Wolf of Wall Street" was adapted by Terence Winter, it was directed by Martin Scorsese, and the infamous hallmarks of the grandmaster are on full display. The loaded soundtrack is wielded for maximum effect and all assortment of editing tricks are utilized not simply to enhance the experience but to effectively communicate the story. This, for instance, is not a story about how hard work trumps all. It's a lightning quick way to the top, and Scorsese and his longtime editing cohort Thelma Schoonmaker underscore this with a myriad of quick cuts graduating Belfort from his questionable digs in Long Island to a jam-packed edifice in Lower Manhattan. The reward is what matters here, not the means to it and not the eventual reaping, and Scorsese drives that point home again and again, but briskly, and always intentionally undercutting it.

Jordan looks the camera in the eye and begins to explain in explicit detail precisely how the ruse his company, Stratton Oakmont, perpetrates works and then......cuts it short. "It doesn't matter," he declares. "What matters is this-" At which point Jordan's lieutenant, Donnie, relays a certain carnivorous dollar figure. The bottom line, baby. Donnie is played by a lunatic Jonah Hill, sporting big framed glasses and a Long Island accent that suggests Mike Francesa if he had chosen stocks rather than sports radio. Often the funniest thing in any given scene of drugs, debauchery and nakedness is Hill off to the side in the background, watching with a stoned-out vacant look, as if alluding all the while to a willful ignorance of the happening.

It would not at all be improper to note the structural debt paid to "Goodfellas", though the fall of Henry Hill is much more pronounced than the fall of Jordan Belfort, which I would argue is decidedly on purpose. This is not to suggest Belfort is positioned as a redemptive or complicated character. Far from it, and DiCaprio commits to playing him insistently one-dimensional, a gonzo addict hellbent on getting rich, having sex and popping pills. Repeatedly he is placed in potential Come-to-Jesus moments, and essentially each time he turns his back on it, never more spectacularly than when he is about to cut a deal with the SEC and walk away from his company, only to relent at the very last instant because his ego and lasciviousness will not allow it.

That the FBI agent (Kyle Chandler) on Belfort's trail appears and then disappears for a large swath of time is not coincidental, just as the utter neglect of camera time for Belfort's two daughters in a two hour and fifty-nine minute film is not coincidental. We, in fact, do not even know Belfort has had a daughter until it's mentioned long after the fact, nor do we know he is having a second until his wife enters the frame with a quite-clearly pregnant belly. Consequence and Family Life are of no interest to Belfort, and so they are kept tucked away off camera.

The film's final third is an absurdist descent into horror, though not quite complete self-destruction, because Scorsese and Winter are willing to admit that even though a character like Belfort deserves to be tossed into a Bond-like pool of sharks, our world simply does not work this way. Our world, to quote an oft-espoused cliche, is what we make of it, and too often the bankers and brokers fashion this world in their image. So even though Belfort is condemned to prison, the only scene we see of him in prison is set on a tennis court, strictly time off. And thus, the film comes full circle.

Tellingly, “Wolf of Wall Street” ends not with a close-up of DiCaprio, who has been on screen for virtually every frame, but DiCaprio re-fashioned as a motivational speaker teaching suckers to sell him a pen. No one seems able or willing, and the camera glides over the top of the audience - us - as we watch and contemplate, asking us what we think of the preceding three hours. One man’s thought: take that pen, Belfort, and shove it up your ass.