It is very encouraging that the filmmaker is 80 years old Martin Scorsese Keep telling stories about soul searching, and may these films be little laboratories of narrative possibility in their own right. Flowermoon Assassin It starts from a ruthless premise redressing historical injustice with an exterminated people from the perspective of their oppressors and the entire project is to find out whether there is a possible film there, that is, whether this point of view justifies its choice.
The oppressed are the Osages, a nation of Native Americans who are placed by the American government in an Indian territory in the state of Oklahoma and become rich there in the early 20th century when oil is discovered in the region. In the factbased storyline, the white oppressor is represented by the family of rancher William King Hale (Robert DeNiro), who desires these lands for himself and chooses his newly arrived nephew Ernest for this purpose (Leonardo Dicaprio), to one of the Osage heirs, Mollie (Lily Gladstone).
The film’s brief introduction states that the murders are already underway when Ernest arrives in Oklahoma with little prospects after fighting in World War I. What makes him stand out as a protagonist, apart from DiCaprio’s beautiful blue eyes? In English, “earnest” means sincere, eager, and is dismantled by the war we see as Ernest ends up on his uncle’s ranch. The narrative of “Assassins of the Flower Moon” is essentially the story of how the former fighter discovers a second chance in life to dehumanize himself.
Scorsese here follows a similar path to Goodfellas (1990) in choosing a newcomer to the Mafia family to introduce us to the workings and implications of this universe of violence; The fact that Henry Hill’s true story is ultimately about betrayal of the mafia is the same moral ballast with which the filmmaker now justifies the choice of Ernest as the main character. We never doubt Ernest’s love for Mollie, and perhaps this is the greatest level of compassion the character inspires in us, in a portrayal by DiCaprio that immediately references the other journeys of deglamourization and physical ruin that the actor has been on Scorsese has served, most notably in The Aviator (2004).
The fact that the filmmaker appears in person and at the forefront of the film, in the metalinguistic scene of radio theater, already shows that Scorsese is fully aware that he could never retell the story of the Osage without disregarding their place as a white man to leave the “legacy” of oppression. . At a time when it is understood that places of speech are the first and most important authority in an artistic creation process, Scorsese bypasses political correctness and defends in his own way the right to tell the story of the Osage: by embracing their personalism and it investigate. or without condescension.
The resulting film therefore begs to be analyzed with the rigor that its decisions require. At its best, Killers of the Flower Moon is a disruptive epic, an antiWestern that suggests we see the Wild West not through the lens of civilizationism and Manifest Destiny, but rather as a distorted product of greed and Opportunism. It’s an antiWestern in that the Western amplifies small gestures, turns brave men into myths, and here the men played by Ernest have little to show for it other than the ridicule of their white privilege. When he stages the major events of the time, particularly the growth of the KKK, Scorsese does so in a panoramic and almost elusive way, preserving the scale of this Oklahoma microcosm: The story of the Osage’s extinction is also the story of small, little men who conquered the West by force.
At its worst, Killers of the Flower Moon, despite its awareness of its place, fails to honor the memory of the Osage. The idea of extending the mechanics of the murders by three hours may effectively convey Ernest’s slow demise, but Scorsese stages the comings and goings of the evildoers and their stumbling blocks with an anecdotal verve that belies the supposed seriousness he has in this one Accumulation seeks, invalidates. Perhaps the gangster film is too close to a farce or a caricature for the director, and that taints Killers of the Flower Moon, where the grief narrative actually called for a penance more akin to that of Silence (2016). ) works better key for three hours.
Between one hypothesis and another which are not mutually exclusive the primacy of performance remains. In practice, DiCaprio claims the starring role in this story not because of the virtues of his character, but because of the virtuosity of his performance. The Osages feel represented in the dignity of Lily Gladstone, an actress who has the same antimuse quality as the young woman Meryl Streep and at least since Certas Mulheres (2016) he has managed to make optimal use of the screen time given to him. When we look at “Killers of the Flower Moon” from the perspective of the performance—which includes Scorsese’s presence on stage, the pretentiousness of the digressive text, and his camerawork full of zoomins—we can simultaneously view the film as a project of understanding memorialism and vanity, two other things that are also not mutually exclusive.
Flowermoon Assassin
Flower Moon Killer
Flowermoon Assassin
Flower Moon Killer
Year: 2023
Country: USA
Rating: 14 years old
Duration: 206 mins
Director: Martin Scorsese
Screenplay: Eric Roth
Actors: Robert De Niro, Lily Gladstone, Leonardo DiCaprio
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