2023-10-18 20:01:06
by Maurizio Porro
The American director creates a very powerful film based on a true story. When, in the 1920s, a handful of rapacious whites murdered the Osage natives in Oklahoma to take possession of the black gold
By fitting together like pieces of a Lego western and crime movie, but also family tragedy, Martin Scorsese signs a great film and returns to the age of innocence, the American Twenties, however very far from Edith Wharton’s New York living rooms, but between the oil wells discovered at the beginning of the twentieth century by the Osage natives in Oklahoma. And the mortal sin of the “Oilman” and the “Giant” returns, the rapacious, amoral capitalism that in a few years murdered the owners of the wells, while the dark mind of the landowner Uncle William arranged the marriage plan for which Ernest, a devoted nephew returned from war without a future he would marry the Indian Mollie, and so others, staging a gang murder of women, so that the inheritance in black gold would go to the whites.
A very wild ballad, where everyone accepts the banality of evil, so much so that the FBI arrives for checks with the sheriff sent by Edgar Hoover, future head of the CIA, told by Eastwood. Writing the text with Eric Roth and taking inspiration from the book «The Assassins of the Red Earth» by David Grann, Scorsese, who appears in the surprising cinema-radio finale, imagines with masterly narrative variety the demonic intention of these years of massacre, not to case called the “reign of terror”, à la Robespierre.
His is a very powerful film, 206 minutes long, which reveals a cruel period in history, finds the American epic to tear it to pieces. The moral breadth is as wide as historical geography with its traditions and horses: Scorsese follows machinations and derivations, analytically investigating individual crimes without punishment and rummaging through the tragedies of families in which the “sisterhood” is betrayed but the moon protects the flowery fields . Alternating sun and shadows, truth and lies, while the owl announces the coming deaths, the American director rereads a novel not of training but of deformation, finding two wonderful allies in Robert De Niro, more Luciferian than in Angel Heart, with scary eyes, and Leonardo DiCaprio, the listless and reckless perpetrator of every misdeed against Lily Gladstone, who has the face of destiny, as in a Greek tragedy.
October 18, 2023 (changed October 18, 2023 | 8:00 pm)
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