2023-10-18 13:30:00
One in eleven white Americans owns an automobile and every Osage owns eleven automobiles. That’s what it said in the newspaper back then and that’s how it can be seen in Martin Scorcese’s new film “Killers of the Flower Moon”: The wooden houses of Osage County, scattered across the vast prairie, are surrounded in the style of a wagon castle by nothing but Fords and Buicks and Chevrolets . The Western is upside down; the conditions too.
The few remaining Indians from the Osage tribe, expelled to Oklahoma, suddenly became the richest people in the world in 1921, and the rights to the oil that bubbled up on their reservation were, on top of that, inalienable. Anyone who wants the Osage’s petrodollars has to cook for them or drive them, charge them top dollar, marry them, incapacitate them and murder them in order to finally inherit them. In Osage County, hundreds of Osage are believed to have been shot, stabbed, poisoned and nursed to death within just a few years.
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The “New Yorker” journalist David Grann researched what exactly happened around Fairfax, Oklahoma in the 1920s for his book “The Crime,” a sensational report that has been crying out for a film since it was published six years ago. The fact that Martin Scorcese doesn’t make a true crime movie out of the material is proof of his cinematic mastery. The script by Scorcese and Eric Roth, who wrote “Forrest Gump,” can only be one of the hot Oscar candidates for best adapted screenplay.
Lily Gladstone and Martin Scorcese filming
Quelle: Melinda Sue Gordon/Courtesy of Apple
Because the crime story was actually on the street. In the long, sometimes more and sometimes less illustrious history of Hollywood, almost every director would have made a man named Tom White the hero of this film. White, a former Texas Ranger, was one of the first agents of the newly formed, not-yet-named FBI and put a stop to the murderers and conspirators of Fairfax. He won a spectacular, although ultimately unsatisfactory, trial and slept in bed with a gun while he was investigating.
Tragedy of the weak man
He would be the prototype of a classic Hollywood hero. In “Killers of the Flower Moon,” however, Tom White remains a marginal figure. Jesse Plemons, who plays him, doesn’t even show up until two-thirds of the way through the story. The overly long film is already two hours old, and Scorcese’s regular actors Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro have already given their all – they may be the second and third Oscar candidates when it comes to this film.
Later appearance: Jesse Plemons as Tom White (r.) and Robert de Niro as “King” Hale
What: Apple TV+
Because Scorcese has mercilessly decided to tell the story of the perpetrators. That of William Hale (De Niro), who pulls the strings as “King” in Osage Country, and that of his underexposed nephew Ernest Burkhart (DiCaprio), who becomes “Squaw Man” at “King” Hale’s behest, and the Osage Mollie Brown (Oscar nominee Lily Gladstone) marries to inherit at the end of a series of murders. The story of the Browns is actually at the center of David Grann’s book: after the literal execution of Mollie’s sister Anna, the investigations by what would later become the FBI only began.
But while De Niro, who has taken an eerie resemblance to the historical William Hale, can transform from manipulative patriarch to devil in distress alone, DiCaprio has the full tragedy of the weak man who wants to have everything but stand up for nothing .
Outside and inside
DiCaprio plays Ernest Burkhart, in whom audacity and stupidity, wantonness and need for love are combined and who is almost always at a loss for words, with great physical presence, and Scorsese explores his face with almost manic interest: the deep forehead, the defiant chin, the strangeness eloquent corner of that strangely silent mouth.
The Smart Man and the Stupid Man: De Niro and DiCaprio (as Ernest Burkhart)
Quelle: Melinda Sue Gordon/Courtesy of Apple
You constantly see the “killers” in oppressive close-ups, which makes the rare glimpses of the “Flower Moon”, the vastness of the prairie, the endless grassland and the last remnants of the Osage ceremonies that took place there all the more relieving. But soon the camera will once again press into the moral darkness of one of the houses, in which dark furniture looms from the walls, the servants stand on their feet and the Osage are onlookers condemned to a slow but certain death.
At one point, such a tracking shot finally finds Mollie’s mother Lizzie in the farthest corner – matriarch of a suffering that Scorsese knows how to classify historically. The film references the Tulsa massacre twice, the brutal destruction of a prosperous black city, which, unlike the story of the Osage, has now found its way into America’s collective memory.
Martin Scorcese is 80 years old and has just made what is probably his most important film.
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