One Battle After Another

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Writer/director Paul Thomas Anderson

Anderson on the set with Leonardo DiCaprio

Anderson with DiCaprio and Benicio del Toro

ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER             B                                                                             USA  (161 mi)  2025  70mm  d: Paul Thomas Anderson

Time doesn't exist, yet it controls us anyway.                                                                               —Comrade Josh (Dan Chariton)

Another revisiting of the 60’s counterculture movement, like Haskell Wexler’s Medium Cool (1969), Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point (1970), Howard Alk’s The Murder of Fred Hampton (1971), Sidney Lumet’s Running On Empty (1988), and Olivier Assayas’ 2012 Top Ten Films of the Year: #7 Something in the Air (Après mai), where cries of revolution are in the air, kind of a throwback to the Weather Underground and the Days of Rage, including a 2015 book by Bryan Burrough, offering a fictional counterpart to Weatherman radical couple Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, who according to Burrough was something of a revolutionary sex symbol in miniskirts and knee-length boots back in the day, yet for all their chutzpah, little was actually achieved, as liberalism’s postwar peak ushered in the era of Richard Nixon, moving the country to the right.  Only a very few have accurately portrayed the movement, where the decade of the 60’s has not translated well into the mainstream, as it remains something of an enigma in American history.  According to the director, an artistic descendent of Robert Altman and Jonathan Demme, he had a 20-year obsession to make this film, adapting a combination of car chase movies, female revolutionary figures, and Thomas Pynchon’s 1990 postmodern fiction novel Vineland set in California during the year of Ronald Reagan’s re-election in 1984, where the remnants of 60’s radicalism and government paranoia from the Watergate fallout of the 70’s undercut daily life, yet somehow it’s been updated to the present, holding a mirror to our current reality.  Courageously standing up to fear in her lifetime, according to singer and civil rights activist Nina Simone, true liberation means being free from all forms of fear and oppression, which she viewed as a sickness in society, or as one character expresses in the film, “The message is clear.  Free borders, free bodies, free choices, and free from fucking fear.”  That is the subject this film addresses, where it’s Anderson’s most expansive film yet, exploring and exposing the darkness of America, with the director imagining just what happens in the disillusioning fallout when the revolution fails and members under pressure collapse upon themselves.  Listed as the #1 film of the year on Letterboxd, 130 tickets were sold for an afternoon matinee in the only theater within a hundred miles capable of screening 70mm films, where the word of mouth on this film is through the roof with hyperbole, some indicating it’s the filmmaker’s best film, or the best film of the year, even described as the film of our time, where the audience was howling with laughter throughout the entire film.  The problem is the film features white supremacists whose racial hatred drives their political agenda of hating migrants and people of color, as it stains the “purity” of the country, yet they’re also incredibly stupid and played for laughs.  Somehow, that just doesn’t seem like a laughing matter, however cartoonishly absurd it is presented, combining farce, black comedy, family drama, and surrealist elements, as the film is crazy scary about what’s happening in the present, with the government overextending their reach, with a militarized police force conducting raids in immigrant neighborhoods, smashing car windows, breaking down people’s doors, pulling children out of bed and zip-tied, raiding official places of business, slamming people to the ground, manhandling and herding people into prisons like cattle, denying their rights, even sending them to overseas supermax prisons, and believing the worse their own official behavior, the better example it sets, as they want to send a message that “these people” are not welcome here.   Much of this plays out like a MAGA wet dream, so you can see the problem with the laughter here, as the film simply adds no depth to any continuing exploration of the racism, social justice, and immigration issues that are currently tearing apart the fabric of the nation, where the one-sided worldview is too often characterized as overly naïve, where people who are actually in these dire predicaments may find it difficult to laugh at the absurdity of it.  Rather than creating full-fledged characters, mostly these are stereotypical caricatures, a collection of broken idealists and monstrous zealots, where the world already has enough problems from stereotyping, especially with people of color, so this only adds and contributes to that age-old historical negligence.  Instead of being horrified at the tragic turn of events in this country, with the creeping threat of fascism and white supremacy mirrored by what we see onscreen, viewers were breaking out in applause.  One must say that just a decade ago in the era of Obama, audiences probably wouldn’t be laughing at something like this, so something has drastically changed in the minds and hearts of contemporary viewers, younger perhaps, and less conscientious.  It’s probably a cliché to suggest times have changed, but they really have, almost overnight, where the established norms and laws have been manipulated to suit the government’s own despicable political agenda, with Anderson provocatively envisioning a society already in captivity, with a group of ragtag revolutionary guerillas attempting to disrupt the authoritarian regime through a series of random bombings and bank robberies.  For a big budget movie, it’s surprisingly experimental, where it’s meant to be chaotic and all over the map, taking chances few others would take, like an arthouse movie, but that is counterbalanced by an old-school reliance on box office stars who are, as they say, bankable.     

The film is dedicated to Adam Somner, the legendary second unit director of Anderson’s 2018 Top Ten List #10 Phantom Thread (2017), and producer of 5 of his last films, who died last year in November.  Among the most important contemporary filmmakers, in tune with current events, this is his most commercially accessible and expensive production to date, creating an arthouse version of a blockbuster, loosely inspired by the frenetically paced Mission Impossible and Terminator movies, with an over-the-top PR ad campaign that produced the biggest box office opening of his career.  Anderson has adapted Pynchon before with Inherent Vice (2014), which was kind of a stoner roller coaster, film noir, private eye romp, which exists in conversation with this film, as there is a palpable sense through the marijuana haze that we are watching the end of an era, with Pynchon evoking the passing of the counterculture, where free love slips away and paranoia creeps in, depicting what seems to be the official end of the 60’s.  Like watching the pendulum swing to the extreme opposite end of the spectrum, with its caricature of hyper-materialism, this era was ushered in with Mary Harron’s scathing social satire American Psycho (2000), a film that could make your hair stand on end with its surreal take on the empty universe of decadence, excesses, rampant consumerism, and exaggerated hedonism.  Pynchon’s novel takes place in a similar bizarre alternate reality, one where a group of student radicals choose to secede from California in the 1960’s to create their own free territory, declaring independence from the United States, celluloid revolutionaries who use film to expose fascism, while the federal government takes the War on Drugs quite literally, providing a satirical commentary on America’s shift from the 60’s to the 80’s.  It is in this vacuum that we find ourselves in contemporary times, with the film depicting the lengths that people are willing to go in order to derail the inhumane autocratic power that only wants to amass more unfettered control over the country, highlighting a culture of fear and repression, where the powers that be would like you to think that the 60’s never happened, as progressive social values like racial tolerance and women’s rights are viewed not only as irritants, but crimes where its advocates need to be locked up and eradicated from society, regressing to a time when whites-only ruled unhindered by outside pressures or influences.  The backlash from the socioracial turmoil of the 60’s led to a so-called War on Drugs in the 70’s and 80’s, which was really an excuse to lock up people of color in record numbers, where by the late 1980’s, blacks (who comprise just 14% of the population) constituted the majority of prisoners for the first time in U.S. history, with the government targeting them exclusively with higher penalties while pretty much giving whites a pass for the exact same crimes.  In much the same vein, we have a newly elected President who has targeted immigrants with crimes, yet whose own failed attempts to remain in office following his 2020 election defeat led to charges of election interference, compounded with criminal charges of illegally retaining classified documents once out of office, and a conviction on 34 felony counts for falsifying business records in connection with a payoff to a porn star to avoid a potential scandal prior to the 2016 election, becoming the first convicted felon to become President.  That in itself is unique in American history, but making it even more absurd is that he was able to successfully evade prosecution by becoming president, taking full advantage of the immunity it brings.  These are the times we find ourselves living in, where the rules have changed, as pending multi-million dollar fines for corrupt billionaire business practices were immediately dropped by this new administration, who also offered pardons for the criminal convictions of many of their supporters, while the President has sought to bring criminal charges against his political opposition, fully determined to crush any last remnants of the left, while also withholding federal funding for entire states that may not have voted for him — all things that are unheard of in a free country, yet that is where we find ourselves.  To counter that bewildering turn, it’s the film’s liberating outlandishness that may be the most powerful message, the sheer creative freedom of Anderson’s direction, where what really matters is just how absurd, dangerous, ridiculous, and faintly hopeful the world is today, where it’s a daily struggle that requires eternal vigilance to save a flailing democracy that is besieged by the belligerent fear-mongering and ever-increasing authoritarianism surrounding immigration of today.  Anderson himself is a father of mixed-race children with his partner, actress and comedian Maya Rudolph, and some of his own paternal anxieties may permeate this film, which may actually be a tribute to black women.  The trailer, by the way, does an excellent job of not giving away what actually happens in this movie.  The one takeaway from this film:  There’s no safe place left in this world.

From the maker of Boogie Nights (1997), Magnolia (1999), Punch-Drunk Love (2002), There Will Be Blood (2007), The Master (2012), Inherent Vice (2014), 2018 Top Ten List #10 Phantom Thread (2017), and Licorice Pizza (2021), this is set in an authoritarian future America that resembles the present, yet what this film envisions is a resistance movement, something sorely lacking today, borrowing the free spirit of rebellion from Pynchon’s novel, providing an astute description of the times, recounting the heightened discord that existed between the old 60’s hippies and the new 80’s yuppies, with Anderson adding his own spin, turning darker, edgier, and even uglier, exacerbating how the political and the personal intersect, how the family dynamic is affected, while magnifying the absurdities in order to make sense out of this rapidly changing world.  Like a modern day version of John Sturges THE GREAT ESCAPE (1963), a far-left underground revolutionary group calling themselves the French 75 wreak havoc in Southern California, using explosives and a carefully planned getaway to liberate hundreds of caged immigrants in a heavily guarded Otay Mesa Immigration Detention Center near the Mexican border, where the intensity is raised as the action is set to the subversive black liberation anthem of the 60’s, Gil Scott-Heron - Revolution Will Not Be Televised (Official ... YouTube (3:06).  In what may be a turn-off to some people and their political allegiances, the bomb-throwing radicals are actually the good guys, like the French resistance during the Nazi occupation of France in WWII, as they’re defiantly resistant of a newly created, fascist regime that wants to eliminate all opposition in a power grab to acquire absolute control, with Anderson offering an unflinching look at where this government is heading right now, making it very clear who the villains are and what motivates them.  At the center of the group are explosives expert “Ghetto” Pat Calhoun (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his beautiful sex-craved partner Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor, an unforgettable presence), who are revolutionaries in love, with the ferociously “black and I’m proud” Perfidia proclaiming, “Babe, let’s fuck when the bomb goes off,” taking great joy in capturing the head military officer Col. Steven J. Lockjaw (Sean Penn in a deliciously despicable role, the personification of toxic masculinity, where he’s never less than terrifying), who is something of an audaciously preening military pit bull, forcing him to endure degrading sexual humiliation, which he apparently gets off on, having a secret sexual fetish for black women, developing a special fascination with her.  Easily the most pathetic character in the film, Lockjaw presents himself as an all-powerful paragon of white American masculinity, but prefers being dominated in the bedroom, especially by a powerful black woman.  The irony is not lost on viewers.  This love triangle of strange bedfellows forms the basis of the ensuing drama, going off on mysterious tangents and bizarre detours, offering a comedic take on the travails of the times, including carrying out the revolution with a newborn infant, orchestrating targeted bombings, including a fictional senator’s office, sabotaging power grids, until a flashy Symbionese Liberation Army style bank robbery goes wrong, quickly falling off the rails with the arrest of Perfidia, with Lockjaw leading the charge to dismantle the radical organization.  Virulently racist, Lockjaw’s ardent desire to join a secret society of white supremacists called the Christmas Adventurers Club, a group “dedicated to making the world safe and pure,” mirrors the current political climate at the highest levels, as racism is no longer secret, but normalized as the official policy of the U.S. government, which continues to routinely suppress gays, women, and minorities.  This is a movie about political violence that’s come out in a moment of increasing political violence, and while the characters are caught up in an endless cycle of violence to achieve their aims, it’s that same violence which drives and ultimately destroys them.  Making a 16-year leap into the future, Perfidia went into the witness protection program after her arrest, but then escaped, vanishing into exile, while Pat and the newborn go into hiding in the fictional California sanctuary city of Baktan Cross, changing their names to Bob and Willa Ferguson (Chase Infiniti, positively radiant and a revelation in her screen debut).  With a washed-up Bob lazily turning into a layabout alcoholic and increasingly paranoid stoner addict, burnt out in a cloud of marijuana smoke, dressed in a plaid bathrobe, deeply sunk into his couch in utter resignation, he is a mirror image of the Dude in Joel Coen’s The Big Lebowski (1998), who lives under a constant fear of exposure, and frustratingly can’t remember the decades-old underground code words, One Battle After Another Movie Clip - What Time Is It? (2025) YouTube (52 seconds), while the biracial Willa becomes the new center of the story, as she’s athletic, innovative, self-reliant, and speaks her mind.  Honestly, she’s like a breath of fresh air in this picture, still young and vibrant, with a future ahead of her, and a force of sheer will and determination. 

Considering that the film was conceived several years ago and was completed before Trump took office (I’m guessing this film won’t be shown in the White House), Anderson is merciless in his flamboyant depiction of a totalitarian clampdown, expressed through government raids, brutally aggressive approaches to deportation, and recklessly corrupt law enforcement, which all feel unnervingly prescient for present-day America, offering a scathing depiction of what goes on behind the scenes, fueled by an equally underground Christmas Adventurers Club, a shadowy cabal of hate mongers which is a more futuristic version of the Ku Klux Klan, the oldest and most infamous American hate group, where targeted murders of undesirables have replaced hundreds of years of lynchings, where Lockjaw is desperate to prove his worth to the neo-Nazi elites he so admires.  While the film blatantly rejects the rising tide of tyranny, it’s not exactly a call to arms against the Trump administration, who are never named, and while it’s the most political film Anderson has ever made, his message isn’t, as it simply provides the backdrop for the story he wants to tell, where the heart of the picture is really a father/daughter movie, becoming more personal than political.  Anderson reshapes an abstract paranoid and fractured narrative that remains unpredictable, where the key characters are morally complex, often making questionable choices, merging the sympathies of the French 75’s into the values of the immigrant community in Baktan Cross, led by Sensei Sergio (Benicio del Toro), who is also Willa’s martial arts instructor (the actress is a trained kickboxer), heard offering his own philosophical mantra, “Freedom:  when you have it, you don’t appreciate it, but when you miss it, it’s lost,” which may as well be the central premise for the film.  Calmly seen evacuating a stream of Latino immigrants through a hidden tunnel while under fire from Lockjaw’s small-town SWAT invasion (stormtroopers operating without government oversight), he’s a man of many hats, also seen helping Bob escape on several occasions (“Don’t go dark on me, Bob”), where he is the true patriot and revolutionary, as opposed to Bob who by this time only has fond memories of being one, One Battle After Another | Exclusive Film Clip YouTube (2:02), ironically seen watching Gillo Pontecorvo’s epic colonial resistance movie The Battle of Algiers (1966) on TV.  Of interest, del Toro previously worked together with Sean Penn in the Penn-directed film The Pledge (2001), also in Alejandro González Iñárritu’s 21 GRAMS (2003).  In order to solidify his chances of obtaining membership to the Christmas Adventurers Club, the maniacal Lockjaw has to wipe out evidence of his own racial mingling, so he targets and kidnaps Willa from her school, conducts a DNA test to prove blood relationship, and then passes her off to a like-minded compatriot for elimination.  Meanwhile, Bob is on his own desperate journey to find and save her, but the years have taken their toll, and he’s a pathetic excuse of who he once was, but he’s persistent and fights through his obvious limitations, with Anderson mixing a whirlwind of comic absurdity, suffocating paranoia, and frantic action.  But the real focus is on Willa, who becomes a fully formed character, where her spirit uplifts and infuses the film with needed energy, culminating in a daring escape from her kidnappers and a harrowing, super-charged car chase sequence shot moving up and down the rolling hills of an isolated desert region that may give some viewers motion sickness due to the extraordinarily intense way that it is filmed, with the camera literally placed directly on the car bumper as we see the constant lifting and lowering of the road.  Shot on 70mm VistaVision by Michael Bauman and Anderson, collaborating as they did in Licorice Pizza (2021), the only other film this century using this format other than Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist (2024), where the lengthy sequence is beautifully fueled in its entirety by the percussive, piano-heavy score of Jonny Greenwood, reminding viewers of the sophisticated, cool under pressure Steve McQueen in Peter Yates’ Bullitt (1968), whose muscle car went up and down the steep hills of San Francisco.  For a subversive film filled with dark pessimism and deep-seeded negativity, where cruelty lies around every corner, there’s a surprisingly optimistic and open-ended finale that’s almost cheery, as the cyclical nature of resistance passes from one generation to the next, picking up the pieces of what’s been left behind, as the fiery spirit of Willa’s ghost for a mother is passed on to her, where the question of who gets to write history is left ambiguously open.  Maybe 35 years after the story was published, eloquently capturing the desolate beauty of a dystopian America, we may finally be living in Thomas Pynchon’s world.

Killers of the Flower Moon

 

Director Martin Scorsese

Scorsese with Lily Gladstone

Scorsese with Robert De Niro and Leonardo DiCaprio

Scorsese with Lily Gladstone

William King Hale

Mollie Burkhart

Mollie with sisters Anna and Minnie

Ernest Burkhart

Scorsese with Chief Standing Bear, Chief of Osage Nation

Author David Grann

KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON                     B                                                                    USA  (209 mi)  2023  ‘Scope  d: Martin Scorsese

Anna Kyle Brown. Osage.                                                                                                        1896-1921. Fairfax, Oklahoma.

Because she died where the ravine falls into water.                                                                Because they dragged her down to the creek.                                                                                 In death, she wore her blue broadcloth skirt.                                                                              Though frost blanketed the grass she cooled her feet in the spring.                                          Because I turned the log with my foot.                                                                                           Her slippers floated downstream into the dam.                                                                             Because, after the thaw, the hunters discovered her body.

Because she lived without our mother.                                                                                   Because she had inherited head rights for oil beneath the land.                                                 She was carrying his offspring.                                                                                                  The sheriff disguised her death as whiskey poisoning.                                                       Because, when he carved her body up, he saw the bullet hole in her skull.

Because, when she was murdered, the leg clutchers bloomed.                                                     But then froze under the weight of frost.                                                                                     During Xtha-cka Zhi-ga Tze-the, the Killer of the Flowers Moon.                                                I will wade across the river of the blackfish, the otter, the beaver.                                                 I will climb the bank where the willow never dies.

Wi'-gi-e by Elise Paschen  Osage poet, 2009, spoken by Mollie Burkhart, whose sister, Anna Kyle Brown, was murdered during the Osage Reign of Terror

The kind of thing they never taught you in the finest schools of the country, yet Native American genocide is reflective of the very soul of the nation, founded on the pillars of greed and racism, as American history is largely taught as an extension of European history, and while there is some argument that African American slavery is central to the making of America, Native American history has largely been omitted, perhaps due to the massive extent of the atrocities committed which have largely been swept under the rug, something the majority of the country would just as soon forget.  This is American history as we’ve never seen it, one of the darkest chapters come to light, so this film will likely have a polarizing effect on viewers who are already positioned to think what they want, irrespective of what actually happened in American history.  For those searching for the truth, this film only tells part of the story, given free reign under poetic license, but it tells enough to suggest a staggering crime with profound implications that still reverberates today, where it’s hard to imagine that this kind of thing could actually happen, but Scorsese gets underneath the psychological mindset of the perpetrators, where the epic scale recalls Erich von Stroheim’s silent American classic Greed (1924), an off-the-rails yet blistering critique of the American Dream.  This film isn’t really for everyone, as it requires a great amount of patience, an eye for detail, and an ability to feel empathy, standing in sharp contrast to the Marvel superhero films that dominate American theaters these days, seen featured in the coming attractions prior to the start of the film.  Of unique interest, in a short video Scorsese briefly welcomes the audience to the theater to see his film, which is a personal touch, yet sets the stage for what follows, as this is a deeply personal project for the 81-year old director, along with his longtime 83-year old editor Thelma Schoonmaker, who has edited every film made by this director since RAGING BULL (1980), with Scorsese making a cameo appearance near the end of this $200 million dollar film, premiering out of competition at Cannes, where it received a 9-minute standing ovation (Scorsese films had been absent from the festival for 37 years since a 1986 screening of AFTER HOURS, with Scorsese winning the Best Director award).  At the Cannes press conference afterwards, Robert De Niro referred to this film as “the banality of evil,” where it’s hard to fathom the sheer hopelessness that exists on Indian reservations.  Adapted by Scorsese and Eric Roth from the 2017 Pulitzer-Prize nominated non-fiction book by David Grann, a staff writer for The New Yorker, the story is set primarily in Osage County, Oklahoma in the 1920’s, as Scorsese worked with Osage experts in order to accurately reflect their culture and traditions.  Originally from the Ohio and Mississippi river valleys, the Osage people had been pushed to Missouri and Kansas by white settlers, along with the forcible removal of about 100,000 American Indians from their eastern homelands to western reservations, eventually forced to relocate to a reservation in Oklahoma about the size of Delaware in the middle of nowhere, given the worst piece of barren and undesirable land imaginable, viewed as worthless at the time, only to later discover the tribal land was sitting on some of the largest oil deposits in the United States, quickly striking it rich, making the Osage Nation residents among the wealthiest people in America.  Their shares were known as “headrights,” with the tribe distributing royalties equally among its few thousand enrolled members, collectively earning more than $30 million dollars in royalties (equivalent to more than $400 million today) in 1923 alone. 

Despite their wealth, the racial bias against Native Americans was only exasperated by white society’s jealousy of the Osage people’s wealth and lavish lifestyle, as in the public’s eye, as depicted by the press, they were still wild Indians, mocked for their extravagance while still living in a primitive style, wrapped in colorful blankets, described as “the laziest people on earth,” claiming they were “slow to civilize,” expressing contempt at seeing whites slavishly performing menial labor for conspicuously wealthy Indians, which was viewed as an abominable role reversal.  That massive wealth drew the attention of the white neighbors, who murderously conspired to get their piece of it, using marriage, guardianship, and devious legal maneuvers to steal the Osage oil money, where this sprawling three hours plus movie documents just some of what is now referred to as the Reign of Terror, From the archives: The Osage murders and "Killers of the Flower Moon"  David Grann on CBS Sunday Morning (8:18), as an estimated 5% (or roughly 150 people) of the Osage tribe were poisoned, murdered, or died under suspicious circumstances in Osage County, Oklahoma from 1921 to 1926, most of which were never even investigated.  In the state of Oklahoma, killing an Indian was simply of no consequence, and those who dared to investigate the killings were themselves murdered, while evidence was routinely tampered with or destroyed, with oil rights transferred to the whites who were likely their murderers.  In 1921, the federal government passed a law requiring Osage members to prove “competency” with money or else be assigned a (white) financial guardian, as most tribe members were considered incapable of handling such large sums of money, for no other reason except for the fact they were considered ignorant Indians, described in the film as “incompetent.”  One Osage tribe member named John Goodskin was a college graduate and a WWI veteran, yet the Bureau of Indian Affairs mandated a white guardian be assigned control over his financial affairs.  The origins of this racial bias came from the words of Chief Justice John Marshall in 1832, claiming the relationship of Native Americans to the U.S. was “that of a ward to his guardian,” so the use of these same terms 90 years later on the Osage Reservation is not a coincidence, as the government still viewed themselves as primarily protecting the interests of their supposedly incompetent wards, opening the floodgates for grifters and fortune hunters, with lawyers pouring into the region to get their hands on this unique opportunity, with judges handing out Indian guardianships to faithful friends as rewards for favorable political contributions, as laws allowed mismanagement and corruption to thrive, where the entire white community became incentivized to participate in this system of greed (the guardianship system was not overturned until 1978).  A 1924 study by the Indian Rights Association, a policy and advocacy group founded by non-Indians, estimated that guardians had stolen at least $8 million directly from the restricted accounts of their Osage wards, calling it an “orgy of graft and exploitation.”  When Osage guardians funneled Osage money into their own pockets and the case went before a local judge, it would routinely be ignored, despite the grisly fact that many guardians ended up with multiple dead wards.  For this reason many Osage women married whites, so their guardian overseer was their own spouse, presumably a reliable and trustworthy ally. 

No one makes crimes stories like Scorsese, the maker of gangster films like Mean Streets (1973), Goodfellas (1990), The Departed (2006), and The Irishman (2019), describing this film as “a sober look at who we are as a culture.”  There are visual and thematic similarities with Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood (2007), both featuring megalomaniacal lead characters, both crafted by the same production designer Jack Fisk, yet what makes this different is Scorsese’s first attempt at making a western, shot out in open country, where typical of westerns, the story pits civilization and the rule of law against frontier outlaws who exploit the system.  Police investigations, if they happened at all, often blamed the victims, as deliberate poisonings were chalked up to drinking bad liquor or what was described as a peculiar wasting illness, shootings got labeled as suicides, autopsies were often skipped, burials rushed, and death certificates falsified.  Grann’s book is meticulously researched while diligently providing the context for these shocking acts, becoming a searing indictment of the callousness and prejudice toward American Indians that allowed the murderers to operate with impunity for so long, turning late in the book to firsthand experiences with the families and communities that continue to be affected by the murders.  Scorsese omits that late transition, which makes all the difference, so this film takes a different perspective, centering upon the story of Mollie Kyle (Lily Gladstone, who is of Blackfeet and Nez Perce heritage, acknowledging in an interview earlier this month, “Nobody is going to hand an Osage filmmaker $200 million”), an Osage woman who marries a white man, Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio in his sixth Scorsese film), an easily manipulated foil heavily influenced by his domineering uncle, William King Hale (Robert De Niro working with Scorsese for the tenth time), to personally carry out or be complicit in the murders of most of her family.  Hale’s psychopathic hatred towards Indians draws an apt comparison to John Wayne’s archetypal Ethan Edwards in John Ford’s THE SEARCHERS (1956), while it was impossible not to think of De Niro’s overwrought maliciousness as Max Cady in Scorsese’s CAPE FEAR (1991), yet at the time of his trial for orchestrating a string of murders, the press, still enthralled with the myth of the American West, romantically referred to him as an “old-time cowboy.”  While Mollie and her family are the targeted victims, the storyline closely follows Ernest Burkhart in his transition from the budding romance of a returning war hero to a deceitful and treacherous husband who carries out despicable crimes, where the film is largely seen through his point of view.  Unlike Grann, who follows the arc of the investigation, within the first ten or fifteen minutes Scorsese makes the intentions of Hale and Burkhart known well before the story starts, diffusing the film of any underlying tension, yet the deteriorating trust in the marital relationship becomes closer in spirit to Hitchcock’s Suspicion (1941), focusing instead on an unraveling character study as he attempts to get at the heart of what feels like a void in humanity.  Hale was a cattle rancher who amassed a fortune through insurance fraud and unfair trade with the Osage people, proclaiming himself “King of the Osage,” owning a controlling interest of the Fairfax bank, part interest in the town’s general store and funeral home, while also serving as a reserve deputy sheriff, giving him access to local criminals to do his bidding.  While taking us into frontier settlements called Gray Horse, Hominy, Pawhuska, Fairfax, and an illicit gambling outpost called Whizbang, this captivating murder mystery may be viewed as a journalistic exposé, but it lacks the electrifying suspense and emotional complexity of Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood (1967). 

“I’d never been out to the prairie,” said Scorsese in an interview with The New Yorker, “When I got out there, we were driving for so long on one road, and I wondered why we were going so slowly, and I looked at the — it was, like, 45 minutes — I looked at this speedometer, we’re doing 75, and I realized this place never ends.”  In both the book and Scorsese’s film, the full brunt of the emotional devastation falls upon the shoulders of Mollie, who narrates a description of the dry grasslands, as every April millions of tiny flowers spread over the hills and vast prairies as Johnny jump ups (wild pansies), spring beauties, and bluets blossom over the Osage land.  In May, however, taller plants like black-eyed susans and spiderworts begin to grow, overtaking the smaller blooms, stealing their sunshine and rainwater.  As the smaller flowers try to reach for the sun, their necks break and their petals fall, buried beneath the taller plants.  The Osage refer to this period as “the time of flower-killing moon,” becoming a metaphor for the way the white men came and brutally killed the Osage people.  In something of a strange twist, the Osage petitioned to President Coolidge and the federal government for help, a plea that was initially ignored, as there was a tremendous amount of corruption in Osage County, where lawmen were either complicit in the murders or bought off, turning a blind eye to justice.  Even the Governor of Oklahoma, Jack C. Walton, was impeached out of office in 1923 for accepting under-the-table oil bribes after serving less than a year.  In this murky landscape, whites were emboldened to commit cold-blooded crimes, thinking of themselves as untouchable, as it’s questionable whether a jury of twelve white men would ever punish another white man for killing an American Indian, where one lawman can be heard saying, “You got a better chance of convicting a guy for kicking a dog than killing an Indian.”  Seeking a high-profile success to erase the bureau’s stained reputation for its role in another oil corruption scheme, the Teapot Dome scandal, newly appointed director J. Edgar Hoover sent investigators to Oklahoma in the new Bureau of Investigation, then an obscure branch of the Justice Department, which would later be renamed the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in 1935, but only after the death toll rose to more than twenty-four.  With a culture of killing and complicity, the FBI investigated only a fraction of the killings, as Hoover was in a hurry to close the case, never looking deeper into the darker conspiracy implications, turning the case over to Tom White (Jesse Plemons), a former Texas Ranger and an experienced investigator who lived in the saddle, putting together an undercover team that included a Native American agent, John Wren (Tatanka Means), actually charging the Osage $20,000 for their services, as they had to pay for justice, which is simply unheard of, yet the headlines generated by this case gave birth to a more professional, modern era FBI.  However, even after the Bureau of Investigation closed the case, according to Yancey Red Corn: Actor, Osage Native American, “the killings just kept going on.”  While the oil ran dry and the Depression depleted their wealth, one important consideration here is that even though the Osage tribe were the targeted victims, something they never forget, they don’t live their lives as victims, as the Osage Nation has not just survived, but is thriving, making attempts to reacquire the stolen lands (including Ted Turner’s expansive 43,000-acre Bluestem Ranch) while adopting new ways to ensure its future.  Having once owned nearly 1.5 million acres in the early 1900’s, before this 2016 acquisition the Osage Nation owned only 5% of that.

While the story itself has profound implications, the film is very sluggish and feels like an overlong death march, with vicious murders accumulating before our eyes, one after another in a succession of endless brutality, growing darkly unsettling and relentlessly grim throughout, where you wonder where the hell was Thelma Schoonmaker’s reputedly outstanding editing, as it definitely needed some help.  This never lives up to the best of Scorsese, feeling instead like an elderly version where you try to say too much, and don’t want to leave out anything, but makes it more rambling while attempting to chronicle such a dark and nearly forgotten aspect of American history that resembles the grisly maliciousness of Shakespeare’s Macbeth.  The opening sequence is the best thing in the entire film, as that Robbie Robertson music just grabs you by the throat, Killers of the Flower Moon Soundtrack | Osage Oil Boom - Robbie Robertson | Original Score | YouTube (2:51), while Scorsese’s gravity-defying crane shots lure you in.  Malevolence is everywhere in this film, as the loss of life feels unstoppable, most of it masterminded behind the scenes by Hale, who spent years ingratiating himself into the good graces of the Osage community so no one would suspect him.  He proclaims himself a merciful friend, speaking their language, making benevolent donations for schools and the local hospital in the Native community, where he’s allowed a privileged position to sit at tribal meetings and at funerals that he orchestrated, but his benevolence is a ploy to disguise his evil intent, drawing a parallel to the billionaire pharmaceutical Sackler family, famous for their philanthropy, positioning themselves as bastions of morality, building a reputation as generous patrons of the arts while pushing the highly addictive OxyContin on the general public, where more than half a million have died from the damage caused by the opioid epidemic, so brilliantly revealed in Laura Poitras’ All the Beauty and the Bloodshed (2022).  Scorsese exposes the murderous intent of Hale, but he did not act in a vacuum, and many more Osage went missing than were ever accounted for.  Left out of the film is the unmistakable reality of federal Indian policy, which, from the 1880’s through the 1940’s, fostered a legal strategy through which Native peoples would lose their land and resources more and more easily, which is an underlying cause of why this happened, as it wasn’t just Hale, but the government’s intent as well, yet instead of murdering Indians they simply stole land and wealth through legal channels, as the federal government has seized hundreds of millions of acres of land from Native nations in over 300 treaties.  It was the official government policy of assimilation which saw Osage children forced into boarding schools, with attempts to eradicate Osage language and culture (both survived).  Even in the 20th century, the federal government collected billions of dollars from sales or leases of natural resources like timber, oil, and gas on Indian lands, which it was supposed to disburse to the land’s owners, but it failed to account for these trust funds for decades, let alone pay Indians what they were due, so this film is just one chapter in a much larger story, one that affirms the U.S. was built on stolen lands and wealth. 

Despite Scorsese’s best efforts to tell the story of the Osage murders in the most respectful manner, working closely with the Osage people in Oklahoma, Native Americans are relegated to the background in a larger story predominately featuring white male protagonists, as Hale enlists the aid of ranch hands, doctors, lawyers, insurance agents, law enforcement officials, and relatives to carry out his relentless schemes and cover-ups.  Perhaps due to the commercial appeal of De Niro and DiCaprio, they are onscreen for the majority of the time, where much of this is seen through their eyes, perhaps focusing too much on Ernest Burkhart, giving him a conscience, while taking away the pain of Mollie and her family, where the Osage community are largely given a distant ceremonial presence, remaining passive bystanders as one by one they are picked off in the most heinous manner by a racist and utterly vile plot against them.  For most viewers, they will remain outsiders, silently playing the tragic victims, perhaps mirroring Scorsese’s delicate position as an outsider himself, where little time is spent attempting to understand their culture.  Even when speaking among themselves in their own language, there are no subtitled translations, so viewers have little opportunity to become emotionally invested or gain needed insight.  Scorsese simply accentuates the wrong perspective, shifting the emphasis to those carrying out the crimes, giving too much screen time to the villains instead of expanding an indigenous narrative, as David Grann does with his book.  Compare that to Sarah Polley’s Women Talking (2022), for instance, where there are a stream of revelations from the point of view of those who are targets of a crime, while those that carry out the crimes are largely unseen.  As a sign of the times, it was no accident that these events happened simultaneously to the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, where wealthy blacks in Oklahoma were terrorized by a two-day long mob attack from white supremacists, literally destroying the homes and businesses of a well-established black community, where hundreds of lives were lost and up to 10,000 black residents were left homeless, leaving a thriving community utterly decimated.  These incidents do not reflect upon black or Native American history, but instead reveal the historically racist mindset of whites (the Ku Klux Klan of the 1920’s had a nationwide membership in the millions), instilling widespread community fear by devaluing people of color to such a degree that they readily resort to murder to stop minority economic advancement from happening in America, where the laws and political institutions have been complicit in either covering up these crimes or conspiring against those who were plotted against.  Unlike Grann’s book that exposes how the murders and ethnic violence against the Osage Nation affect its people to this day, with families still haunted by the atrocities, Scorsese’s tale is one of an extensive criminal conspiracy, still largely undocumented, where one group plots against another with complete impunity.  This kind of mindset has not disappeared, reflecting the complicity of white supremacy, as a Pandora’s Box of toxic race hatred has infected the present as well, with hate crimes on the rise (Hate and Extremism — In the Mainstream and on the Main Street), along with a gun culture of mass shootings, as if we’re still living in the lawlessness of the Wild West, where families continue to deal with inconsolable losses from dreadful tragedies that all Americans need to come to terms with.

Note

The family of Ree Drummond, aka television’s Pioneer Woman, a staple on the Food Network since 2011 who married into the Drummond family (Oklahoma) in 1996, is the largest landholder in Osage County that also includes churches, oil companies, banks, the University of Texas, and the University of Oklahoma, owning 433,000 acres in 2017, or 9% of the county, as the Drummond patriarchs were able to amass so much land because they were guardians to at least 10 Osage estates, owning a trading company offering extensive services like will executions, deed transfers, as well as undertaker and funeral services that eventually turned into a funeral home, routinely overcharging Osage customers, with Jack Drummond in a late 1970’s interview openly acknowledging a 700% markup for Osage shoppers (The Strange but True Story of the Pioneer Woman's Link to ...), while also purchasing Osage headrights during the Reign of Terror, making money off of the Osage Nation, with the Drummonds eventually purchasing William Hale’s ranch.