Curse of the (Marty) masterpiece

A still from Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon

There's a scene in Martin Scorsese's Killers of the Flower Moon (in theatres, later on Apple TV), where Robert De Niro in a white colonialist's role, Bill Hale, wishes his nephew (Leonardo DiCaprio), well: "God bless you, and your child," he says (or something to the effect).

This Hale fellow is plain evil. I can't sense anything redemptive about this character, who's been pretending to be a friend/benefactor of the native American Osage tribe, at one end.

At the other, he's mercilessly behind their murders, plotting his own nephew to marry a woman from the community (Lily Gladstone). Just so they can take over lands, where oil has been discovered, lately.

That is, early 1920s.

De Niro has famously spoken about the need to be less interesting as a person, so you can be more interesting as an actor/artiste.

Yet, the most interesting thing he's done, as a public figure, is launching a vitriolic tirade full of cusses, once, against the then American President Donald Trump. Observe the aforementioned dialogue by De Niro in the film. Please tell me if he's slyly imitating Trump in the scene!

DiCaprio's character, of course, looks perennially confused, hence the actor playing it. He's in love with the native American woman he's married to. What kinda man slowly poisons the woman he loves, and finishes her family off alongside.

Killers of the Flower Moon (Killers) is based on a 2014 David Grann non-fiction novel of the same name. Scorsese's tour de force culmination of mob operas he specialises in, The Irishman (2019), was based on a book in the same journalistic genre (Charles Brandt's I Heard You Paint Houses). That's his current trip.

The final half-hour in The Irishman, which is a striking meditation on the mundane ageing, after a life of crime, explains its exacting length. Take that away, and you have any other film, detailing America's underworld history, with Jimmy Hoffa at the centre.

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Also, The Irishman sufficiently bore a sense of occasion - bringing together De Niro and Al Pacino into the Scorsese universe. A necessary erasure of the memory of Righteous Kill (2008), that got the two actors on screen since Michael Mann's Heat (1995).

Killers is around three and half hours long - which, including interval and commute, is more than what Narayana Murthy's prescribed 70-hour work week will allow!

It's not laboriously boring, still. Hell, no. Could be sleep-inducing, sometimes. Could it have been shorter, tauter, more dramatically stirring… Can't see why not.

Does it equally reflect the momentous, maiden event of uniting two prime muses from separate phases of Scorsese's career - De Niro (Taxi Driver, Casino, Goodfellas), and DiCaprio (The Departed, Shutter Island, The Wolf of Wall Street)? Nope. These aren't the characters I'd imagined the two burning up the screen with Scorsese.

Which isn't to suggest plainly malicious people, with barely any face-saving traits to their complex personalities, must not be protagonists, in a picture. Although I do enjoy quasi-moral men, doing inspiring things, restoring faith in humanity, on screen.

That guy, in Killers, was likely to be the Bureau of Investigations Agent, Tom White (Jesse Plemons), getting to the bottom of the series of deaths in Osage nation. Only, this gent, post a late entry, feels he's merging into the background. Almost as much as, you'll notice, the Native Americans themselves.

Which is odd for a movie that's ostensibly telling an important story, of Caucasian domination - from the POV of the victim, rather than the perpetrator.

Important, because it's white men - and among the world's most important filmmakers, ever - looking inwards at the bloodied past, that got them to where they are.

Every part of the world, including the US, has such a story. An Ecuadorian-American told me once about how, if you look at countries, where white colonisers decided to settle down, rather than plunder, and leave - they totally destroyed local cultures.

Britain, America, Australia appear far too similar, half a globe apart. Unlike India, for instance. And what's popular history, or his story, if not men hunting men, anyway?

Of course, Killers is set at a time, when ideas of a rights-based society were set in stone. A comparison to, say, Kevin Costner's Dances with Wolves (1990) doesn't make sense - also because you barely see anything of the outer world in Killers, beyond mid-shots of the main town centre.

Is this film to Scorsese, what the gloriously disturbing, Django Unchained (2012) was to Quentin Tarantino? Hardly as visceral.

Either way, Tarantino and Scorsese aren't from the same raw-stock. Tarantino is more the writer of scripts, like novels, from scratch. The relentlessly prolific Scorsese is a director with writing riffs.

Like Tarantino, Scorsese is a filmmakers' filmmaker. In the sense of his impact on the intimate, indie-space, over six decades (unlike his top contemporary, Steven Spielberg, for instance). Which also means you start making a Scorsese movie, in your head, as an audience, if it hasn't lived up to your expectations.

Otherwise, in Killers, you watch him fully checking off a Western in his filmography, at 80. And that adorable cameo - in the lovely epilogue, recreating a radio show from the 1920s. De Niro, DiCaprio gotta return for something better. No end to human greed, you see.

Mayank Shekhar attempts to make sense of mass culture. He tweets @mayankw14

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