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‘Killers of the Flower Moon’ in Cannes: Scorsese’s true crime with DiCaprio and De Niro is not afraid to upset you

Today it was all Scorsese in Cannes and this has been reflected in the immense queue formed in the rain to gain access to the only pass in the Debussy room Killers of the Flower Moon scheduled for accredited. they were ahead 206 minutes of powerful Scorsesian thriller based on the homonymous book by david grann about a series of murders that occurred in Oklahoma at the beginning of the last century with members of the native Osage people as victims.

Leonardo Dicaprio guides the story as Ernest Burkhart, nephew of local warlord William Hale (played by Robert DeNiro), who manages the politics, society and infrastructures of the Indian reservation at will. His goal is to seize the wealth accumulated by the Osage natives during the oil rush, for which he does not hesitate to orchestrate the marriage of relatives with Osage women who are later murdered to inherit their heritage.

Perhaps at another time in the director’s filmography this approach would have given rise to the umpteenth story of criminal ascent, with DiCaprio in the middle like Ray Liotta from One of ours. Not at all. Those who expect another variation of the narrative model of casino either The wolf of Wall Street they will crash against the constant evolution of a filmmaker of Scorsese’s caliber, who undoubtedly closed that part of his filmography definitively with the magnificent and twilight The Irish.

Scorsese changes course

Killers of the Flower Moon is a highly polymorphic film that causes strangeness. Especially the more he delves into those areas so traveled by the director who has portrayed the most upstart criminals in American history more and better. In this case, it will be very difficult for someone to take its petty protagonists as an aspirational model (whoever did it with the previous ones already required rapid psychological intervention), since there’s not a hint of glamour, just greed and misery.

Leonardo DiCaprio plays (with his perpetually lopsided chin and a perennial sneer of emoji with lips down) who is perhaps his most unsympathetic and mean character in recent years. Ernest Burkhart is a weak-minded, short-sighted, easily manipulated fellow who his uncle only has to verbally shake to get him to be his puppet; although those scenes are gold for the fans of the histrionic De Niro from his grandfather stage of comedies.

One of the irregularities in the film arises precisely from the contrast between the atrocities that are recounted and the alternation between a almost parodic tone in the DiCaprio-De Niro exchanges with the severe tone of the rest, the flashes of violence and the romantic drama that beats in the middle of the carnage. Scorsese is not afraid show the death, evil and racist corruption of an entire community starkly, but neither does he renounce the spectacularization that all representation entails; the radio recreation that closes the film is a masterful gesture, with a meta touch, that seals the filmmaker’s fidelity to popular entertainment.

Ernest’s relationship with Mollie, whom he plays with fabulous restraint lily gladstone (this is as good a time as any to recommend that you rush over to see it in Certain Women) in the antipodes of the unleashed record of her male companions, perhaps it is the only redoubt of sincerity and tenderness that the film allows its vile main character; even if the background is openly sad and terrible.

Who knows how it would have turned out Killers of the Flower Moon with DiCaprio in the role of the FBI agent in charge of the investigation that he plays Jesse Plemons, and that this would have been Ernest Burkhart. Perhaps we would be talking about a typical thriller, from the perspective of the detective who pursues the culprit, instead of the criminal who is barely aware of his misdeeds. Surely more satisfying, but surely a lot less interesting. You have to ask Scorsese for just that; and that is what he has given us: a movie to come back to.

DATA SHEET

Poster of 'Killers of the Flower Moon'

  • Director:

    Martin Scorsese


  • Gender:

    Drama


  • Country:

    USA


  • Synopsis:

    In the early 1920s, a series of murders of members of the native Osage people took place in the state of Oklahoma in order to keep their oil fortune.

  • Script: Eric Roth, Martin Scorsese

    Cast: Leonardo DiCaprio, Robert De Niro, Lily Gladstone, Jesse Plemons

    ​Duration: 206 min.

    Premiere: 10/20/2023

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