BEFORE: Brew up some coffee and keep those sugary cookies coming, we got a LONG one tonight, the running time for this film comes in at 3 hours and 26 minutes. I'm going to try and get it done, because I'm working the next few nights and I'll be coming home late, too late to start a movie that takes so long to watch. Sure, I could split it into two nights, but I'd rather try to watch it all in one go, also I don't want to fall behind again.
John Lithgow carries over from "Spellbound". And I simply cannot believe that this film, with an enormous cast of 265 people, can't produce a birthday SHOUT-out for me. The law of averages dictates that SOMEONE in this cast must have been born on April 24, but I can't find one, according to the IMDB. Oh, wait, there are 365 days in a year, so I suppose it's very possible that all those actors were born on other days.
Oh, and this one's on Apple TV+, which is the main streaming service I do NOT have access to. I have watched other movies in the past that are Apple exclusives -- "On the Rocks", "Napoleon", "Fly Me to the Moon" and lately it's been easier for me to just find the film I need on a pirate site BUT the pirate site I've been relying on has been shut down, so that's not an option for me tonight. What I have done, three or four times, is sign up for a free trial of Apple TV+, then cancel immediately after watching the movie I want, which meant FREE movie. But now Apple has changed their terms, instead of FREE I'll have to sign up for a month of service for $2.99, then cancel again right after. Paying $2.99 to watch "Killers of the Flower Moon" is still a great deal, that's less than a dollar per hour. So that's probably what I'll do, and if there's anything else on Apple TV I want to watch, I'll have until May 22 to do that. Maybe "CODA" or "Causeway"?? "Greyhound"? "Wolfs"? "Luck"?
(Damn, after "Easter Sunday" I could have linked to "Luck" via Eva Noblezada, then got back to my chain via John Ratzenberger in "Spellbound". Oh, well...I can always get another month of Apple TV+ in the future for another $2.99)
Meanwhile, my plans for Doc Block 2025 are coming together - this involves taking a look at all of the docs on my list and making sure that the lists of credits (including appearances via archival footage) are as complete as possible. I've been keeping them in a rough linking order, but it's time to solidify that order, to the extent that I can, and then maybe finding a few more to add to the mix, once I can see where to work them in. A quick scan of one doc revealed some archive footage that was NOT mentioned in the IMDB, and it was exactly the thing I needed to turn my temp screening order into a circle, the last film connects back to the first one. Really, this is the ideal situation for those 34 (and rising) films, this means I can enter the chain at any point and go in either direction, which increases my chances of, say, programming a very American film for July 4. But first I'll need to know what I'm screening on Father's Day, which is June 20, and then once I have that I can figure out how many steps I'll need to link to a doc, the whole thing is color-coded so I'll have to work that out in mid-June, probably.
THE PLOT: When oil is discovered in 1920's Oklahoma under Osage Nation land, the Osage people are murdered one by one - until the FBI steps in to unravel the mystery.
AFTER: Honestly, this is three and a half hours of your life that you're just not going to get back. Every film you could watch demands your time, of course - but few demand so much of it. And usually you don't regret giving up 90 minutes or two hours of your time, because ideally you get some entertainment back in an equal amount, and it's a fair exchange. But here there's such an imbalance, could you possibly get something in return that makes the time drain worth it? When I got to the point of the film when I was an hour in, usually a good time to take a break, I then realized I still had almost TWO AND A HALF hours to go, which is longer than most films are. It's by no means a record for me, last year I made it through "1900", an epic film that ran 5 hours and 17 minutes, and thus felt even longer than the year 1900 was. But hey, if I watched that, I can make it through this one.
Still, you can't tell me that there wasn't SOMETHING that could have been cut. Any editor worth their salt should have been able to trim at least 30 minutes out of this, but it's clear that Scorsese didn't want them to. So there's a LOT of stuff that happens multiple times, which in some cases serves to drive the points home, but other times it just feels like we're re-hashing stuff we already know. In particular the conversations between DiCaprio's character and De Niro's character feel sort of like unscripted improv, and together they tend to talk in circles and say the same things over and over, so maybe they just weren't given too much dialogue to work with? It's tough to say. But it feels like the whole movie kind of gets encapsulated in these conversations, because this is how William Hale (De Niro) manipulates his nephew, Ernest Burkhart (DiCaprio). Hale is the one who first suggests that Burkhart should romance and marry Mollie, who is one of the Osage Native Americans that has mineral rights, or a share of the income from the oil that was discovered on their property.
We already know that someone is killing Osage people, but it's not clear at first why, but over the course of the three-plus hours we can connect the dots and assign motives for all of the killings. Whenever an Osage dies, then their rights to a share of the oil money transfer to someone else, either their children or their surviving spouse. So for Burkhart that would mean that marrying Mollie would allow him to live in comfort, however Hale has a different endgame in mind, to him all of the Osage are useful up to a point, he can make money from them while they're alive, but eventually he's going to take out insurance policies on them and profit from their deaths. There's no telling how many times he's running this scam, or if he's the only one doing it, or if there are other businessmen profiting from the killings. The entire culture in this part of Oklahoma changed overnight, suddenly the Osage were the richest people in the world, per capita, and I suppose it was only a matter of time before the system "corrected" itself, and the white Americans started figuring out how to get a hold of their money, either by working for them in service capacities, or by taking their money by other means - over-charging them for stuff and then profiting from their deaths when the well ran dry.
Nobody even really appreciated the irony, the oil was found on tribal land which the U.S. government "gave" the Osage in exchange for decades of mis-treatment and of course coming to America and taking over the land in the first place. And then OIL gets found there? One would think that God might have a sense of humor, or was trying to tell the white men something, only they didn't want to hear it. (Assuming you believe in God, that is, maybe this is just a thing that happened.). I mean, I get it, you go where the money is, you work for the people who have the money, because it doesn't do much good to work for people who DON'T have money (I can speak from personal experience here...) and this process is kind of like what we see happen to lottery winners, immediately they will get contacted by people offering to manage their money or invest their money or sell them everything they want, and so then how long is it before a person with a lot of money becomes a person without?
Burkhart starts out as Mollie's driver but on Hale's advice he becomes her husband, so everything from then on should be great, right? But Hale keeps using him to hire people to kill other Osages, including some of Mollie's relatives - and her dead relatives' rights will be transferred to their heirs, and eventually to Mollie, so what could POSSIBLY go wrong here? Burkhart keeps making stupid mistakes, though, or hiring people who make stupid mistakes, which is itself a stupid mistake, so over time it becomes harder and harder to chalk all the deaths up to accidents or suicide. Like, how did that guy shoot himself in the back of the head? Maybe it was a freak accident or some kind of ricochet? When Burkhart learns that the guy Hale has an insurance policy on (and therefore the next Osage to die) is also Mollie's first husband, you'd think he would want to do the job himself, or take extra care to make sure it's done correctly, but that's just not where we find ourselves.
Meanwhile, Mollie has diabetes, which a lot of the Osages have because they inherited a lot of money and they tend to spend it on sweets, and Hale offers to get her this new drug called insulin which has been found to help regulate blood sugar levels. This seems like a grand gesture, but only until Hale's doctors suggest to Burkhart that he add a little something to her insulin, you know, just to slow her down and keep her housebound, not enough to kill her. Not yet, anyway. Also meanwhile the Osage council is getting really concerned that so many of their tribe members keep turning up dead, and they don't know the exact reason why so many suicides and accidents keep taking place. Eventually Mollie and other tribe representatives travel to Washington to ask President Coolidge to figure out why so many of their people are getting killed.
Soon investigators from the new Bureau of Investigation turn up in town, replacing the private detectives that managed to get nowhere. Once the feds show up, it's really just a matter of time before they figure out what's going on, they know how to follow the money, after all. Plus they have the power to grant immunity to the bad people that Burkhart hired in order to build a case against him and Hale. When the agents find Mollie at home, and learn that her insulin was poisoned, they have all the evidence they need. Burkhart is convinced to testify against Hale because his other option is to serve time in prison and never see his children again - and sure, things between him and Mollie get really awkward when she learns her husband was poisoning her.
I didn't really understand at first why Scorsese, king of the modern mob movies, would make a film about the Osage tribe in Oklahoma, but about two hours in, this became clear to me, that this IS a mob movie, it's just one without Italian people in it, but the idea is the same. William Hale was like the Godfather of Oklahoma, and Burkhart was his "capo", bringing his orders to the foot soldiers who then the dirty work. So this film is really in the same vein as "Goodfellas" or "Casino" or "The Sopranos", just with different faces. This is what the mob does, they make money from everything that is illegal - the gambling, the bootlegging, the drugs - and then once the regular citizens start owing them money, they bleed those people dry and they take their money, their businesses, and eventually their lives.
Art imitates life, but life also imitates art - to make this film, over $200 million was spent on the shoot in Oklahoma, which is reportedly the most anyone has ever spent to make a film in that state. Just imagine what kind of cottage industries probably sprung up around that film shoot, it probably looked a LOT like what happened back in 1919 when oil was discovered on the Osage land, and suddenly every white man around there found himself working for Native Americans, all hustling to get a piece of that pie.
Directed by Martin Scorsese (director of "Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore")
Also starring Leonardo DiCaprio (last seen in "Don't Look Up"), Robert De Niro (last seen in "Albert Brooks: Defending My Life"), Lily Gladstone, Jesse Plemons (last seen in "Civil War"), Tantoo Cardinal (last seen in "Wind River"), Brendan Fraser (last seen in "Brothers"), Cara Jade Myers, JaNae Collins, Jillian Dion, Jason Isbell (last seen in "Sheryl"), William Belleau (last seen in "The Unforgivable"), Louis Cancelmi (last seen in "The Eyes of Tammy Faye"), Scott Shepherd (last seen in "Side Effects"), Everett Waller, Talee Redcorn, Yancey Red Corn, Tatanka Means (last seen in "The Host"), Tommy Schultz, Sturgill Simpson (last seen in "The Creator"), Ty Mitchell (last seen in "True Grit"), Gary Basaraba (last seen in "Little Italy"), Charlie Musselwhite (last seen in "Blues Brothers 2000"), Pat Healy (last seen in "Bad Education"), Brent Langdon (ditto), Steve Witting (last seen in "The Irishman"), Steve Routman (last seen in "I Don't Know How She Does It"), Gene Jones (last seen in "Fly Me to the Moon"), Michael Abbott Jr. (last seen in "The Bikeriders"), J.C. MacKenzie (last seen in "Somewhere in Queens"), Jack White (last seen in "Conan O'Brien Can't Stop"), Larry Sellers, Barry Corbin (last seen in "The Homesman"), Jo Harvey Allen (ditto), Talon Satepauhoodle, Jennifer Rader, Chance Rush, Dana Daylight, Mahada Sanders, Ben Hall (last seen in "Minari"), James Carroll (ditto), Beau Smith (last seen in "Everybody Wants Some!!"), Victor McCay (last seen in "The Ring Two"), Nathalie Standingcloud, Jay Paulson (last seen in "The Laundromat"), Candice Costello, Chris Daigle, Jerry Wolf, Addie Roanhorse, Norma Jean (last seen in "Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story"), Elisha Pratt, Brave Desiree Storm, Margaret Gray, Christopher Hill, Dolan Wilson (last seen in "No Good Deed" (2014)), Vanessa Pham, Terry Allen, Sarah Spurger, Joshua Close (last seen in "Kill the Messenger"), Elden Henson (last seen in "She's All That"), David Fields, Anthony J. Harvey, Joe Spinelli, Leland Prater, DJ Whited, Jessica Harjo, Joey Oglesby (last seen in "Fruitvale Station"), Alexis Ann, Lee Eddy (last seen in "I Don't Feel at Home in This World Anymore"), Gary S. Pratt, Nathaniel Arcand (last seen in "Cold Pursuit"), Kristin Keith, Shonagh Smith, Mark Landon Smith, James Healy Jr. (last seen in "The Hate U Give"), Ron McMahan, Karen Garlitz, David Born (last seen in "The Highwaymen"), Mary Buss, Tanner Brantley, Jezy Gray, Steve Eastin (last seen in "Matchstick Men"), Joe Chrest (last seen in "Runaway Jury"), Brian Shoop (last seen in "The Rookie"), Larry Jack Dotson (last heard in "Apollo 10 1/2: A Space Age Childhood"), Vince Giordano (last seen in "The Wizard of Lies")
with the voices of Larry Fessenden (last seen in "The Dead Don't Die"), Welker White (last seen in "A Shock to the System"), and cameos from Martin Scorsese (last seen in "Albert Brooks: Defending My Life") and Craig "Radio Man" Costaldo (last seen in "Game 6")
RATING: 7 out of 10 overpriced caskets
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