Robert Horton is a Scarecrow board member and a longtime film critic. This series of "critic's notes" is chance to highlight worthy films playing locally and connect them to the riches of Scarecrow's collection.
There is always something incoherent at the heart of Martin Scorsese's films. As much as he reveres the classical model of the Hollywood movie, Scorsese cannot or will not make a picture that sews itself neatly into a satisfying whole. He understands that the center does not hold, something the movies knew at least by the time Orson Welles made Citizen Kane in 1941. But if Welles probed to the middle of the soul and found an empty chamber there, he shrewdly provided a Rosebud to round off that ghastly knowledge.
Scorsese offers no Rosebuds. His films sometimes seem to be at war with themselves, just as their protagonists are; they thrash around in search of purpose or meaning, just as his protagonists do. This is the source of excitement in his best films (GoodFellas, The King of Comedy) and his less articulate efforts (Casino, The Wolf of Wall Street). New York, New York is a good case study for this: a 1940s movie musical in pitched battle with Method acting excess and 70s fragmentation. The closest Scorsese has come to presenting a magnum opus in which everything clicks into place in a complete way is The Irishman, and even that masterpiece has an inscrutable hole where its deadened hero exists. Nothing can explain that killer's life, no lack of mother's love or missing sled, and Scorsese does not try, because he's part of a generation that doesn't believe in the old explanations.
The tortured journeys of Scorsese's men—it is hard to call them "heroes," although I suppose Jesus of Nazareth deserves a pass—are an important part of his work, of course. These investigations are sometimes thrilling. They can also be exhausting. As a Catholic who lapsed at a very early age, I find the spiritual anguish of Scorsese's religious characters kind of tedious after a while, but some of that personal exasperation is on me. More difficult is the obtuseness of Jake La Motta in Raging Bull, a blockhead at the center of one of the director's most lauded works (the "I was blind but now I see" quote at the end is especially mystifying, given La Motta's animalistic existence).
Scorsese's newest, Killers of the Flower Moon, is not about the ways of the Osage people or a murder investigation. It is about one of those Scorsese men: morally blind, venal, none too bright. The movie is about other things, including an American system founded on corruption and racism; at its best it's a folk epic, fueled by vintage songs and Robbie Robertson's marvelous score, and as such it takes flight at regular intervals (as Scorsese's Western, it's decidedly short on sweeping grandeur, favoring a chamber-play approach). But mostly it's about a man and his torment. The man is Ernest Burkhart, played by Leonardo DiCaprio, a WWI vet returned to his rich uncle's Oklahoma domain. The Osage have oil on their land and have become instantly wealthy, so Ernest marries Native woman Mollie (Lily Gladstone) to bring her family's money into his family's pocketbook. Murder, too, is part of this business, and Ernest has a role in that.
Had this played as a crime film, with an FBI agent (Jesse Plemons) at its center, the film might have succeeded as a procedural—which, in its present form, it does not. Apparently DiCaprio called for the reshaping of the story as Burkhart's tale, which suggests that the actor truly understands his longtime director. Ernest is a pigheaded enigma with blood on his hands, able to compartmentalize his affection for his wife with his crimes against her. It's DiCaprio's best performance, and studio executives must've been horrified when they realized what he and Scorsese had created—not a sneering, juicy villain, but a loser, thick-faced with dimness and, eventually, guilt.
It's not easy spending three and a half hours with this character, even with Gladstone's sharp originality or Robert De Niro's steady turn as the two-faced uncle. On first viewing, I don't understand why the film is so very slow, except that it's another in a long line of Scorsese experiments in film form (the experiments include the brilliant touch of beginning with faux-silent-movie images and ending with a radio drama). The true story—adapted by Scorsese and Eric Roth from David Grann's book—cries out for a TV miniseries full of vivid cliffhangers and twists, but Scorsese has gone the opposite direction, pacing the thing like a Bresson picture and leaching out the usual satisfactions of a true-crime saga. It's as though Killers is admitting that cinema's tendency to present such histories as entertainments is unacceptable now, and what a story of human and cultural horror needs is a church service. A comparison with 2023's other serious marathon film, Oppenheimer, shows Scorsese's risky move: Where Christopher Nolan bebops his true narrative into a syncopated full-body experience that comes right at the audience, Scorsese backs off and mutters quiet prayers for the dead—and the dead who are still living, like Ernest Burkhart.
October 20, 2023
