Day: January 5, 2024

Last night I watched Juan Antonio Bayona’s Society of the Snow (Netflix, now streaming), and while it’s obviously a thumbs-upper in several respects I don’t quite understand why so many critics have been doing acrobatic cartwheels.

It’s very good but it’s not a film that enables you to meet or know God…it doesn’t cleanse or purify your soul or bring about a shuddering emotional orgasm. Turn it down, ease up.

Society is obviously a very well-made, bracingly realistic survival film. I never felt it was doing anything but dealing straight cards about that horrible real-life ordeal that befell that Uruguayan rugby team when their prop plane crashed into the snowy Andes mountains in mid October of ‘72.

The smallish plane was carrying 45 passengers; upon rescue 71 days later all but 16 had died, and the survivors wouldn’t have lived if they hadn’t resorted to cannibalism, and not just strips of flesh and muscle but internal organs (heart, lungs, brains)…horrific but true.

I still feel that Bayona’s The Orphanage (’07) is his finest film, but Society of the Snow is quite the rugged accomplishment and I have no serious complaints. I do, however, have a few small ones.

One, there’s too much “acting” among the ensemble cast of young lads…too much eye contact, too much hugging, not enough bitter humor or a sense of “we’re fucked and I don’t need to fucking hug you” solitude.

Two, the incessant debate about whether or not they should eat their dead comrades in order to live is ridiculous — if they didn’t eat something (and there was nothing to eat up there) they would have died, period, and yet some (they were all Roman Catholics) insist that eating human flesh will damn their souls for eternity. Asinine.

Three, I should compare Society of the Snow with Frank Marshall‘s Alive (’93), which told the exact same story, but it’s been 30 years and I need to re-stream it. Does anyone have any vivid memories? Reviews mere moderately positive.

Four, Bayona’s film doesn’t make it clear that the crash happened entirely due to pilot error. Flight 571’s inexperienced co-pilot, Lieutenant-Colonel Dante Héctor Lagurara, fucked up and pretty much committed manslaughter, plain and simple.

Five, Bayona allows the viewer to presume that the survivors are eating the tastiest parts of the human body (ribs, arms, legs) until we see a glimpse of a stripped human rib cage…holy shit.

But there’s no question that Society is a first-rate effort…your belief in the frosty realism is absolute and bruising. I just didn’t find it miraculous or breathtaking or drop-to-your-knees astonishing. But it’s worth seeing.

Yesterday Indiewire‘s Anne Thompson posted an interview with Killers of the Flower Moon screenwriter Eric Roth, and in so doing passed along, for what seemed like the umpteenth time, the story of how Roth and Martin Scorsese‘s 209-minute period melodrama began as one thing (a traditional investigative crime drama) and then became something else (a sprawling white-guilt wokester saga about the the ache of the Osage murder victims in the early 1920s, and particularly the evil of the white Oklahoma yokels).

Leonardo DiCaprio had initially been set to play the intrepid Bureau of Investigation agent Tom White, the guy who ultimately indicted three of the killers but was unable to bring many other killers to justice. (Leo excitedly told me this during a 2019 party at San Vicente Bungalows.) But sometime in early 2020 and perhaps during the beginning of Covid, Leo had a change of heart.

He didn’t want to play White because — let’s be honest — the woke movement had taken hold in progressive Hollywood circles and he didn’t want to be attacked or sneered at for playing a heroic white savior — a politically uncool thing in the Hollywood climate that was then unfolding.

Leo instead wanted to play the none-too-bright Ernest Burkhart, who became complicit in the murders of certain Oklahoma Osage natives by way of his fiendish uncle (Robert De Niro‘s ‘King” Hale), and who also came close to murdering his own Osage native wife, Mollie Burkhart (Lily Gladstone).

“At the beginning, Scorsese and Roth embraced a real John Ford Western,” Thompson writes.

Roth: “The early versions of the KOTFM screenplay were as much about Tom White as they were about the crime and everything else, and in that sense they were closer to the book. So it wasn’t a mystery in that sense.

“But then Marty began to express a bigger thing, which he’s so right about. It’s not a ‘who done it’ — it’s ‘who didn’t do it.’ As a social comment.”

God save Joe and Jane Popcorn from “social comment”, or more specifically social instruction.

Marty and Leo’s idea, in other words (allow me to offer an interpretation), was that we’re all guilty…all of us…back then and today.

In the same way that Randy Newman, in his 1970 song “Rednecks“, expanded the concept of racist attitudes and behaviors from the rural south to the entire country (“We don’t know our ass from a hole in the ground”), Killers of the Flower Moon would essentially serve as an indictment of white racism all over, in every nook and cranny of the country…we’re all dirty and guilty and reprehensible as fuck.

There’s no way the wokesters would come after Marty, Eric and Leo if they made a movie like this, the thinking presumably went, but if they made a “hooray for Tom White” flick, they might be indicted or semi-cancelled for being old-fashioned or blind to the new woke enlightenment or whatever.

Sometime in early ’20 or thereabouts, Roth got a call from Scorsese. “Are you sitting down?” Marty said. “Because Leo has a big idea.”

Roth: “Leo didn’t want to be the great white savior. Very smart. And the more complicated part was the husband [Ernest Burkhart] and complicated for many reasons, but probably the most interesting is somebody who’s in love with somebody and trying to kill them.

“We always embraced [Mollie] as the centerpiece of the movie.” [HE to Roth: Why? She doesn’t say anything or do anything — she’s completely passive.] “We had many, many things that dealt with the Osage, the Osage customs, the Osage world.”

What?

In fact Leo’s decision to submit to woke sensibilities (and Marty and Eric’s decision to go along with this) ensured that Killers of the Flower Moon would become a long, half-mystifying, eye-rolling, ass-punishing slog — a guilt trip movie without any story tension to speak of.

And here we are now, unlikely to bestow any top-tier awards** upon KOTFM except, most likely and very depressingly, the Best Actress Oscar to Gladstone for basically playing a passive victim of few words, a sad-eyed lady of the oil-rich lowlands who sits around in native blankets and gives dirty looks to all the evil crackers as Leo injects her with poisoned insulin…fascinating!

** Except for the musical score by the late Robbie Robertson — this is likely to win.

HE has no problem whatsoever with BAFTA’s Best Supporting Actor long list excluding May December’s over-awarded Charles Melton — obviously a modest momentum-stopper.

May December also didn’t make BAFTA’s Best Film tabulation and helmer Todd Haynes has also come up short on BAFTA’s Best Director long list.

Why are the Brits ixnaying a film that American easy lays have been falling all over each other to praise? Whatever the reason, HE approves.

On its Best Film roster BAFTA has also stiff-armed Cord Jefferson’s American Fiction, a tough break for a smart, engaging film that seemed semi-unstoppable after winning the People’s Choice award at last September’s Toronto Film Festival debut but estime–wise has drooped and under-performed ever since. THR’s Scott Feinberg is puzzled and a bit heartbroken.

And so, apart from respectful sympathy, I have nothing effusive or impassioned to share about the passing of David Soul, 80.

The only contact I’ve ever had with the Starsky brand was the 2004 Ben Stiller-Owen Wilson feature comedy, which was directed by Todd Phillips and costarred Vince Vaughn, Snoop Dog, Jason Bateman and Fred Williamson. Honestly? Even that is a fading memory. Pic opened two months shy of 20 years ago (3.5.04)

The original ABC Starsky & Hutch series ran for five years and change (April ‘75 to August ‘79).