From “Scorsese’s White Man’s Burden,” posted by Armond White on 10.20.23:

“All that Killers of the Flower Moon has going for it is the woke idea that America’s white men are spiritually sick. It’s the latest variation on themes from the oil-well saga There Will Be Blood, with the added Millennial gloss of racial blame along the lines of Biden-era white self-revulsion.

“In the age of Diversity Equity Inclusion, Scorsese gets superficial, not more personal. He depicts the Osage as types — as overdressed, rowdy, pathological nouveaux riches, occasionally superstitious, sharing only slight interaction with resentful, miscreant whites.

“Instead, Killers of the Flower Moon pits white reprobates against indigenous innocents. Gladstone’s Mollie is a passive victim, given to bovine Streepian furtiveness and suffering. ‘Evil surrounds my heart,’ she moans, triggering Scorsese’s close-ups of ugly, mean, frowning white faces staring Mollie down — even though Gladstone’s complexion is whiter than theirs.

“[There is an] emphasis on Ernest’s false-hearted romance and eventual marriage to the quiet, heavyset Osage parvenue Mollie (Lily Gladstone). He goes from gaslighting Mollie to slowly poisoning her through insulin injections. [Note: White also describes Gladstone as “bovine.”]

“Killers of the Flower Moon is obviously hobbled by topical attitudes — an Osage gathering laments knowingly about white betrayal, actually invoking the modern word ‘genocide.’ It mourns a people without will or fight but plagued by melancholy, diabetes, and other maladies apparently affecting only their community.

“Killers of the Flower Moon is another instance of fatuous white guilt — a companion piece to the treacheries and condemnations of Spielberg’s West Side Story. Scorsese of all people should know the sensitivity that distinguished innumerable American movies that dealt with the tragic mistreatment of Native Americans, but this movie, instead, promises there will be Blood/Oil/Genocide. It is Scorsese’s first political movie, and, unfortunately, he has been radicalized against America.”

Sidenote: As HE readers know, I posted a piece last summer about the abbreviated dramatizing of the Osage murder saga in Mervyn LeRoy‘s The FBI Story (’59), which starred James Stewart. White is apparently the first name-brand critic to reference same. White: “LeRoy handled the Osage killings with economical moral clarity.”

** The term genocide was coined by Polish lawyer Raphael Lemkin in his 1944 book “Axis Rule in Occupied Europe.”

Late yesterday afternoon I sat through my second viewing of Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon. (My first exposure was on 5.20.23 at the Salle Debussy, or five months ago.) It happened at Westport’s AMC Royale 6, Theatre #3 at 4 pm.

The screen illumination was decidedly dim (in Cannes the brightness levels seemed well above the SMPTE standard of 14 or 15 foot lamberts) and so the whole thing felt needlessly shrouded and vaguely downish…dark rainclouds overhead.

Plus there were only four of us in the theatre — Jody and myself plus a 60ish couple in the rear.

I knew I would be experiencing a kind of waiting, stuck-in-the-Oklahoma-mud gaslighting hell for the first two hours. For it’s not just Lily Gladstone being monotonously lied to by Robert DeNiro’s incessantly drawling “King” Hale and his dumbfuck nephew, Leonardo DiCaprio’s Ernest Burkhart — it was me also…me, Jeffrey Wells, sprawled in my handicapped seat for extra legroom…I had to sit through all that gaslighting bullshit…lying, lying, “ahh feel fer yew in your tahhm of grief”…will you shut the fuck up already, Bobby?

I flinched with every DeNiro sighting. Jesus, here it comes again…”we wull leave no stone unturned in order to fahhnd these killers…”

And then finally Jesse Plemons (as FBI investigator Tom White) shows up at the two-hour mark, and things start to pick up. But even then…

For one thing there’s no real Lily / Mollie catharsis at the end. No admonishments, no barking, no “how dare you?”

Even during her final scene with Leo / Ernest, after White has doubtless told her the full sordid truth about Leo’s conspiratorial complicity in the Osage murder spree as well as her own poisoning, Lily / Mollie can’t bring herself to slap or even scold that hayseed.

Instead she embraces Leo / Ernest and then her right palm gently touches the side of his face. Lily’s pained expression says, “I feel mostly pity in my heart for you, my poor dumb beef-bod yokel. You’re the lamb who went astray and saw to the deaths of my family and friends…poor little stupid baby.”

Not very dramatically satisfying, Lily, Leo and Marty!

The rich visual spank in Fred Zinnemann‘s Oklahoma! — 70mm Todd-AO, 30-frames-per-second — is so luscious that I decided to watch some of it last night. The first 35 or 40 minutes, I mean. Watching the whole film is impossible — talk about square, complacent, cornball, plodding.

But those Arizona visuals! Location shooting was done mostly in Nogales, Arizona. The cornfield in the opening number as well as the reprise song “Surrey with the Fringe on Top” were shot at the historic Canoa Ranch in Green Valley, Arizona.

Oklahoma! itself is a glaze-over, for the most part. You sit and watch it, and it sure as hell goes on longer than you’d prefer. The tunes catch lightning every so often. I really enjoyed Rod Steiger and Gordon Macrae‘s “Poor Judd is Dead” duet.

If only there wasn’t this feeling of complacency, of an overly revered stage play being shot by cameras that weight ten tons, of the filmmakers coasting on the laurels of the original 1943 Broadway stage production, which (along with the earlier production of Jerome Kern‘s Showboat) changed the character and upped the game of American musicals.

If only the Curly-Laurey-Judd triangle made a lick of sense. If only the photography wasn’t so conservative and the cutting so uninquisitive. If only Laurey’s dream sequence didn’t use replacement dancers for Macrae and Shirley Jones (why were they even hired if they couldn’t handle a few modest ballet moves?). If only it didn’t seem as if director Fred Zinneman was on a Thorazine drip and wearing a straightjacket during filming. If only those jutting Arizona mountain peaks (i.e., total fiction compared to the typography of the real Oklahoma) weren’t visible in all the exteriors.

Incidentally: Did you know that Oklahoma!, despite its staunch mid-1950s squareness, is all about sexual longing and mating rituals and perversity, and is generally teeming with erections and dampness and pelvic thrusts?

Jason Cochran makes a surprisingly clear case for this analysis in a 2011 article called “Oklahoma! Is One Of The Dirtiest Movie Musicals Ever Made.”

“There’s a storehouse of sexual activity swarming in Oklahoma!,” he writes, “and enough to fill several ten-page papers. In overview, however, it suffices to note the several main themes in the film: the cloaking of continual sexual pursuit beneath local custom and chivalry, the dependency of each character on that custom, the matriarchal presence of the [lascivious] Aunt Eller and the…sexual linkage of beasts and dancing as they relate to Oklahoma!‘s setting and genre.

In those themes alone there is enough to give any Rodgers and Hammerstein fan pause as she or he considers Oklahoma!‘s innate sexuality and perversity.”

In Killers of the Flower Moon (which I’ll be seeing for the second time later today) the yokelish scumbag Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio) romances and then marries the oil-rich Mollie Burkhart (Lily Gladstone). There’s a strange implication that Ernest is actually sweet on Mollie, but that’s bullshit. He’s mainly after her money.

The problem is that there’s no believing that Leo is genuinely attracted to Lily. Because we can’t divest ourselves of a persistent social-media impression of Leo over the last 25 years or so, which is that he only goes out with foxy, super-slender supermodels who are 25 or younger. Lily is a nice-looking lady as far as it goes, but she’s not in Leo’s class. She’s moonfaced, in her mid 30s and a bit on the chubby side. You tell yourself “no, no….forget real-life Leo…he’s playing an actual Oklahoma guy who married Mollie back in the 1920s…you need to invest in his performance and forget his real-life escapades.” And you can’t. You just can’t.

When Scott Feinberg assesses the strength of Best Picture Oscar contenders, he starts by breaking them down into three categories — frontrunners, major threats and possibilities.

There are always two or three generous inclusions in the frontrunner group, but it’s always a good thing to be in this fraternity. Your film’s standing or status is regarded as healthy and at least semi-hopeful. But if your film is listed among the other two categories, it means you’re in some kind of trouble. Especially if you’re among the possibilities, which pretty much means “no way, Jose” or “you might as well throw in the towel.”

In a 10.17 article titled “First Post-New York Film Festival Read of the Race,” Feinberg has chosen ten frontrunners, seven major threats and eight possibilities.

Herewith are my own assessments of the top ten, title by title, blow by blow. HE favorites are signified by boldface BINGO.

In HE’s estimation there are currently four keepers among the ten — Barbie, Oppenheimer, Poor Things and The Holdovers.

FEINBERG FRONTRUNNERS:

1 American Fiction / HE sez: Haven’t seen it yet.

2. Oppenheimer / HE sez: Hauntingly brilliant but at the same time increasingly dense and airless and almost oppressively talky, and Cillian Murphy‘s zombie-from-Betelguese performance drains the sand out of your soul. BINGO.

3. Barbie / HE sez: The buoyant energy, dynamic visual scheme, tongue-in-cheek social satire plus the massive commercial success factor obviously locks it in tight, but imagine the howls of derision if a male Greta Gerwig had created a reverse-engineered satire that replaced Barbie‘s misandry with misogyny. A mixed BINGO.

4. Killers of the Flower Moon / HE sez: Sprawling mixed-bag, Satanic-paleface, poor-Osage period saga with no strong point of view. Excellent tech elements. Woke sentimentalists aside, nobody is going to feel all that excited about this. It’s certainly no BINGO.

5. Poor Things / HE sez: Roughly the same kind of feminist fantasy as Barbie, only sexier, crazier and more imaginatively out there. Seriously stand-outish. BINGO.

6. Past Lives / HE sez: Forget it…too delicate, too hesitant, too prolonged, no romantic payoff.

7. Maestro / HE sez: Haven’t seen it. Word on the street is that it’s no BINGO.

8. The Holdovers / HE sez: Sublime craftsmanship pays off like a slot machine…an emotionally fulfilling, character-driven Christmas holiday flick…back-to-the-’70s and then some…perfectly acted, wonderfully written, easily the most audience friendly of the finalists. BINGO.

9. The Zone of Interest / HE sez: Brilliant, austere, chilly…an exercise in minimalism that doesn’t leave you with much at the end.

10. All of Us Strangers / HE sez: The gay beard-stubble factor is off the charts. If Paul Mescal bothers you half as much as he does me, this movie will certainly present problems.

Below is a screen capture from Martin Scorsese‘s 2004 American Express commercial. This is the Marty I’ve adored for decades as opposed to the woke Marty who decided he couldn’t make a white guy movie when he started work on Killers of the Flower Moon. This recent Marty incarnation I don’t fully relate to. The “I only have eyes for the pain of the Osage” Marty is like a Marty who’s been taken over by seed pods from Don Siegel‘s Invasion of the Body Snatchers. It looks like him and talks like him, but it isn’t him…it’s someone else.

And now comes the revelation that Leo did it…Leo talked Marty into dropping the “birth of the FBI” angle and giving Killers a woke makeover.