Issue #1: I’m not predicting that Martin Scorsese‘s Killers of the Flower Moon will use narration, but if it does use narration, I realy don’t want to hear it from Jesse Plemons‘ “Tom White” (FBI guy, former Texas Ranger) or Lily Gladstone‘s “Mollie Burkhart”, wife of Leonardo DiCaprio‘s “Ernest Burkhart”…narration will not be appreciated under any circumstance, but it will be extra problematic if Plemons or Gladstone are the narrators.
Issue #2: The best Scorsese crime movies are those in which the audience identifies with or half-admires the lead-protagonist criminals or sociopaths (Mean Streets, Goodfellas, Casino, The Departed). We know they’re bad but we enjoy their attitude and energy.
Unfortunately there’s no apparent room for amusement or guilty identification in Flower Moon, as the bad guys — DiCaprio’s Burkhart, Robert De Niro‘s William Hale, Scott Shepherd‘s Bryan Burkhart — are racist yokel scumbags. It’s an “Oklahoma whiteys were really satanic back in the ’20s” movie, which falls in line with the woke narrative about all whites being evil or ethically derelict in one way or another. So where’s the fun in that?