The film at the Cannes Film Festival was Killers of the Flower Moon.
Endless queues in the afternoon rain have preceded the return of Martin Scorsese, present on the red carpet with two of the actors of his life, Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert de Niro, paralyzing the activity of the rest of the contest, and with the aura of be his most ambitious film in terms of production and duration (three and a half hours).
At the end of the screening, moderate applause: the Cannes audience expected everything from such a beloved pope of cinema. Killers of the Flower Moon is far from boring, but it is a flat and contained film for the dynamite within, with more dialogue and explanations than the combination of pure film noir and Western that it promised.
Based on the journalistic investigative book by David Grann (Killers of the Moon), Killers of the Flower Moon is based on the tremendous true story of the Osage Indians. Expelled from their lands at the end of the 19th century, they were banished to a windy and bare county, the almost barren hills of Oklahoma. The law granted them their property: the so-called headrights, which included rights over the mineral exploitation of their land and which could not be sold or transferred except by inheritance. Initially wet paper that literally turned into black gold: the subsoil of the hills was an oil manna.
It was his glory and condemnation: the white man returned to the charge to finish off the Native Americans. The 'Indian business' was the euphemism by which a culture of murder was known that sowed terror in the Osage population: between 1907 and 1923 the official figure counted 24 murders, but the real number is surely higher among the 38 Indians on average they died every year. Many crimes have never been investigated.
Dozens of opportunists of the worst kind flocked to Osage County to seize the headlights at any price. The system consisted of becoming related in marriage in some way and thus inheriting in the event of the possible death of the Osage. The conspiracy reached such a dimension that the newborn FBI, then an obscure bureaucratic department that was being built, saw the possibility of scoring a good amount of media attention by investigating the case.
Scorsese, chronicler of the darkest pages of the United States.
Scorsese will always be associated with his best New York gangster and lumpen films. But, in addition to his transcendental side (Silence, Kundum, or The Last Temptation of Christ), his career has turned to great frescoes on the darkest history of the United States, with the precedents of Gangsters of New York and The Irishman, which Now they are completed in a sort of trilogy.
DiCaprio plays Ernest Burkhart, one of those careerists married to the Osage Mollie Kyle (Lily Gladstone). Robert DeNiro is William Hale, Ernest's uncle, and the true leader of the white community in the county. Scorsese's first bet is to renounce all suspense about the authors: from the beginning, the murderers' plans are revealed.
Hitchcock said that the better the bad guy, the better the movie. But both DiCaprio's character and De Niro's character are far from any fascination. Burkhart is a clumsy guy who Scorsese and his screenwriters have given a bit of seductive power, but he is still a difficult character due to his weakness of character. And, Hale, nicknamed 'the king of the Osage hill', is not the all-powerful hero that everyone fears on screen either.
Evidently, Scorsese's heart goes out to Osage and Mollie, a strong, taciturn woman who refuses to believe her husband is involved. The option of the wildest Scorsese remained: the real story contains as much violence and corruption as the New Yorker's most corrupt and violent film. It does not manifest itself either and Killers of the Flower Moon remains a long plot with many characters involved.,
Three days ago, in an interview with Deadline, Scorsese confessed that his career will continue as long as he lives. "I'm old. I read things. I see things. I want to tell stories, and there is no more time. When Kurosawa received the Oscar from him, he said: 'I'm only now beginning to see the possibility of what cinema could be, and it's too late.' He was 83 years old. At that moment, I said, 'What does he mean?' "Now I know what he meant." Scorsese, Cannes, and any screen in the world will continue to wait for him.
