What Roth’s adaptation does allow is for “Killers of the Flower Moon” to blossom into a compellingly multi-faceted character study about the men behind the massacre. Even in the finished version - despite a host of indelible performances from Native American actors like William Belleau and Tantoo Cardinal - the haunting witness they offer to the horror around them is less immediate than the silence that surrounds it. Ironically, Roth and Scorsese originally envisioned White as the protagonist of this story, only to start over from scratch once they realized that centering law enforcement would pull too much focus away from the Osage themselves, and from the awful toll these events took upon their entire community. He’s just a stiff man in a striped suit, as opposed to a living emblem of the faded American West. Needless to say, Roth’s approach doesn’t pan out so well for the aforementioned cowboy, as the straight-shooting Tom White is diminished to the point that he would hardly even register in this story if not for the quiet moral strength that Jesse Plemons brings to the role. Its primary interest is limited to the sinister mastermind and his favorite lapdog, two beady-eyed fucks whose understanding of the new American landscape was limited to the belief that it still belonged to them. Scorsese’s more narrowly focused version takes stock of those tectonic shifts in our nation’s history, but only in passing. The book from which “Killers of the Flower Moon” has been adapted is a sweeping tale about the end of the Wild West and the birth of the 20th century, as the author David Grann devotes roughly equal time to the modern sociopath who orchestrated the Osage slayings and the old-fashioned cowboy who J. Ryan Gosling Was Told by ‘Notebook’ Director He Had ‘No Natural Leading Man Qualities’Īnd yet, the “Reign of Terror” - which came in the wake of an oil discovery that made the members of the Osage Nation in Oklahoma the richest people per capita on planet Earth - proves to be an uncomfortably vast backdrop for Scorsese’s more intimate brand of crime saga.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |