Leonardo DiCaprio

KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON: an epic tale of epic betrayal

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Photo caption: Lily Gladstone, and Leonardo DiCaprio in KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON. Courtesy of AppleTV.

Martin Scorsese’s three-and-a-half-hour Killers of the Flower Moon is an absorbing epic of betrayal, betrayal on many levels.

In the 1920s, the Osage people, having been cast into the apparently worthless dry prairie of northern Oklahoma, have the good fortune to discover oil on their land. Suddenly, tribe members become instant, Pierce Arrow-driving oil millionaires. It doesn’t take long for tribe members to start dying mysterious deaths, with their oil rights passing to local Whites. Despite the entreaties of the Osage, local and state law enforcement is, at best, indifferent, and the bodies pile up.

This a true story that was essentially little known before a 2017 bestseller by David Grann. Osage country in the 1920s is an unfamiliar setting for us, the audience. Scorsese takes the time to bring this society alive for us. Bejewelled Native Americans are consuming luxuries while White men scurry around in menial jobs and hucksterish scams. Lazy nogoodniks are looking for gold-digger marriages to rich Osage women. We’re not that far along from an Old West of saloons, gunfights and Indian Wars, and, despite the new fangled automobiles, there are plenty of working cowboys.

A recent WW I vet, Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio) arrives with few prospects. His uncle William King Hale (Robert De Niro) is an established bigshot, and takes Ernest under his wing. The uncle, who likes to be called King, is a major cattle rancher with a unique and longstanding relationship with the Osage, even speaking the Osage language and having an Osage drinking buddy. King enjoys being a Big Fish in a Little Pond, and is a very wily Big Fish.

Ernest on the other hand, is not at all smart, but he’s amiable and ambitious, and he’s lucky enough to meet Mollie (Lily Gladstone), an Osage woman, and marry up.

Mollie is very smart, a keen and clear-eyed observer of human behavior. She is strong willed and knows what she wants. She only has two vulnerabilities – her diabetes and a (temporary) inability to imagine the depth of someone’s worthlessness.

Gladstone’s performance is especially brilliant as she sizes up Ernest. Mollie is under no illusions about Ernest’s qualities, and she knows that he is attracted to her money. But he’s more good-hearted and less lazy than the other available White men, and he’s much better looking. She knows what she wants, and she knows what she’s getting. Near the end of the film, Mollie asks Ernest a question, and, upon his answer, Gladstone’s eyes silently sum up the entire story, with all its themes. It’s a superb, highly nuanced performance and certainly award-worthy.

DiCaprio ably portrays Ernest Burkhart, a protagonist who is a spineless dimwit. The centrality of Killers of the Flower Moon becomes the story of the weak-willed Ernest, pulled between his much smarter and strong-willed uncle and wife.

Robert DeNiro and Leonardo DiCaprio in KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON. Courtesy of AppleTV.

The story starts as a whodunit, but then it’s revealed who is responsible, and we are immersed into the portraits of the three main characters, with the story is framed against the greater themes. One of those themes is the racism that devalues the lives and welfare of Native Americans, and the even more universal human history of the powerful unapologetically taking from the less strong. And then there’s the exploration of trust – just whom can you trust and to what degree?

Heeding the plight of the Osage, the federal government finally dispatches an FBI team, headed by the pleasant but implacable former Texas Ranger Tom White (an excellent Jesse Plemons). The agency is so young that it isn’t yet known as the “FBI” but as the “Bureau of Investigation”. Solving the Osage Murders was an important early benchmark in FBI history (which is emphasized in Grann’s book but not explicit in the movie).

In this case, the villain is a sociopath who can hide in plain sight with audacity, and who recognizes, and is able to leverage, the racism in the environment. Tom White, however, is immune to bullshit, and hones in on the crimes, regardless of who the victims may be. And the villain’s soft underbelly is his reliance on some very dumb henchmen.

Again, this story really happened, and the characters played by De Niro, DiCaprio, Gladstone and Plemmons are actual historical figures. Another writer has noted that’s it’s interesting that, although this is a serial killer movie, Scorsese chose not to focus on either the murderous mastermind nor on the detective trying to corner him. Indeed, I’ve also read that DiCaprio was originally slated for the FBI role, but advocated to make the role of Ernest central enough for him to play.

The cast is impossibly rich, including Oscar winners and nominees De Niro, DiCaprio, Plemmons, John Lithgow, and Brendan Fraser, plus Tantoo Cardinal, who SHOULD have been nominated for Dancing with Wolves, among other work. Scorsese gets memorable performances from Cara Jade Myers, Louis Cancelmi (Billions, The Eyes of Tammy Faye) and Ty Mitchell. One of the most vivid performance is from Tommy Schultz, a guy with no previous screen credits.

One of my favorite musicians, Jason Isbell, plays a key character, and he’s excellent. There’s one scene where Isbell’s and DiCaprio’s characters are isolated in a parlor and have a verbal confrontation. Although DiCaprio’s character has the best lines, it’s an acting standoff, and you really can’t tell that one of these guys is a movie star and the other is just learning the business. Very impressive.

Speaking of musicians, this was the last time Robbie Robertson composed music for a film, and his score is magnificent. Robertson, of course, had been a close friend and collaborator of Scorsese’s since The Last Waltz (and was also a Canadian of Cayuga and Mohawk heritage). Blues harmonica great Charlie Musselwhite and rock star Jack White also have acting cameos.

I rarely mention a movie’s sound mixing, but the extraordinary sound mix when Ernest, in a panic, buttonholes King at a boisterous town street party, strongly contributes to the storytelling.

What of the three hour, twenty-six minute running time? I agree with the critical consensus that Killers is long, but never slow. After all, it is an epic, even several epics braided together.

Killers of the Flower Moon is an excellent movie, and will receive lots of recognition. I’m sure that it will be nominated for a Best Picture Academy Award (although it’s not nearly as good as Oppenheimer IMO) and will garner Oscar nominations for Lily Gladstone and Robbie Robertson, who will be favorites in their categories. Other Oscar nods are likely.

Killers of the Flower Moon is in theaters, and will stream on AppleTV sometime after December 4, perhaps as late as January.

ONCE UPON A TIME…IN HOLLYWOOD: masterpiece

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Brad Pitt and Leonardo DiCaprio in ONCE UPON A TIME…IN HOLLYWOOD

In Quentin Tarantino’s spectacularly successful Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood, two fictional characters, Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio) and Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt) and the actress Sharon Tate (Margot Robbie) navigate a changing Hollywood in 1969. The next evolution of Hollywood is filled only with promise for Sharon, but presents an unseen threat to Rick and Cliff.

Rick is an actor, a former star of TV Westerns who has aged into guest appearances on the shows of a new crop of TV stars. Cliff is Rick’s longtime stuntman, who now works as Rick’s driver, gofer and drinking buddy. Cliff lives in a San Fernando Valley trailer; Rick lives on exclusive Cielo Drive, next door to Sharon and her husband Roman Polanski, but he’s slipped too far down the showbiz ladder to know them.

Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood is about a lot of things, expertly braided together. It’s about a specific time and place. It’s about a woman, filled with innocence and zest, who is justifiably hopeful. It’s about two guys – one tortured and the other decidedly not – facing age and irrelevance. It’s about the guys’ relationship, at once interdependent and asymmetric. And it’s a love letter to vintage Hollywood, the Hollywood that six-year-old Quentin Tarantino lived near to, but was not a part of.

The story follows the three characters through a series of vignettes, right up to the most startling ending in recent cinema. This is a Quentin Tarantino masterpiece, right up there with his best, Jackie Brown and Pulp Fiction.

The movie’s title begins with “Once Upon a Time…“, so you are on notice that this isn’t actual history.

Leonardo DiCaprio and Brad Pitt in ONCE UPON A TIME…IN HOLLYWOOD

Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood is set in the locations most evocative of the 1969 Hollywood: movie studio sets, legendary showbiz hangout Musso & Frank, the Playboy Mansion, the ill-fated Cielo Drive and Spahn Ranch – famous for both its use as a movie set and as the home base of the Manson Family.

There’s a dazzling montage of neon signs being lit up at sunset. Not many contemporary directors still know how to film galloping horse riders, but Tarantino brings us some great shots from Spahn Ranch, where so many Westerns were shot.

Of course, Tarantino’s soundtrack takes us right into 1969 with superbly curated period radio hits like the Deep Purple version of Hush and the Jose Feliciano cover of California Dreamin’. A February scene is perfectly set to Neil Diamond’s Brother Love’s Traveling Salvation Show, with its hot August nights lyrics presaging the Manson murders to come in LA’s stifling August 1969. (Brother Love’s Traveling Salvation Show got me wondering how Tarantino restrained himself from using it in some – or all – of his previous films; it’s every bit as Tarantinoesque as Misirlou or Stuck in the Middle with You.) A snippet of a full-bearded Robert Goulet singing MacArthur Park even turns up on somebody’s TV.

In 1969, American culture and the nation itself were in turbulence. Hollywood showbiz was also being rocked – major movie studios were slipping both financially and creatively, floundering to react to the primacy of television and the public’s changing taste (and growing disinterest in Westerns). The studios were about to reach out in desperation to auteur directors like Polanski. Rick and Cliff are behind the curve – but they haven’t noticed that their world is dying.

As hedonists, Rick and Cliff have embraced the drugs and free sex of the counterculture. But they still drive gas guzzlers – a luxury sedan for Rick and a muscle car for Cliff – and refer to “dirty hippies”.

How does the Manson Family play into all this? There was a time when people actually believed that drug-infused peace and love would cure all that ailed us as a society. By 1969, the Summer of Love had already turned dark in San Francisco; but the Manson killings made the unmistakable point that the counterculture, for all its promise, didn’t have an answer to murderous psychopaths any more than did the mainstream.

We very briefly glimpse Manson himself (in an encounter that is pretty close to historically accurate). Tarantino knows that the best way to depict Manson’s evil is to reflect it in the cult he created.

DiCaprio’s Rick Dalton, drinking way, way too much, is still treated like a star around town, and he’s grown complacent – until the truth about his career staleness finally hits home. DiCaprio shines in the scene where Rick, cast as a one-dimensional villain in a disposable TV Western, shows his acting chops with an explosive performance; Rick, having internalized that his career may be over, lets it all go in the scene. The character of Rick has the movie’s greatest arc, but he’s less interesting overall than Cliff or Sharon.

Margot Robbie in ONCE UPON TIME…IN HOLLYWOOD,

Sharon Tate is the soul of Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood. Robbie is absolutely transcendent,. She doesn’t need a lot of lines to make her character unforgettable. Sharon gets a ticket to watch herself in a Dean Martin movie, and it’s impossible to imagine a moment with more goofy innocence.

Cliff Booth is one of Tarantino’s greatest characters. Cliff is secure in his abilities, without any need for recognition or self-promotion. Unambitious, he is absolutely content to be Rick’s second banana. That being said, he’s not going to take any shit from anyone.

Brad Pitt in ONCE UPON A TIME…IN HOLLYWOOD

In Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood, Brad Pitt shows us what a movie star is and why he is one. I haven’t been a Pitt enthusiast, although I’ve liked him in Fight Club, The Assassination of Jesse James, Moneyball and Inglorious Basterds. Pitts’ Cliff Booth is off the charts, and it’s tough to imagine any other actor in the role. Other male stars can match the physicality, but not the unique combination of confidence and humility.

Right up there with Pitt and Robbie is Margaret Qualley, who plays a fictional Manson girl named Pussycat. She is kooky in the cute way and kooky in the scary way. Qualley fills her with manic energy, brimming with wit and sensuality.

Julia Butters plays a precocious child actor in the pilot Rick is shooting; she’s the best possible counterpoint to Rick’s flabby professional complacency. Michael Moh is very funny in a send-up of Bruce Lee. Damien Lewis has a priceless moment as Steve McQueen.

For his supporting players, Tarantino pulls out an abundant cornucopia of acting talent and Tarantino sentimental favorites: Al Pacino, Dakota Fanning, Kurt Russell, Emile Hirsch, Brenda Vaccaro, Clu Gulager, Bruce Dern, Michael Madsen, Luke Perry, Timothy Olyphant, Zoë Bell , Clifton Collins Jr. (Perry Smith in Capote), Lena Durham and Scoot McNairy.

Tarantino’s exquisite filmmaking skills blend together the verisimilitude of time and place, the vivid performances and a rock ’em, sock ’em story to make Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood an instant classic.

Note: Deep into the closing credits, there’s an Easter egg.

THE REVENANT: authentic and awesome

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Leonardo DiCpario in THE REVENANT
Leonardo DiCaprio in THE REVENANT

Not just a compelling movie, The Revenant is an experience for the audience and a marvel of filmmaking.  Oscar-winner Alejandro Gonzalez Iñárritu (21 Grams, Babel, Biutiful, Birdman) may be the director doing the most groundbreaking work in today’s cinema, and The Revenant, with its long shoot in hostile conditions, is his triumph over the seemingly impossible.

The Revenant is based on the historical episode of mountain man Hugh Glass, who was fur trapping in the Missouri River watershed of the Dakotas in 1823, when the area was completely unspoiled and inhabited only by nomadic bands of Native Americans.  Glass was severely injured in a bear attack, left for dead by his companions and crawled 200 miles to safety.   A “revenant” is a re-animated corpse, and Glass essentially returned from the dead.

Leonardo DiCaprio plays Glass, and his performance is extraordinary.   For one thing – the most obvious – DiCaprio is a human piñata who actually must stand and then submerge in a freezing river, get bounced around by a CGI bear, chew on raw bison liver, crawl across uneven ground, and on and on; he takes a licking and keeps on ticking.  And, in at least two-thirds of the movie, Glass either isn’t able to speak or has no one to talk to.  So DiCaprio must convey his terror, grief, determination to survive and seek revenge with his physicality.

There are also solid performances by Tom Hardy (being villainous) Will Poulter and Domhnall Gleeson (a good year for him – also Ex Machina, Brooklyn and Star Wars).

There probably isn’t a more overused word in the current culture than “awesome”.   But it’s precisely the right word to describe the depiction of Glass’ ordeal.  The dazzling scenery as photographed Iñárritu‘s equally brilliant cinematographer  Emmanuel “Chivo” Lubezki is awesome, as is the overall filmmaking challenge.  In particular, the bear attack and an extended one-shot of a Native American attack with the camera moving by and forth among the combatants are brilliant and unforgettable. Showing off, Iñárritu even throws in an actual avalanche as a background shot.

The result is an utterly authentic film.  Now I think I know what it looks like when a bear attacks and when an Indian band raids. DiCaprio shows us convincingly how it looks when a man grieves.

The Revenant is also exhausting – in a good way.  As the film opens, we see men creeping through a primordial forest that has been flooded by a river.  They are tense and so are we.  We can’t tell whether they are hunting or hunted or both.  We soon come to understand that their heightened alertness and intense concentration is required to survive a dangerous environment.  That level of intensity remains throughout the film, and it wears down the characters and the audience.

History buffs will appreciate that Glass was part of Ashley’s Hundred, an enterprise that included many mountain men (Jim Bridger, Jedediah Smith, Kit Carson) who would later become guides and explorers with central roses in the history of the American West.

I also recommend Sheila O’Malley’s insightful comments on survival movies, in particular the very compelling Touching the Void.

This is one of the very best survival movies.  See The Revenant, and make sure that you see on the Big Screen.

 

DVD/Stream of the Week: The Wolf of Wall Street

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wolfWhat do you get when testosterone-fueled and morally challenged stock salesmen discover how to make piles of easy money by defrauding investors? Well, when Martin Scorsese tells the tale, we get three hours of full throttle, hilariously bad behavior. The Wolf of Wall Street is the story of a (real life) guy who found out how to make a fortune scamming middle class investors – and then a bigger fortune scamming rich investors – on penny stocks and shady IPOs. It’s a wild ride that is destined to end in a perp walk, propelled by enormous amounts of recreational drug use. In fact, the movie is really about excess – the sales meetings here make the toga party in Animal House look like an Amish barn-raising.

This is not economic story-telling. Scorsese indulgently lets his scenes run on and on – not so we lose interest, but just so he can milk out every drop of spectacle. Although he could have told the story in two hours instead of three, he just couldn’t resist supplying three hours of exhilaration. Fine by me.

I had never thought of Leonardo DiCaprio as a comic actor, but he does a fine job in the lead role – driving what is essentially a comedy. Speaking of comic actors, this may be Jonah Hill’s finest performance – he plays the top henchman, a character who wears horn-rimmed glasses (without corrective lenses) just to look more WASPish; no one can play schlubby desperation or drug-impaired overreaching better than Hill. There is a huge cast, and some of the year’s best acting gems include:

  • Kyle Chandler (Friday Night Lights and so brilliant in The Spectacular Now) as the FBI agent targeting DiCaprio. In particular, Chandler performs an exceptional scene on a yacht, where the agent lets the con artist (and the audience) think that his con is working – for just a bit. Top notch stuff.
  • Matthew McConaughey, at the height of his new-found acting powers, as our hero’s first mentor in amorality;
  • Rob Reiner (!) as the hero’s emotionally explosive but common sensical dad;
  • the stunning blonde Australian actress Margot Robbie as the Brooklyn-bred trophy wife; and
  • Joanna Lumley (a top model in London’s 60s Mod scene and popularizer of the Purdey bob hairstyle) as the trophy wife’s conveniently European aunt.

I’m certainly going to add this to my Best Drug Movies. Multiple scenes make this the best Quaalude movie ever, and one extended ‘lude scene with DiCaprio and Hill had the audience howling for several minutes.

Is this one of Scorsese’s best films? No – but it is one of the most entertaining and certainly the funniest.  The Wolf of Wall Street is available on DVD from Netflix and Redbox and streaming from Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube, Google Play and Xbox Video.

The Great Gatsby: flashy, hollow and lame

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Carey Mulligan, Leonardo DiCaprio and Tobey Maguire in THE GREAT GATSBY

Let’s start with director Baz Luhrman’s decision to present The Great Gatsby in 3D.  The source material, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel, is so compelling because it is character driven.  Luhrman’s 3D cannot enhance the characters, but can only augment wild car chases and zooming camera shots that zip us down skyscrapers and across bays.  So to use Gatsby as an excuse to launch some action sequences really misses the point of the story.  See The Movie Gourmet’s Ten Really Bad Movie Ideas.

Indeed, there’s lots of eye candy in Luhrman’s Gatsby, but to what effect?   The story seems set, not in the 1920s, but in a modern  1920s theme park where tourists waddle around chomping on churros while peering at flappers and Duesenbergs.

The story is about the Coolest Man in the World, the impenetrable Jay Gatsby, whose savoir faire, personal mystery and lifestyle splendor completely seduce his neighbor Nick Carraway, the story’s narrator.  Now you would think that putting Leonard DiCaprio in impeccably styled white and pastel pink suits would take you a long way toward Cool.  But this Gatsby is a little too anxious. And the screenplay dumbs down the story, and we learn too much about Gatsby’s real past too early and too easily.  Similarly, Tobey Maguire as Carraway brings a yippy dog energy to a character that should be more observant (like Sam Waterston’s laconic Nick in the 1974 Gatsby).

Gatsby, the acme of the self-made, is driven to at long last possess Daisy (Carey Mulligan), the girl who got away (and who is now married to the boorish jock Tom Buchanan).  The novel deeply explores Gatsby’s pursuit of Daisy.  Can someone with New Money penetrate the Old Money set?  Did Daisy really love Gatsby when they were younger, or was he just a girlish flirtation?  Does Daisy love Gatsby now, or is she just flattered by his captivation and impressed by his bling?  Can Daisy escape her class?  Can Gatsby’s success buy him everything that he needs and wants?

Sadly, Luhrman reduces The Great Gatsby into a sappy melodrama of obsessive love.  That’s kind of like turning The Sun Also Rises into a bullfight story or The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn into a river raft travelogue.  It doesn’t help that Carey Mulligan’s Daisy is more neurotic than fickle – and just not that sexually fascinating to begin with.

The one good thing about this movie is Elizabeth Debicki’s turn as the celebrity golfer and jaded party girl Jordan Baker – her every glance commands the screen.

Luhrman made lots of other choices in this adaptation.  Some work out (to my surprise, I didn’t mind the 21st century music) and some don’t (the odd and nakedly commercial casting of Bollywood star Amitabh Bachchan as Meyer Wolfsheim).  But the resulting totality is a hollow, somewhat vulgar misfire.  It’s the flashiest version of The Great Gatsby, but strangely not even as vivid as the written word.

In the novel, Daisy and Tom Buchanan are “careless” people – their Old Money has insulated them from the consequences of their selfishness and irresponsibility.  Fitzgerald describes them thus:

Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand. They think, deep in their hearts, that they are better than we are because we had to discover the compensations and refuges of life for ourselves. Even when they enter deep into our world or sink below us, they still think that they are better than we are. They are different.

The Great Gatsby is almost 2 1/2 hours long.  That means about four hours of your life, if you count driving to the theater, parking, buying popcorn beforehand and returning home afterward.  The novel is only 192 pages, so I strongly suggest that you take the four hours and read the glorious book instead.

J. Edgar: an interesting perspective, if you can stay awake

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You’ll find director Clint Eastwood’s biopic of J. Edgar Hoover to be an interesting take on Hoover’s twisted psyche, if you can stay awake.

Leonardo DiCaprio is excellent playing Hoover over the course of 50 years.  So is Armie Hammer (who played the Winklevoss twins in The Social Network) as Hoover’s long time companion Clyde Tolson.  Judi Dench nails the role of Hoover’s nightmare mom.

Eastwood and screenwriter Dustin Lance Black (who won an Oscar for Milk) see Hoover as a man tortured by the expectations of his scary mother, which keep him from physically completing his lifelong love affair with Tolson.  That’s an interesting take.

Yet the movie drags.  When your protagonist is arresting celebrity gangsters, solving the Crime of the Century, persecuting left-wingers and blackmailing Presidents, your story should pop and sizzle.

The movie also suffers from distractingly bad make-up on the older Clyde Tolson and the Richard Nixon characters.

DVD of the Week: Inception

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Inception was the year’s best Hollywood summer blockbuster.  Because it’s written and directed by Christopher Nolan (Memento, The Dark Knight), we expect it to be brilliantly inventive and it exceeds that expectation.  The story places the characters in reality and at least three layers of dreams simultaneously.  A smart viewer can follow 85% of the story – which is just enough.  Then you can go out to dinner and argue over the other 15%.  The Wife said it was “like The Wizard of Oz on acid”.

Leonardo DiCaprio leads the cast, but the supporting players give the best performances: Ellen Page, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Michael Caine, Marion Cotillard, Pete Postlethwaite, Cillian Murphy, Ken Watanabe, Tom Berenger and Tom Hardy.

DVD of the Week: Inception

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Inception is the year’s most successful Hollywood blockbuster and now available on DVD.  Because it was written and directed by Christopher Nolan (Memento, The Dark Knight), we expected it to be brilliantly inventive and it exceeds that expectation.  The story places the characters in reality and at least three layers of dreams simultaneously.  A smart viewer can follow 85% of the story – which is just enough.  Then you can go out to dinner and argue over the other 15%.  The Wife said it was “like The Wizard of Oz on acid”.

Leonardo DiCaprio leads the cast, but the supporting players give the best performances: Ellen Page, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Michael Caine, Marion Cotillard, Pete Postlethwaite, Cillian Murphy, Ken Watanabe, Tom Berenger and Tom Hardy.

For my recent DVD choices (including trailers), see DVDs of the Week.

Inception

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Inception is the year’s most successful Hollywood blockbuster.  Because it’s written and directed by Christopher Nolan (Memento, The Dark Knight), we expect it to be brilliantly inventive and it exceeds that expectation.  The story places the characters in reality and at least three layers of dreams simultaneously.  A smart viewer can follow 85% of the story – which is just enough.  Then you can go out to dinner and argue over the other 15%.  The Wife said it was “like The Wizard of Oz on acid”.

Leonardo DiCaprio leads the cast, but the supporting players give the best performances: Ellen Page, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Michael Caine, Marion Cotillard, Pete Postlethwaite, Cillian Murphy, Ken Watanabe, Tom Berenger and Tom Hardy.