October 12, 2023
In the 1920s, families of the Osage tribe in Oklahoma were granted headrights by the court to a share of the profits from oil deposits found on their land, and this made them quite wealthy. Not long after that white folks also settled in the area and started their own families after marrying Osage women. The most influential and respectable of these white settlers was William Hale (Robert de Niro) who owned a sprawling cattle ranch.
One day, Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio) came home after being injured in the war and stayed at the ranch of his uncle William. Ernest became a driver for hire to earn money, and his first customer was Osage woman Mollie (Lily Gladstone) who later became his wife. During that time, there was a series of murders of Osage tribespeople, all unresolved. One day, Mollie's sister Anna Brown (Cada Jade Myers) was found murdered.
This film has brought to light a lesser-known, but no-less dark and despicable episode of racial oppression in American history, beyond the slavery of the blacks. It showed how the Native Americans, the original inhabitants of the USA, were being raped of their culture, cheated out of their fortune, up to the point of being actually being physically murdered -- all borne out of wanton greed of unscrupulous white interlopers.
Leonardo DiCaprio eschews his usual leading man persona to play a vile example of such a repugnant beast, a pathetic excuse of a white man. His Ernest Burkhart was painted as a gullible fool who blindly followed orders of others, regardless of who he was going to hurt -- totally heartless and detestable. For the whole third act, I daresay I had never seen DiCaprio contort his handsome face into an irritating mask of abject blank cluelessness, ever.
As the dignified Osage lady Mollie, Lily Gladstone is a mesmerizing screen presence. She proudly wore her native Osage garb and looked absolutely elegant in these colorful printed dresses. She played a woman and a Native American, so she was expectedly at the receiving end of insults, commands, and injustice, but Mollie still kept her honor and dignity intact. She was the beating heart of this story as she represented the sorry plight of her people.
Robert de Niro was right in his comfort zone with his rather predictable role -- we've definitely seen him do such roles of nebulous character before. In the final hour or so, a surprising series of name actors showed up to play small roles, including Jesse Plemons as Tom White, the agent sent to investigate the Osage murders; John Lithgow as the public prosecutor of the case; and Brendan Fraser as the oily defense attorney of the rich accused.
Martin Scorsese is already 80 years old this year and he can really tell a complex multilayered story about true-to-life racial abuse. He led a formidable artistic team to achieve his epic vision --cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto, editor Thelma Schoonmaker, musician Robbie Robertson -- all of whom are sure shots for Oscar nominations. It took 3-1/2 hours to tell because he wanted to immerse us in the rich Osage culture before laying out the reprehensible crimes committed against them.
I do have to take a little exception to the avant-garde way Scorsese wrapped things up at the end. Traditionally, a courtroom drama would end in the climactic revelation of the verdict and how the characters react to it. Instead, Scorsese cut off from the action right before the reading of the verdict and abruptly brought the scene somewhere else. He tried something innovative there and even snuck in another cameo, but I am not sure this was the best way to do it. 8/10.
I liked the ending. I saw it more as a comment on the media and our current culture, especially true crime culture and how it is presented in TV and on the Internet, where the suffering of people is reduced to entertainment. Having it presented through the lens of a radio play shows that people were already morbidly fascinated with true crime ever since, even before Capote's book.
ReplyDeleteAlso, having read the book, it also felt like the book's third act, where the story the author jumps to the present day and shows that the Hale case was not the only one that occurred to the Osage people.
Last note: The play at the end did feel anticlimactic, but so did the justice that the Osage had attained through the trial's verdict. The Osage peoples continued to suffer hardship because of the oil wealth running dry, being neglected by the Great Depression, and the US government's continued discrimination throughout the 20th century. If the verdict felt anti-climactic to the Osage in the long-term, the radio play succeeded in making the audience feel the same feeling of an anti-climactic ending.
P.S. Scorsese in the movie makes a very self-aware acknowledgement in the end by essentially making personal admission of complicity and guilt that he's not quite the right person to tell the story.
Delete