The Sunday Intertitle is unavailable BUT…

I was determined to see KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON the very day it opened — we ended up being a day later and indeed the screening went past midnight so we finished watching it two days late. But Friday was a fairly big day at work so it was unavoidable.

Some modest spoilers ahead. Depends how much you like to know in advance.

The film seems to me a masterpiece. Fiona and I exchanged many glances in the darkness of the Vue Ocean Terminal’s Screen 2. Moments so strong they had to be acknowledged. And one shocking image made Fiona gasp aloud.

Also — there are intertitles! But as I don’t have a copy of the film I can’t reproduce them for you. They are unique to the film, mostly, although those in a newsreel of the Tulsa race massacre may be of the period. Of course the movie’s intertitles are in an authentic Academy ratio.

The film’s sense of period is near-flawless and pervasive. The late Robbie Robertson’s score — the film may be the most heavily-scored Scorsese film ever — nimbly keeps one foot in the 1920s and one in the here and now. I think the frequent use of the word “pregnant” was the only thing I even questioned. At the dinner table, it seems likely that people in the ‘twenties would prefer to say “expecting.” In the talkies, the word “pregnant” would be verboten, so I suspect it would have seemed slightly clinical, slightly rude.

The script is by Eric Roth & Scorsese, from David Grann’s book. I was thinking I hadn’t seen a Scorsese writing credit for a long time, but in fact his name was on SILENCE. Before that, though, you have to go back to CASINO. His name is on lots of documentaries, but I give Kent Jones credit for most of those. I do think the films on which Scorsese is a credited writer tend to be those he’s most fully engaged with… one might have to make an exception for TAXI DRIVER and RAGING BULL… but in his memoir Final Cut United Artists exec Stephen Bach credits the final draft of the script to Scorsese and DeNiro.

Roth wrote FORREST GUMP, a film I loathed, and a bunch of other things like the new DUNE and THE INSIDER and MUNICH and BENJAMIN BUTTON that I don’t like either. But based on this film, I have to give Roth his due. Excellent work, elevated by the handling.

In KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON there remain traces of that tendency to look for opportunities to soften a very dark character — DiCaprio’s Ernest Burkhart, an objectively bad fellow. Everything he does is bad, or can be interpreted as bad. The movie attempts to suggest that some of his bad acts might be open to more favourable readings, that sometimes he was not fully aware of what was going on, etc. In this case, it works for the movie. If Burkhart is totally unredeemed, you have a GASLIGHT/SUSPICION (if we assume Cary Grant’s guilty) type of movie which could only be told with Molly (the magnificent Lily Gladstone) as the absolute reigning main character, therefore a film not about white guilt and one that ought to have an Indigenous American director. As a film about white guilt, white corruption, toxic masculinity, it’s a highly suitable subject for Scorsese.

The curious result is one of the most complex lead characters in any Scorsese film, embodied in a somewhat limited performance — Scorsese’s cinema thrives on psychological contradictions, and Burkhart is fully compartmentalized — his left hand doesn’t know what his right is doing, but it also doesn’t know what IT is doing — he’s “a dumb boy” as Brendan Fraser’s showboating lawyer says, and also in deep denial, and we have to accept that he loves his wife even as he’s killing her relatives AND killing her.

Scorsese and Roth have decided the love story is genuine, which presents difficulties since everything Burkhart does seems to contradict this. So they have him simply ASSERT his love for her, multiple times, which usually inclines one more to doubt a character than believe them. But in odd moments DiCaprio manages to suggest that Burkhart has, somewhere inside him, a love that is true. In his reaction to the bombing aftermath, DiCaprio is brilliant — he seems astonished by something he absolutely knew was going to happen, and properly puzzled by his own surprise. Does not compute. Elsewhere, his baffled scowl is a bit overdone. A berk at heart, it’s surprising Burkhart holds out under questioning for even an hour.

A central problem in Scorsese’s films is Why do these smart women go for these toxic men? In fairness to him, it’s a central problem of the world, too. LaMotta, Henry Hill, and Jimmy Doyle in NEW YORK, NEW YORK are so obviously problematic we are forced to wonder. Is it credible that Travis Bickle should even get so far as to have one incredibly bad date with Betsy? But one answer is available — in the world of these films, choices of male companionship are very limited.

The setting here is more rustic than we associate with this director, who likes westerns but doesn’t much care for horses. The production designer is Jack Fisk, who did DAYS OF HEAVEN (and who is the Man in the Planet in ERASERHEAD) — the Masonic Lodge spanking scene is the best room we’re likely to see in a movie this year. And this is a countryside that’s had the city scattered over it, Pierce Arrows instead of horse-and-buggies. It’s just a very big city with greater distances between everything, and those distances are occupied by photogenic scenery.

This is a very very very good film. Like THE IRISHMAN it’s long and engrossing. It’s also fancier — THE IRISHMAN is some kind of strange epic chamber piece. The stylistic flourishes we associate with this director are back in force — the God’s-eye-view overhead shots; moments of swirling Steadicam; aggressive zip pans (but sparingly used); drone shots that approach and then stop dead, unnaturally.

Then there’s the welcome return of the redundancy joke from WHAT’S A NICE GIRL LIKE YOU DOING IN A PLACE LIKE THIS? “My friends always say to me XYZ.” Cut to a friend, labelled “a friend” by a helpful subtitle, who then says “XYZ.” He does it again here. “I always admired his ambition. I told him so, and the thanked me.” FLASHBACK: “You know, I’ve always admired your ambition.” “Thanks.”

Those aerial views first showed up in TAXI DRIVER — hard to find the spiritual dimension in that film, but the ceiling track post-bloodbath does feel like an out-of-body experience. They recur intermittently in Scorsese films, leaping whole decades — LAST TEMPTATION has lots. They attach to images which have a kind of ceremonial quality, though sometimes it’s merely the ceremony of paperwork. (“All this,” gestures Travis, “means nothing.”) But sometimes, as in Hitchcock, it really is the viewpoint of a purely hypothetical deity who remains, in terms of Their attitude, completely opaque.

And the spiritual dimension — the approach of death is vividly rendered in maybe-hallucinatory images — adds a touch of the sublime and numinous to a gritty, troubling narrative of all-too-earthly greed and brutality.

Old Queen Who?

“I mourn the safe and motherly middle-class queen, who held the nation warm under the folds of her big, hideous Scotch-plaid shawl and whose duration had been so extraordinarily convenient and beneficent. I felt her death much more than I should have expected; she was a sustaining symbol — the wild waters are upon us now.”

Henry James on the death of Queen Victoria, quoted in Erik Larson’s Thunderstruck, which I am currently enjoying. And I’m sure it seems like that to a lot of people now. I like the “big, hideous shawl” line too.

I read Larson’s The Devil in the White City when it first came out — I think I may have actually bought it in an airport en route to New York for the first time? Seems apt — Larson writes airport histories, you might say. But I mean that as a compliment, somehow. Anyway I read that and enjoyed it and then forgot to keep an eye on the author, with the happy result that I now have about seven of his books to read. I’ve hoovered up The Splendid and the Vile (the Blitz) and managed to draw upon it when writing abut THE GREAT DICTATOR; I’ve also enjoyed Dead Wake (the Lusitania) and Isaac’s Storm (the Galveston hurricane disaster of 1900). There’s usually a small film connection to keep me happy: one of the witnesses to the destruction of Galveston was a small boy named King Vidor.

I recall being bewildered that Leonardo DiCaprio was buying the rights to Devil in the White City — the book doesn’t contain a lot of what you’d call dramatic scenes, though it’s a very dramatic, exciting read. I feel like LDC got bamboozled into buying an unfilmable book, though now, finally, the thing seems to be moving towards production as a miniseries. That work tells in parallel the stories of the murderer HH Holmes and the creation of the Chicago World Fair of 1894. My current read, Thunderstruck, has a similar structure, following Marconi’s development of wireless, and Dr. Crippen’s less salutary life, destined to collide with the Italian inventor’s creation.

In other news — we’re going to the pictures! This has become a somewhat irregular event. The occasion is JAWS in 3D IMAX. I’m excited by the IMAX, a little nervous about the 3D. I haven’t seen any fake 3D movies, I’ve refused to. Although GRAVITY is sort of a fake 3D movie and I love that. What I mean is I haven’t seen any movies not originally designed to be seen in 3D. But I love 3D. I’ve just paused Wim Wenders’ PINA, on flat DVD. I’m a little cross that Edinburgh Filmhouse never deigned to screen that one, to my knowledge, in three dimensions. They invested in the chargeable electric glasses system, then decided their audience didn’t like 3D and stopped using it. Tsk. I thought *I* was their audience! I’m crazy about the third dimension, I practically live there.

PINA is very enjoyable so far — I love the dancing. The filming is fine. Editing less so. But I wish I could see the missing dimension.

Stertorous

Fiona experienced a sensation of uncanniness right at the start of Alejandro González Iñárritu’s THE REVENANT, when laboured breathing on the soundtrack seemed to be coming from immediately over her left shoulder, to the point where she suspected some cine-pervert had snuck up behind her to wheeze in her ear. And no, I was sitting beside her at the time. And I didn’t experience the same sound. It’s the fulfillment of Walter Murch’s dream of sound design — “the sound designer positions sound effects in the auditorium the way the production designer positions furniture on the set.”

Unbelievers who find the film lacking in story are, arguably, failing to surrender to the experiental aspect of the film: its tactile, impressionistic, auditory qualities. A limited amount of narrative is actually helpful in appreciating these qualities, as viewers of BBC4’s more restful The Sleigh Ride discovered. Everybody shut up and let us just feel what it’s like!

Open your ears to Lon Bender’s astonishing sound design, seamlessly integrated with the score by Alva Noto and Ryûichi Sakamoto (a man who previously journeyed to the Pole to record the melting ice cap: the rushing, tinkling sound of our imminent extinction). The fraught tale of survival (and non-survival, if you’re a bear or a bystander) becomes oddly hypnotic and peaceful, so that I do understand those who grumble that they slept through the thing. Obviously, they didn’t get the whole experience so that’s frustrating, but it’s also their own fault, and it’s in no way a bad thing for a movie to offer a lulling, peaceful quality amid bear-mauling and impromptu frontier surgery and whatnot. Allah loves wondrous variety, as Morgan Freeman says in that other great bow-and-arrow romp, ROBIN HOOD: PRINCE OF THIEVES.

Exactly like The Sleigh Ride, the long take camerawork (I see CHILDREN OF MEN as the obvious influence on protracted action sequences staged as sequence shots) work to dump you in it along with the hero, and create a nervous tension simply by limiting the speed with which the camera can react to unfolding events. It’s decidedly NOT realistic, since the lens is always more sluggish than the human eye could be in such circumstances, but by weighing down our eye-movements so frustratingly, the film accentuates our impression of the world becoming too chaotic, too fast-moving for us to keep up with.

To be honest, I found some of the script’s elaborations on the true story to be slightly dumb (Hollywood movies have really lost the ability to question the satisfactions of vengeance intelligently) but the plot is not the thing here, merely a serviceable hook — the basic situation or set-up is very strong, so we don’t need an infernal machine of twists and reversals, or shouldn’t. Though what Leonardo DiCaprio does with a big forked stick made me smile for about ten minutes.