Greed and murder are not new themes in the work of Martin Scorsese, but the effects of those capital sins have never been more darkly devastating than they are in “Killers of the Flower Moon.”
A study in the banality of evil, the story, loosely based on David Grann’s 2017 nonfiction book of the same name, is set in 1920s Oklahoma, a time of an oil rush on land owned by the Osage Nation. The discovery of black gold made the Indigenous Nation the richest people per capita on Earth. With wealth came an influx of white interlopers, “like buzzards circling our people.”
Among them is William King Hale (Robert De Niro), a seemingly respectable Osage County power broker. He speaks the area’s Indigenous language and publicly supports the Osage community, but, as we find out, it is his insidious and deadly dealings with his Indigenous Osage neighbors that filled his bank account. “Call me King,” he says unironically.
When his nephew and World War I vet Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio) arrives, looking to start a new life, Hale brings him into a years long con to defraud the Osage people through marriage scams and murder by setting up a connection between Mollie (Lily Gladstone), a wealthy Osage woman, and Ernest.
“He’s not that smart,” says Mollie, “but he’s handsome. He looks like a coyote. Those blue eyes.”
Mollie sees through the overture, noting, “Coyote wants money,” during their first dinner, but despite the economic angle, the pair marry, making Ernest an heir to her fortune if something should happen to her.
That economic element lays at the dark heart of Hale’s plan. He orchestrates matches between the monied Osage mothers, sisters and daughters with carefully chosen white men, who exploit them, murder them, and siphon off the oil money from their estates.
This reign of terror claims the lives of more than two dozen Osage women, attracting the attention of the newly formed Bureau of Investigation agent Tom White (Jesse Plemons) and his crew.
The murderous real-life scheme behind “Killers of the Flower Moon” is the most depraved crime and villain Scorsese has ever essayed on film.
The wholesale murder for money is driven not just by greed, but also by white supremacy, oppression of culture and a diabolical disregard for human life. It is pure evil, manipulated by Hale, played by De Niro as the smiling face of doom.
De Niro has played dastardly characters before, but he’s never been this vile. And this is an actor who played The Devil in “Angel Heart.”
The thing that makes Hale truly treacherous and morally irredeemable is the way he insinuates himself into the lives of the very people he was exploiting and having murdered. He is a master manipulator, who will shake his victim’s hand while using his other hand to stab them in the back, and De Niro’s embodiment of him is skin crawling. “This wealth should come to us,” he says, “Their time is over. It’s just going to be another tragedy.”
As Ernest, DiCaprio goes along with the plan, but, unlike his uncle, has a hint of a conscience even as he does horrible things. He’s a weak person, torn between love for his wife and his uncle’s plan to eliminate her and her family.
The center of the story is Mollie, played with quiet grace by Gladstone. Although she disappears from the screen for long periods of time, it is her presence that provides the film with much needed heart and soul. She is strong in the face of illness and betrayal, but her stoicism portrays a complexity of emotion as her family members are murdered and her own life is endangered. Mollie is as spiritual as Hale is immoral, and that balance is the film’s underpinning.
“Killers of the Flower Moon” earns its three-and-a-half hour runtime with a classically made, multiple perspective, slow burn of a crime story that sheds light on, and condemns, the brutal treatment of Indigenous people.
Movies about giant things hurdling through space toward Earth are almost as plentiful as the stars in the sky. “Armageddon,” “Deep Impact” and “Judgment Day” all pose end-of-the-world scenarios but none have the satirical edge of “Don’t Look Up.” The darkly comedic movie, now in theatres but coming soon to Netflix, paints a grim, on-the-nose picture of how the world responds to a crisis.
Jennifer Lawrence is PhD candidate Dr. Kate Dibiasky, a student astronomer who discovers a comet the size of Mount Everest aimed directly at our planet. Her professor, Dr. Randall Mindy (Leonardo DiCaprio), comes to the alarming conclusion that the comet will collide with Earth in six months and fourteen days in what he calls an “extinction level event.”
They take their concerns to NASA and the White House, but are met with President Janie Orlean’s (Meryl Streep) concerns about optics, costs and the up-coming mid-term elections. “The timing is just disastrous,” she says. “Let’s sit tight and assess.”
With the clock ticking to total destruction Dibiasky and Mindy go public, but their dire warnings on the perky news show “The Rip”—“We keep the bad news light!”—go unheeded. Social media focusses on Dibiasky’s panic, creating memes of her face, while dubbing Mindy the Bedroom Eyed Doomsday Prophet.
As the comet hurdles toward Earth the world becomes divided between those willing to Look Up and do something about the incoming disaster and the deniers who think that scientists “want you to look up because they are looking down their noses at you.”
Chaos breaks out, and the division widens as the comet closes in on its target.
It is not difficult to find parallels between the events in “Don’t Look Up” and recent world occurrences. Director and co-writer Adam McKay explores the reaction to world affairs through a lens of Fake News, clickbait journalism, skepticism of science, political spin and social media gone amok. In fact, the topics McKay hits on don’t really play like satire at all. The social media outrage, bizarro-land decisions made by people in high offices and the influence of tech companies all sound very real world, ripped out of today’s newspapers.
It’s timely, but perhaps too timely. Social satire is important, and popular—“Saturday Night Live” has done it successfully for decades—but “Don’t Look Up,” while brimming with good ideas, often feels like an overkill of familiarity. The comet is fiction, at least I hope it is, but the reaction to it and the on-coming catastrophe feels like something I might see on Twitter just before the lights go down in the theatre.
It feels a little too real to be pure satire. There are laughs throughout, but it’s the serious questions that resonate. When Mindy, on TV having his “Network” moment, rages, “What the hell happened to us? What have we done to ourselves and how do we fix it?” the movie becomes a beacon. The satire is comes easily—let’s face it, the world is full of easy targets—but it’s the asking of hard questions and in the frustration of a world gone mad, when McKay’s point that we’re broken and don’t appreciate the world around us, shines through.
Despite big glitzy Hollywood names above the title and many laugh lines, “Don’t Look Up” isn’t escapism. It’s a serious movie that aims to entertain but really wants to make you think.
I went to see “Pulp Fiction” on its October 1994 opening weekend at a 2:30 pm screening. I arrived at 2:15 pm, stood in line and waited. And waited. The shows were delayed because audiences weren’t leaving after the credits. They were sitting in their seats talking about what they had just seen. Months of hype in the newspapers and on shows like “Entertainment Tonight” ignited curiosity and the movie delivered, using a broken timeline, ultra-violence and witty dialogue to bend the idea of what a movie could be. Just after 3 pm the movie finally started. Later, mind blown, I didn’t stick around the theatre to discuss the movie with anyone. I ran to the box office, bought a ticket for the next screening and got back in line.
Quentin Tarantino’s new film, “Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood,” doesn’t have quite the same impact as “Pulp Fiction” but it digs deeper, expanding on themes the director has spent a career exploring. “Pulp Fiction” was a seismic shift, a movie changed the face of 1990s cinema, while “Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood” is an allegory for changing times.
As the title would suggest “Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood” has dark fairy tale elements. Set in sun dappled 1969 Los Angeles, it focusses on two almost down-and-outers, Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio) a former series star now reduced to doing episodic television—“It’s official old buddy. I’m a has-been.”—and stuntman Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt), a self-described “old cowboy.” Both are on a race to the bottom in an industry they don’t understand anymore.
Next to Dalton’s luxury Cielo Drive home is a mansion owned by starlet Sharon Tate (Margot Robbie) and director Roman Polanski (Rafał Zawierucha), party place to L.A. luminaries like heiress Abigail Folger (Samantha Robinson) and hairdresser to the stars Jay Sebring (Emile Hirsch). As Dalton and Booth’s Hollywood era comes to a close, another is blossoming next door and further on down the road at Manson Family HQ and former western movie set Spahn Ranch.
There will be no spoilers here. I can say the various narrative shards dovetail together in a frenzy of grindhouse violence near the end, but “OUAT… IH” isn’t story driven as much as it is a detailed portrait of a time and place, the moment when the sea change was coming. Piece by piece Tarantino weaves together a nostalgic pastiche of b-movie tropes and expertly rendered sights and sounds to create a vivid portrait of a time and place. With the setting established, he plays mix and match, blending fact and fiction, creating his own history that feels like a carefully detailed memory play.
Pitt screaming down Hollywood Boulevard in a powder blue sports car is the essence of what the movie is about. The propulsive energy of Hollywood, dangerous, glamorous with the promise of ending up who knows where. The characters may all be headed for uncertain futures but an air of optimism hangs over the story. Dalton is down on his luck but when he realizes his neighbor is a world-famous director he says, “I could be one pool party away from starring in the next Polanski movie.” He’s a man out of time but still feels there might be a place for him in that world and that is the lifeblood of Hollywood, the city built on dreams.
One such dreamer is Tate. Robbie has a lovely scene as the actress enjoying her own movie in a darkened theatre. It does away with the stylized dialogue Tarantino is known for and instead focusses on the pure joy the character feels at watching her dreams come true on the big screen. It’s a lovely scene that speaks to the excitement of the first blush of success, untouched by cynicism in an increasingly cynical world.
“Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood” is unique in its feel. Tarantino has always been singular in his filmmaking but this one feels different. It’s clearly rooted in the b-movies that inspire his vision but here he is contemplative, allowing his leads—DiCaprio and Pitt in full-on charismatic mode—to channel and portray the insecurities that accompany uncertainty. The film is specific in its setting but universal in portrayal of how people react to the shifting sands of time. Funny, sad and occasionally outrageous, it’s just like real life as filtered through a camera lens.
“The Toronto International Film Festival(TIFF) premieres some of the most anticipated blockbuster films and attracts some of the biggest A-listers in Hollywood. This year is certainly no exception with expected appearances from Denzel Washington, Justin Timberlake, Leonardo DiCaprio, Amy Adams, Jeremy Renner and many more.
“Each year we get the inside scoop on the hottest TIFF premieres from renowned Canadian critic Richard Crouse. As the the regular film critic for Metro Canada, the 24-hour news source CTV’s News Channel and CP24, Crouse is an expert in what films to see…and what films to skip. From biographies to dramas, he’s rounded up his Top 10 Must-See Films of TIFF 2016 exclusively for NKPR… Read the whole thing HERE!”
If the 41-year-old actor wins on Feb. 28, it will be well-deserved, says Canada AM film critic Richard Crouse.
“All the other times (he was nominated) were for worthy roles, but he narrowly missed each time,” Crouse told CTVNews.ca.
DiCaprio has been up for the best actor Oscar for his roles in “What’s Eating Gilbert Grape,” “The Aviator,” “Blood Diamond,” and “The Wolf on Wall Street.”
But things appear to be lining up for DiCaprio this year, Crouse says, as his role in “The Revenant” is typical of the kinds of roles that the Academy tends to favour…
This Sunday, put on your best threads + have your red carpet moment at The Drake Hotel.
Cinema King Richard Crouse returns as host of our annual Oscars Viewing Party and this time Google Canada is in on the fun. Peek into the world of Oscars fashion, nominees + moments that are capturing Canada’s attention in real-time, courtesy of our friends at Google. As Canada’s most-searched awards show, it just might surprise you to learn what types of questions have Canadians buzzing.
Cast your votes in our Oscar pool + flex your web-searching prowess in a challenging match of Google’s cinematic trivia! Prizes to be won (like a NEXUS 6P PHONE IN OSCAR GOLD!), bubbly to be toasted, a $37 prix-fixe to enjoy + of course the sweet debates of who wore it best.
Leonardo DiCaprio makes $25 million dollars per movie. So he has money. His best friend is Tobey McGuire and his little black book reads like a Victoria’s Secret catalogue, so he’s never lonely. He has opulent homes on both the left and right coasts of America—one comes equipped with a vitamin C infused shower—and even owns a 104 acre unpopulated island off the coast of Belize.
He’s a superstar with all the creature comforts money can buy. Do you know what he doesn’t have? An Oscar.
He’s come close several times, earning nominations for his work in What’s Eating Gilbert Grape, The Aviator, Blood Diamond and The Wolf of Wall Street but he’s never entered the winner circle.
He’s always been gracious in defeat, smiling and nodding during the Oscar broadcast when someone else’s name is called. “I wasn’t surprised that Jamie got the award,” he said about the 2005 Academy Awards when Jamie Foxx took Best Actor for Ray over The Aviator. “But I knew that cameras would be stuffed up my face so I had my response ready. Anyone who says they don’t practice is a liar.”
He may not have to fake being happy for another actor this year. Pundits are predicting his new movie The Revenant could bring him that elusive honour. He plays American fur trapper Hugh Glass, a frontiersman who became a legend in 1823 when he survived a brutal bear attack and slogged across harsh terrain to get revenge on the man who left him to die.
This is DiCaprio’s Jeremiah Johnson, a movie that masks his matinee idol good looks with facial hair and grimaces. For much of the two-and-a-half-hour running time he is mute, alone on screen crawling across the frozen landscape, slowly inching his way toward vengeance. There are great physical demands made on the actor—the Bear-Maul-O-Rama being just one of the miseries he endures—but this is an internal performance. The character’s strength, pain, frustration, anger and intestinal fortitude are apparent not only in his actions—he cauterizes wounds with gun powder!—but, more importantly, in his eyes. There’s the will to survive and then there’s whatever is driving Glass and whatever that is, it’s written on DiCaprio’s face. It may not be his flashiest role—although he does get to disembowel a horse—but it is one of his best.
Nominations will be announced January 14 so we won’t know until then if he is chosen for sure, but the odds are good. So good that Vanity Fair declared, “This is going to be the year Leonardo DiCaprio finally wins that Oscar.”
Question is, why would someone who has everything want an Academy Award. What difference would it make in his life and career?
The truthful answer is that it would likely make no difference at all to his career, at least financially. He’s already in the top tier of Tinseltown salaries and the fabled “Oscar box office bump”—a sharp spike in ticket sales when the nominations are announced—hasn’t meant much in recent years.
The real win for DiCaprio would be in the prestige department. The Best Actor Oscar is a rare commodity. Only seventy-eight people have them—Daniel Day-Lewis has three, Jack Nicholson and seven others have two apiece—and while he is already a respected performer, winning one would put him in the company of Hollywood legends like Clark Gable, Spencer Tracy and Gary Cooper.
If he becomes the seventy-ninth actor to take home the gold it’s recognition from his peers but besides that, one of those statues is the perfect thing to lend some flair to the man who has everything’s private island décor.
The last time we saw Leonardo DiCaprio he was driving a Ferrari and picking up $26,000 dinner tabs. “The Wolf of Wall Street” star is back on the big screen in “The Revenant,” but now the fancy cars have been replaced with horses, the dinners with raw bison meat.
Very loosely based on real events, DiCaprio plays American fur trapper Hugh Glass, a frontiersman who became a legend when he trekked across country after a brutal bear attack. In the film it’s 1823 and Glass is scouting for a team of fur trappers. The territory is tough, the men even tougher. When Glass is mauled by a bear the company splits into two groups. The first, lead by Andrew Henry (Domhnall Gleeson) heads for home base, while the other—Glass’s son Hawk (Forrest Goodluck), hotheaded trapper John Fitzgerald (Tom Hardy) and the inexperienced Jim Bridger (Will Poulter)—is paid handsomely to stay with Glass, and provide a decent burial when he succumbs to his injuries. Fitzgerald, more interested in getting paid than waiting for Glass to die, hurries the process along, stabbing Hawk and throwing the half dead scout into a hastily dug hole. When Glass comes to he has just one thing on his mind—revenge. “I ain’t afraid to die no more,” he says. “I done it already.”
This is Leo’s “Jeremiah Johnson,” a movie that masks his matinee idol good looks with facial hair and grimaces. His journey is at the heart of the movie but he shares the weight of carrying the film with Hardy. For much of the two-and-a-half-hour running time DiCaprio is mute, alone on screen crawling across the frozen landscape, slowly making his way toward Fitzgerald and his proposed revenge. There are great physical demands made on the actor—the Bear-Maul-O-Rama being just one of the miseries he endures—but this is an internal performance. The character’s strength, pain, frustration, anger and intestinal fortitude are apparent not only in his actions—he cauterizes wounds with gun powder!—but, more importantly, in his eyes. There’s the will to survive and then there’s whatever is driving Glass and whatever that is, it’s written on DiCaprio’s face. It may not be his flashiest role—although he does get to disembowel a horse—but it is one of his best.
Hardy’s Fitzgerald is painted in broader strokes. Driven by greed, this guy makes Bane look as morally bankrupt as Mary Poppins. Intimidating and ruthless, Hardy is a force of nature equal to anything Mother Nature places in Glass’s way.
Perhaps the “The Revenant’s” most complex character is Will Poulter’s Jim Bridger. He’s the runt of the litter, the youngest member of the expedition. Torn between loyalty to Hawk and Glass, his responsibility to his employers and his moral obligations, he is trapped in an impossible situation. Poulter pulls it off with a mix of steely determination and vulnerability.
“The Revenant” is the cinema of misery on screen and off. I’d suggest theatre-goers wear a sweater because the sense of cold and discomfort experienced by Glass is palpable.
On screen the primal story of revenge spares nothing to illustrate the hardships faced by all involved but director Alejandro González Iñárritu hasn’t simply made a gruesome film for the sake of upsetting the audience. Instead, it’s a movie that ends in a question mark. Is Glass’s payback justified or a hollow mission? Iñárritu leaves that decision to the audience, and it is sure to spark conversation as the closing credits roll.
