Strike it glitch
KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON Cert 15 ★★★ In cinemas now
The very fact Martin Scorsese is still making movies is a cause for celebration. The 80-year-old is arguably the greatest living film director and this engaging but flawed true-crime drama shows that he’s not resting on his laurels.
It’s the 1920s and we’re in Fairfax, Oklahoma, where the social order has been overturned by the discovery of oil on land previously ceded to the Native American tribes of the “Osage Nation”.
Robert De Niro plays William “King” Hale, the slimy bigwig who became a trusted ally of the Osage people while secretly plotting their destruction.
Leonardo Dicaprio plays his moronic nephew Ernest, whom Hale persuades to woo and marry Osage resident Mollie (Lily Gladstone) so he can inherit her family’s “mineral rights”.
Ernest is besotted with his new wife. But there will have to be an outbreak of accidents. Mollie’s mum and sisters become victims of gunmen or a mysterious “wasting disease”. Then her diabetes starts getting a whole lot worse.
As it’s obvious that Hale is behind the murders (with the help of local thugs and corrupt doctors), the tension only kicks in on the two-hour mark (it runs for three-and-a-half of them) after Jesse Plemons’s FBI agent arrives and the net begins to tighten.
Scorsese originally wanted Dicaprio to play the agent. Recasting him as the idiot nephew and shifting the focus from the investigation to Ernest and Mollie’s unlikely romance was a risky decision.
In The Wolf Of Wall Street and Goodfellas, we find ourselves sympathising with his devilish anti-heroes as they are seduced into a life of crime.
If we’re to connect with thick Ernest, we need to buy into the idea that a man can genuinely love his wife while secretly poisoning her insulin.
Ernest isn’t Scorsese’s first anti-hero but he could be his most challenging.
‘‘Recasting Dicaprio as the idiot nephew was a risky decision