→ March 3, 2024
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Killers of the Flower Moon (film).

David Grann’s Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI is one of the best nonfiction books I’ve ever read, a true story that works as a thriller, an important part of American history, and a document of racism and injustice that continues to echo today. Like most fans of the book and/or Grann’s work, I was thrilled to hear Martin Scorsese was adapting it for the screen…

…and then I saw the movie was three and a half hours long.

It is a very good movie, but it just didn’t need to be this long, and it works in more detail than the core narrative actually needed. It’s become a trend with Scorsese to create these overlong films that bog down in minor details that sap the energy of the main plot, which in this case detracts from what might otherwise have been the best movie of the year if anyone had said to him that he needed to edit this down to a reasonable length. (It’s streaming on Apple TV+.)

The Osage Nation were once the dominant civilization in the central plains of North America, but in the 1870s, the U.S. government exiled them to a desolate part of what is now northern Oklahoma, a move that backfired on the white colonizers when it turned out that the new Osage lands sat on a large oil field. This made the Osage people quite rich on paper, giving them headrights to a share of the proceeds from the nation’s oil revenues, although a 1921 federal law said that the Osage couldn’t access the cash directly without approval of white guardians until they were ruled “competent.” A series of murders of Osage tribe members in the 1920s, ignored by local authorities, led the tribe to beg the nascent Bureau of Investigations to look into the cases, which uncovered a conspiracy to kill the Osage for their headrights and indeed birthed the modern FBI.

The Osage woman at the center of the case that brought the Bureau into Oklahoma was Mollie Kyle (Lily Gladstone), who married a white carpetbagger named Ernest Burkhardt (Leonardo DiCaprio). Mollie’s two sisters, brother-in-law, and cousin were all murdered at the behest of Ernest’s uncle, William King Hale (Robert Deniro), while Ernest and King nearly killed Mollie by poisoning the insulin injections she needed for her diabetes before the Bureau arrived, led by Thomas White (Jesse Plemons), and solved the case, saving Mollie and sending her husband and uncle-in-law to prison.

The story here is so rich and compelling, especially in Grann’s rendition, that it would be hard to make a bad movie out of it; even when the film drags a little in pace, it’s still interesting because of the wide cast of characters and the sense of creeping doom that dominates the first two hours. All three leads are superb, with Gladstone especially strong, and Deniro looking the most invested in a part he’s been in forever. There’s no mystery as to who’s behind the killings, so any tension is from wondering how long they’ll get away with it, and, if you’re unfamiliar with the story, how many people will die before anyone takes the Osage – who are well aware these deaths are not accidental, as ruled by the coroner – seriously.

That makes the film’s bloat far harder to understand, because it just bogs things down and introduces a broad array of characters, nearly all drawn from real life and many played quite well by famous musicians, that the film doesn’t need. Keeping everyone straight in this movie requires a cheat sheet, and there’s a real imbalance to who’s getting that extra screen time – it’s the villains, all white men, while the Osage get far less screen time and have far fewer named characters on their side; the story unfurls from a neutral perspective, rather than from Mollie’s or that of the Osage in general. The real conspiracy was indeed this broad, involving cousins and criminals alike, yet for the sake of telling the story in a reasonable amount of time, Scorsese should have trimmed some of the names or at least kept a few more of them off screen.

The crimes themselves take up about two-thirds of the film, which does allow for the complex (to put it mildly) relationship between Mollie and Ernest, who had two kids together, to develop on screen, although the script may go too far in casting Ernest as a feckless pawn of his uncle rather than someone aware he was committing murder and poisoning his own wife. By the time the Bureau shows up, it is a welcome shot of energy in a film that had gotten stuck in its own mire, and Plemons livens things up even in an understated performance. The last hour, where the killers are brought to justice, zips by compared to the slow build that came before, with the main tension around whether Ernest will choose to stand by his uncle or confess to his crimes and, on some level, side with his wife. Even so, we get some overblown scenes like Brendan Fraser’s defense attorney bloviating in the courthouse with Ernest on the stand, a perfectly fine scene in its own right but not one that pushes the story forward. There are just so many bits here that could have been cut to make this movie two and a half hours, and in that case, it might have challenged for Best Picture, but instead we get an Apple TV+ movie that feels like it was trying to be a limited series instead.

Killers of the Flower Moon earned ten nominations, including the obligatory Best Director and Best Picture nods for Scorsese; this is the seventh film of his last nine to get him a Director nomination, although it seems far more of a recognition of his name than his work here. Gladstone is the overwhelming favorite to win Best Actress, which may be the only major award it wins; if it wins another, I’d guess Robbie Robertson might win for Best Original Score, as the score is strong, adding to many scenes without ever overwhelming the action or dialogue, and the fact that he died before the film was released will likely win him some additional votes. DiCaprio did not get a Best Actor nomination, even though he at least was better than one nominee in Bradley Cooper.

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→ February 29, 2024
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Maestro.

Leonard Bernstein lived a long and interesting life, earning his place in the pantheon of American music. It’s hard to believe Maestro couldmake him and his life so utterly boring. (It’s streaming exclusively on Netflix.)

Directed and co-written by Bradley Cooper, Maestro is a formulaic biopic that often seems afraid to truly engage with its subject (played by Cooper) or his wife, Felicia Montealegre (Carey Mulligan). The film begins with Bernstein at age 25, thrust into the lead conductor role one night at the New York Philharmonic when the guest conductor is unable to go on, a jumbled mess of a scene that foreshadows the movie’s chronic problems with pacing and tempo. Bernstein is in a relationship with the clarinet player David Oppenheim (Matt Bomer), but soon afterwards meets Felicia at a cocktail party, pursuing and marrying her, although he was gay and had a series of affairs with men throughout their marriage. His career progresses in the background, with nods here and there to his series of successful endeavors (and no mention of his big flop, 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, which became his last Broadway musical), while his marriage teeters and he and Felicia separate, briefly, before reuniting because he conducted a great performance in 1973. And then she gets cancer and dies.

Maestro isn’t even bad, or so-bad-it’s-good, but dull. Bernstein was fascinating as a person and a composer, yet the film does neither side of him justice. He wrote the music and score for West Side Story, scored On the Waterfront, and wrote three symphonies and numerous other orchestral and chamber pieces, which you’d barely glean from this film. There’s relatively little of his music, certainly not his most famous pieces, in the movie, yet the script focuses for an eternity on that one 1973 performance, where he conducted the London Symphony Orchestra at Ely Cathedral – a show that, in the film, led Felicia to forgive his infidelities, which seems to be a bit of Hollywood nonsense. If you knew nothing of Bernstein before watching Maestro, you would likely leave the film believing he was a conductor and not a composer, or at best a minor composer of lesser-known works.

His relationship with Felicia is supposed to be the heart of the film, but it’s in cardiac arrest; it’s a series of interactions, but few if any are illuminating, and there is zero chemistry of any sort between the two of them, which matters given how much the film wants us to believe that, despite his homosexuality, he both cared for and needed Felicia. It’s as if the two characters barely inhabit the same universe, exacerbated by both actors’ attempts to mimic the accents and intonations of the people they’re portraying, which makes Mulligan sound like she’s in a Julian Fellowes period piece. The drive for verisimilitude in biopics has some clear drawbacks, from the distractions of Cooper’s makeup and voice mimicry to the sense that these two characters aren’t even from the same era.

Nothing sinks Maestro as much as how boring the story is, though. There are certainly several ways to treat a protagonist who’s a philanderer, and struggling with his sexual identity in a time of entrenched discrimination and bigotry, yet is also an icon in his field and was recognized as a genius in his own time. Maestro seems unwilling to engage with the darker side of Bernstein’s character – that, even if Felicia accepted him as who he was and what he was doing, he seemed to be using her as cover and as an emotional support. There’s a bigger question of whether a relationship like this can even work, or be equitable, but the script never comes close to exploring it. I’m mystified by the wide acclaim for the film, but there’s always one major Oscar-nominated film that I just don’t get.

Speaking of which, Maestro was nominated for eight Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Actress, and Best Original Screenplay; needless to say, I don’t think it should win any of them, with multiple better choices in each category. Greta Lee (Past Lives) should have had Mulligan’s nod, and Leonardo DiCaprio (Killers of the Flower Moon) or Andrew Scott (All of Us Strangers) would have been a better choice than Cooper. The one race to watch here would be Best Makeup and Hairstyling, given the controversy over Cooper’s use of a prosthetic nose to better resemble Bernstein, a choice that the composer’s children have publicly supported. I don’t believe there’s a clear favorite in that category, since Barbie was snubbed, while Variety and Indiewire have both tabbed Maestro as the likely winner. I haven’t seen three of the five nominees yet, so I’ll defer any opinion on this.

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→ February 25, 2024
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Oppenheimer.

Oppenheimer is an achievement. It’s a biopic, a deep character study, a thriller, a heist movie, and a Shakespearean tragedy (well, except the title character doesn’t die at the end), wrapped up into a three-hour movie that never lets up its pace. It’s incredible that a major studio bankrolled this and gave it such a long theatrical release, given its subject and its three-hour run time, but I hope its runaway success encourages studios to take more risks on prestige films like it. (It’s streaming now on Peacock, or rentable on amazon, iTunes, etc.)

Based on the biography American Prometheus (which I have not read), Oppenheimer tells the story of J. Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy), the physicist who led the United States’s effort to develop a nuclear weapon, known as the Manhattan Project. It’s framed by the events that came after the war, when Oppenheimer became an advocate for international control of the very weapons he helped to develop, leading to a sham hearing that led to the revocation of his security clearance and a subsequent public hearing that led to the downfall of his chief antagonist, Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey, Jr.). The movie itself runs from the 1920s, when Oppenheimer was still a student, meeting Niels Bohr (Kenneth Branagh) and studying under Max Born (mentioned but not depicted), through his time as a professor at Berkeley, his tenure in Los Alamos leading the Manhattan Project, and the post-war attacks on his reputation. The movie focuses on his professional efforts, but his personal life, including his marriage to the biologist Katherine (Emily Blunt) and his affair with the psychologist Jean Tatlock (Florence Pugh), although the movie drags when the focus shifts away from the thriller at the heart of the film.

Writer and director Christopher Nolan packed Oppenheimer with dialogue, so there are very few moments of silence in the film, and any time the movie is focused on the professional arc, it flies. (If I were a more pandering sort, I might say it moves at the speed of light, but I’ll leave those jokes to the least common depunimator.) The script underscores just how massive the undertaking and how unlikely the assembled team of physicists and other scientists was. It’s easy to let hindsight make the development of the first atomic bomb seem like an inevitability, but it was a gigantic effort that required the participation of scientists from across the west, including some refugees from the Nazi regime, and coordination across multiple agencies and university laboratories. The physics behind nuclear fission was only discovered in 1938, and the plants refining the plutonium needed for the bombs didn’t even come online until 1943 and 1944. We know how the story ends, but the movie puts you into the action enough that you can feel the tension and the uncertainty among the scientists – who knew what was at stake, but had no idea if they’d succeed or when.

Oppenheimer’s marriage and infidelity make up the film’s secondary plot, and while it’s an important part of his story and is intertwined enough with his professional life – including his pre-war flirtation with the Communist Party – that it has to be in the film, but there’s so little development of Katherine’s or Jane’s characters that neither role amounts to much beyond one good scene apiece. There’s not enough screen time for either of them, since neither was involved in Los Alamos, and the result is that two Academy Award-nominated actresses are little more than props – which makes Blunt’s nomination for Best Supporting Actress more than a little surprising.

The two best performances are, unsurprisingly, the two that earned Oscar nods – Murphy for Best Actor and Downey Jr. for Best Supporting Actor. Murphy has worked with Nolan before in Inception and Dunkirk, and he gives a superb performance here as the title character, depicting the scientist as a sort of aloof genius whose determination and focus allowed him to lead the project to completion, while also showing his confusion at how his actions affect people around him, including his wife and his mistress. Downey’s career resurgence has been fun to watch, although if you’re old enough to remember his earliest work as part of the so-called “Brat Pack,” you probably saw how talented he was; I remember his supporting performance in the 1995 adaptation of Richard III, which was the first serious role I’d seen of his, and how compelling he was in every scene, often overshadowing other more accomplished actors. Downey isn’t known for dialing it down, but that’s what he does here, to great effect, so that Strauss comes across as an intense, ruthless, yet very professional politician, someone who often acts in his own self-interest but never out of emotion. As much as the movie puts Oppenheimer at its center, Strauss has his own story arc within the movie where Oppenheimer is often just a bit player, giving Downey the chance to be the lead actor in this film-within-a-film. Two outstanding performances in a gripping, wide-reaching story would put just about any film near the top of my annual rankings.

Oppenheimer was nominated for 13 Oscars this year, and I’d guess it’s going to win a slew of them, including Best Picture, Best Actor (for Murphy), Best Supporting Actor (for Downey, Jr.), and Best Director, although I haven’t finished all of the nominees in any of those categories yet and can’t offer an opinion on whether it’s deserving. Of the films I’ve seen from 2023 so far, though, it is the best, just ahead of Past Lives, which is a tighter and far more affecting film, but without as much ambition or as wide a scope. It did not receive a nomination for Best Visual Effects, however, despite the stunning scene where the first atomic test takes place in Los Alamos; perhaps that’s not enough compared to the other nominees, none of which I’ve seen.

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