Schizophrenic’s Guide: Killers of the Flower Moon…

My dad and I wanted to see a movie, and we had seen Equalizer 3 repeatedly. We had seen Expendables 17, too, so that was out. He wouldn’t want to see Taylor Swift, and that’s only on weekends, and he wanted to watch the new Scorcese picture. I hadn’t watched any of his movies since Wolf of Wall Street, to be honest, but I was willing to go with my dad to see this three-and-a-half-hour epic because I wanted to go to the movies and see something that was supposed to have intelligent ideas.

I, Daniel Trump, watched a very, very long movie: Something of the Something Something. I went to the bathroom two or three times and missed some parts, but I got the gist of it from the first few moments of the film: people killed lots of Native Americans. This is one of those movies with deep symbolism and a lot of it, and I only understood a little of that symbolism but appreciated that it has a lot of it. If you like literature — if you want to think about your movie — then you need to see this movie.

There is a poisoning in the movie that says something symbolically, I think. Someone poisons someone in the movie — and I think that represents the way white people mistreat the Native American people. A number of murders are presented as the movie opens — so I don’t think it’s a spoiler to tell you that. People kill Native Americans and take their land and other people marry their women and interbreed with them to eliminate their people and their culture and to take their money. This again is presented at the beginning of the story and is not much of a spoiler.

This is a terrible crime that everyone past the seventh grade in America knows about — everyone — and yet this movie makes it an interesting subject for an intelligent story with sympathetic characters and an operatic, big, bombastic story with many characters and much murder and death and conspiring with and against people.

It’s a little Shakespearean, with the people scheming against each other and turning each other in and manipulating against each other. I liked that aspect of the story — and I liked the reveal of who was doing the killings. The solution of the murderers was neat and obvious and powerful. It was well done.

Martin Scorcese examines bad people and what makes them bad. He doesn’t just focus on benevolent heroic types: he also showcases bad characters who are sympathetic and tries to understand flawed people doing horrible things. That’s a strength, that there aren’t cartoon bad guys in a story in which most people — including me — would have the bad guys be unimaginably bad. In this story they are both unimaginably bad and quite wonderful and sympathetic, and therein lies the problem of the movie.

Scorcese’s use of Native American language and iconography shows research, hard work, and a lot of respect for everyone’s heritage. That’s good. If anything the modern moviegoing audience expects quick cuts and flashy music and action extravaganzas, and this movie doesn’t deliver that. It doesn’t have the action scenes of a Marvel movie or the bombastic music and camera tricks of Oppenheimer. It's just a good story, well told.

I took my dad to see the movie. He’s got Parkinson’s so he has to use a walker to help him get from the car to the movie theater and into the seat. He gets a popcorn with butter, and I get a large soda and take a little bit of the popcorn but leave most of it for him. He thought that it was a good movie but dark. I agree. I’m just glad that an intelligent, long movie about murder and the American dream can be found in the movie theaters in the present year.

Thanks, and take care, friends.