This isn’t to say that the filmmaker is being too explicit or lazy in his storytelling. Instead, getting straight to the point highlights just how clueless, or in denial, Ernest is. Arriving in Oklahoma with the simple hope of getting a job, Burkhart doesn’t seem that flummoxed by the unique dynamic of the town, where rich Native Americans employ white, poorer men. The oil found in the land that the Osage Nation was arbitrarily given by white men changed the game, and Hale—who goes by the modest nickname “King”—became an ally and is beloved by his community. For seemingly purely altruistic reasons, he offers Ernest a job as a taxi driver; but already King’s demeanor hints at what he is really after, for those who can notice it.
De Niro hasn’t given such a complex, funny, and deeply disturbing performance in a long while. His King talks to Ernest as if to a son, telling him in more or less subtle terms how things are to be done in these parts. He’s also a master at saying one thing to mean another, making for moments when DiCaprio gets to be at his best: confused, but too insecure to say so, as vulnerable as in Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood, a performance that marked a real return to form. King referring to “pure blood” Native people doesn’t mean much to Ernest, but it also takes him by surprise. In his language, King walks a fine, confusing line between loving the Osages and describing them as obstacles toward his goal of mass estate ownership. Here’s a man at peace with his split personality because perhaps, to him, it isn’t split at all. Everything is a justifiable means to an end, whether those means consist of learning the Osage language and grieving their losses, or murdering members of the community. Playing this psychopathic character completely straight, De Niro baffles the audience, too. The effect is one of whiplash and cognitive dissonance while Scorsese takes his time, over the first hour, to slowly but surely let the horror creep onto the frame. Almost without knowing it, King’s genocidal master plan has revealed itself, seeping into the narrative like poison.
For the banality of evil (as De Niro rightly referred to it at the film’s Cannes press conference) to take hold, however, you don’t just need men like King. Ernest, as his name announces, is always enthusiastic to do as he’s told without thinking too much. Like a leaf in the wind, this useful idiot lets himself be pushed around easily. He drives for an Osage woman, Mollie (Lily Gladstone), on King’s suggestion and falls in love, marries, and takes care of her, but also participates in the slow extermination of her entire family for his uncle’s sake. It is the bold choice of an experienced filmmaker (some would say in his “late” era) to have at the center of his film a man with no center, and to offer the audience no direct access to his thoughts. Where Ray Liotta’s Henry Hill in Goodfellas shared his reflections on his life as a gangster with some level of insight, Ernest gives us nothing but his contradictory behavior, which we experience in the present tense. Ernest is a man torn but who doesn’t know it, whose only excuse might be that he has been brainwashed from the start by King’s (and America’s) white capitalistic ideology, which Scorsese highlights as he did in his gangster pictures. Establishing the story of the Osages in the film’s first few sequences, the filmmaker relies on his beloved combination of slow-motion and bluesy guitar when oil bursts out of the ground and the oppressed tribe dances under the unexpected black gold rain. As is always the case with Scorsese’s coolest sequences, the swagger of this stylized moment is not to be taken at face value, but instead speaks to the appeal of our vices. Sharon Stone shooting a glance at De Niro and walking off in Casino was the beginning of his downfall, but in Flower Moon’s context of white supremacy, this technique takes on new depth: While it is exciting to see the Osages win over their colonizers, it is also dispiriting that they should even have to play into their capitalist game to survive.
by Manuela Lazic, The Ringer | Read more:
Image: Apple TV/YouTube
[ed. Interesting to compare Scorcese's late-life efforts with someone, say, like Woody Allen.]
