Not only because, in the genre sense, it can at least partially be seen as a mystery film, Martin Scorsese's latest film at the very beginning of the analysis, among other things, provokes an attempt to solve the mystery of those numerous and unison praiseworthy reviews and recommendations that have been following it for the past few days since the beginning of official and wider cinema distribution. It could be that this is because this famous author of a truly world-class caliber in the last few years has proven to be the most persistent and loudest advocate of the fight against the rampant infantilization of primarily repertory films, and in favor of so-called serious films for a more serious and knowledgeable (and therefore more demanding) audience. . It could be that the explanation is also the fact that he showed a great deal of tact and finesse in the always awkward field of screen adaptation of previously highly praised and widely read prose (it is the documentary prose of the same name by David Grene, which has been available in our country since a few years ago - translated by Branislava Radević - Stojiljković and published by Laguna). And it may be that part of the elation comes from the direction of pure joy that Scorsese has shown that in his undeniably serious years (he was born in 1942) he has the strength, both mind and body, to after an extremely questionable film (Irak) back to the top author's form, to which, after all, he accustomed a large "army" of devotees and admirers from long ago.
Everything just listed represents a series of convenient and more or less convincing speculations, but the answer to the above question cannot be reduced to such a simplistic view; simply, Scorsese is not alone in this color (occasionally he is joined by those prone to occasional mistakes of this type - Nolan, Villeneuve, as well as some other worthy filmmakers - for example, Tarantino, Payne, until recently and Friedkin...), and it is not that there are not of other attempts to make today's Holy Grail from a film with more sweeping authorial ambitions for a more discerning audience. In addition, Scorsese himself has persistently pointed out for decades the aforementioned plan of screen adaptations of well-known prose (The last temptation of Christ, Good guys, The Age of Innocence, Gangs of New York, Closed island, The Wolf of Wall Street, and to a satisfactory extent and Silence). At the end of this weighing, Scorsese himself has returned on several occasions before after occasional failures and works that were simply not worthy of his creative capacities in the first place, and then his reputation. So, it will be that in this case the explanation is the simplest - it is a simply excellent film, and also an ambitious realization of an undeniably significant name. And then also about true rarity in the context of cinema repertoires that have been common in at least the last dozen film summers. come, Murders under the flower moon (originally - Killers of the Flower Moon) are an excellent work in a number of certainly authoritative and referential aspects, starting from the convincing multi-genre profile, through the craftsmanship itself, all the way to the dimension of conceptual and meaningful implications that it brings before our eyes and minds, to quickly enumerate only some of the plans on which the maestro Scorsese made a convincing point here.
Murders under the flower moon is, therefore, on the trail of the book on which it is based, to be viewed as whodunit achievement (that is, a story at the core of which is the search for a murderer - here, specifically, the murderer of a number of more prominent Indians from Osage County), which, not only for the sake of accuracy, must nevertheless be renamed as a kind of whydunit mystery (which is to say, the description of the circumstances that could have led to that series of heinous executions, which, along with everything else, were avoided, unpunished, and then tolerated). This is already where Scorsese is at his best - in terms of genre, film Murders under the flower moon are an extension of that, otherwise excellent, documentary prose, in which the emphasis is on what will push this film to the fore in the finale - the investigation that visibly shaped the subsequent form of the FBI's operations; in addition, although it quickly becomes clear which of the actors present could orchestrate that bloody feast, stemming primarily from pure and simple greed, Murders under the flower moon (in its film form) retain the striking outlines of a tense and dynamic mystery which, not only meritocratically, must lead to the final result. And just like before - even when he accepted the script/source of a more transparent and easily discernible genre pedigree, Martin Scorsese managed to raise those starting (genre) premises to a level where one can with the force of the occasion speak of a skillful example of genre ambiguity and polyvalence . In this respect, this film easily reaches the point of a family, and then a really broad social chronicle, and a depiction of extremely vivid life and social circumstances, as a result of which the surviving Indians found themselves on that famous metaphorical trunk on the one hand, and the raiders on the original (so , and "sweetest") capital on the other hand. And in that dimension, we have a definite escape from the frame - right at the beginning of the film, the world of clearly thoroughly westernized Indians appears before our eyes, formally bound by rigid and discriminatory legal regulations (each Osage Indian, no matter how wealthy he was, had to, as officially "insufficient" has a white representative who disposes of his property), steeped in Western predation and hunting for status symbols, as well as forms of self-destruction. This is both a courtroom drama and a drama of (well eroded, if not collapsed) identities, as well as a story about an unusual romance, and an outstanding example of a post-western, which points to a story that takes place as an echo of previous turbulence and in the era that followed after the dying of the Wild West, that durable mythical film topos. Here we can note that previously great authors accepted stories that in terms of chronology were truly post-western (for example, Blake Edwards, Stephen Frears...), while even the unsurpassed Peckinpaugh Wild Horde can join that smaller, but notable gable (and in question is a film that Scorsese himself cites as the ultimate western for the end of that era and that film strain, after which newcomers should seriously think about whether they should even go that way, that one the only indigenous American film genre).
If the complex structure and the fine genre-sub-genre condition of the film that is discussed in this review are sufficiently explained and presented, unequivocal words of praise should be quickly expressed at the expense of the artisan performances themselves, or more precisely, what this production provides us in certain guilds. aspects. Scorsese sovereignly guides the story, which, one might say, is purposefully multi-pronged and therefore prone to blurring, with the fact that the director (and this also goes to the screenwriter - Oscar winner Eric Roth) shows enviable acrobatic skill and daring, so Murders under the flower moon often in the narrative sense, they are "decorated" with narrative and montage micro-digressions, with the help of which, in the manner of written chronicles of the time, we learn additional information and details about those who have just arrived "on the scene". Leonardo DiCaprio is, of course, as expected, inspired and precise in expression, until this moment the almost unknown Lily Gladstone (and this is indicated by increasingly loud media speculations) really deserves an Oscar for the leading female role for this portrayal of a character of extremely palpable and unkillable stoic fatalism , while a special surprise is presented by Robert De Niro, who, as if for the first time in these couple of decades of hard-hitting his own reputation and skill, once again accepted acting that captures the peculiarity and expediency. And that's not all - as it turns out, the testamentary musical score of Robbie Robertson, a frequent and reliable Scorsese collaborator, here, as it seemed at first, in the footsteps of what Warren Ellis and Nick Cave usually offer in stories of a similar genre profile, actually presents a noticeably more diverse musical backdrop for a full-blooded and heartfelt western than the aforementioned duo does. To all that, Murders under the flower moon often enough they have the capacity to impress in the field of cinematographic ambition, where the scene of what follows after the explosion in the house of one of the families who were the target remains a systematically bravura sequence to be remembered for a long time.
It is also worth mentioning that Scorsese masterfully handles these days a particularly inconvenient and debatable issue of the rhythm of storytelling, and on the sample of the story of 206 minutes, which is truly viewer- and time-demanding (Scorsese thanked Ari Arster, the director of the films Midsummer i Bo is scared., which has been breaking through that barrier in recent years). And in the last part of the film, in a kind of epilogue, Scorsese takes a sadistic and at the same time sarcastic look (and in that part he himself appears in a minor role) on the fresh obsession with podcasts and stories about real crimes; it presents to us in the form of a presentation of a radio drama that takes place live in front of the audience with numerous sound effects, which indicates the origin of the film as primarily a narrative (i.e. narrative and story-telling) medium, which then evokes an association with the finale itself, with the last few seconds of unsurpassed Ford's A seeker, where the film returns to its theatrical roots for a moment or two. And although openly painful both in terms of the theme and in the sphere of the story, which deals with social and racial wrongs in the fundamentally not-so-distant past, and with quite a bit of what is evidently universal, this Scorsese film in this plane of our reality also got a happy ending, which is certainly worth it - judging by the specific figures (in the world and in our country - where this hit production in the first weekend of screening overtook Bajić's Heroes of Haliard), however, there is enough of an audience for such a multifaceted challenge. Here is some really good news for this world. Let us welcome her.
