Can you find the wolves in this picture?

Killers of the Flower Moon – 2/5

This is a bad movie. You know everyone and their motivations in the first ten minutes, and then it repeats itself for the following two hours. Lily Gladstone is barely a character. All the natives come off as idiots, ignorant, no interiority, no will. Things just happen to them, and they know not where to look. Ernest Burkhart has no moral qualms, as though that's supposed to make him interesting. It's beyond the banality of evil; it's evil without the existence of the word to define it. The FBI appearing gives the movie some juice, but too little, too late. And then Martin Scorsese appears at the end to make the point which he had failed to make through movie-making. What came after—or the impotence of the punishment that came after: a life sentence for the mastermind, paroled after 18 years—is more interesting than watching people die over and over again. There should be rage at that, but the movie delivers it with such inadequacy. All that said, I want to throw out an appreciation for Martin Scorses not as 'guy who tells stories well' but as 'guy who likes to play with the language of movie-making.' He has fun with his camera, he likes to sneak in something new. There is a scene in the middle that I find to be beautiful; eternal. Mollie's mother, who barely exists in the movie, dies, face pallid, and opens her eyes to see her ancestors, her Gods, the green grass of eternity, red returned to her skin. No words pass between them. It is a scene of pure, calm understanding. It's beautiful because it rings familiar; as though we've been there before and will go there again, and none of what passes between those two points matters all that much. It's great. It's also a weird interlude to a movie about things that are meant to matter much.