The Good, The Bad, and the Short-legged
Indigenous History According To Scorcese (Killers of the Flower Moon Review)
There was once an indigenous nation exploited for their oil wealth. Although as usual, the plunderers were short-legged, pasty-skinned filthy Southerners running amok with bottles of liquor, weak suspenders, holey breeches, and yellow teeth. They were murderers who lusted after money and every woman the color of the rainbow.
But, let’s not generalize because their long-legged conspirators were just as mean and lustful, plotting behind the scenes with their spectacles, potions, stethoscopes, and ledgers. However, their intelligence didn’t match their collective callousness which was unprecedented as Killers of the Flower Moon depicts. The short-legged plunderers thought that by marrying native women and having children with them, no one would notice what they were doing.
But we, the audience, did! We’re not thick.
(Note: Before anyone says that Di Caprio is not short, just one minute watching him hustling from A to B in this movie should convince you that he has mastered short-leggedness.)
Let’s continue…
The indigenous nation had been lucky, or unlucky (it’s hard to fathom which one) to have been granted this oil blessing/curse, as although they became rich like the white man, and likewise entrapped by materialism, their entitlement made them lazy to do anything else beyond drum-pounding and complaining in tribal meetings while dressed in steam-pressed swag. Until one day a strong-willed tribal woman took a swig of whiskey and a drag of a cigarette and decided to marry one of these short-legged cotton-mouthed bums because she liked blue-eye-d, blond-hair-ed “wolves”.
(Did she have a secret plan perhaps?)
I don’t need to tell you everything that happened after that as there is plenty of drone footage of it all including burning fields for insurance payouts and enough deathbed and coffin-lowered-into-the-earth scenes to drive a point home. Unsurprisingly, the strong woman eventually challenged the plunderers despite being slowly “insulin”-poisoned by her insignificant blue-eyed other. Then confusingly, she was allowed to go to Washington to report the evil short-legged-led conspiracy to Coolidge and Hoover and was immediately granted swift, stetson-ed federal help just in time before she was to succumb like her sisters, to a mysterious illness that wasn’t caused by insulin deprivation in the end.
Phew.
I realise this may sound like a familiar boring historical pseudo-whodunnit but rest assured, with enough blood-letting, confusion, and depravity any story can be elevated to the level of Scarface. The creativity required to depict gruesome wounds from many different angles should never be underestimated as Tarantino would attest to. And neither should the De Niro grimace with or without the utterance of unconvincing lines of native tongue.
In the end, the entire story of this exploited nation can be summed up as a radio-drama epilogue-d by Hitchcock, ah, I meant Scorcese. Throw in a bit of made-up “vintage” footage and silent film intertitles to remind the audience of the alleged recorded history, and the 3 hours and 30 minutes required to explain this complex historical drama, flew by. The anticipation of seeing Joe Pesci or Al Pacino pop up, also kept fingers at bay from checking cellphone time, but disappointingly, they never emerged to grace the screen.
All in all, the world according to Scorcese is as black and white as ever and if you fail to tie the loose ends of the plot together then you’re dumb, phone-distracted, or have become jaded like the snoring cinema-goer next to me.
What I learned is that there still remains a story out there to be told but in the meantime, I’ll be wary once more of the short-legged. Napoleon is just around the corner to remind me.
Happy cinema-going everyone.
