Fail Mary: A Good Book Badly Interpreted

 

 

 

 

 

 

PROJECT HAIL MARY (2016)

Directed by Phil Lord and Christoper Miller

Amazon-MGM Studios, 156 minutes, PG-13 (intensity, mention of suicide)

★★

 

Project Hail Mary was a megahit, but the film gets very little love from me. It is ever-so-loosely based on the 2021 novel of the same name by Andy Weir (no relation of mine). Weir’s book was quite good, an exemplar of what is sometimes called a “hard science novel.” It was also “hard” in the sense that Weir didn’t shy away from throwing math equations, chemistry, and physics at his readers. Those things are also present in the movie, but it’s ultimately a buddy film between astrobiologist Ryland Grace (Ryan Gosling) and a xenon-based alien nicknamed “Rocky” (James Ortiz voicing a rather obvious puppet).

 

The story is rather straightforward. Grace is a wise guy scientist whose nonconventional behavior and lack of ambition have wrecked his chances of working at any sort of high-powered university or research lab. He has been reduced to teaching middle school science and he’s really good at it; it fits his slacker-like demeanor. He is, however, aware of the frightening buzz over mysterious celestial dots, the infrared “Petrova line” extending beyond Venus, and rumors that is has been sucking radiation from the sun at such a rate that within 30 years tens billions will die from global freezing.

 

Ryland is commandeered to do research on astrobiological problem he wrote about when he was a serious graduate student. Somehow this makes him the world’s expert above those malingering deadbeats at crappy schools such as Arizona State, Cal Tech, Colorado University, Harvard, MIT, Stanford and university labs in Beijing, Cambridge, Edinburgh, and Tokyo. Ryland almost immediately identifies that a microbe dubbed astrophage is the culprit. (How did those lab-coated dolts elsewhere miss it?) Ryland also realizes that the scenario is much worse than a frozen earth. The Petrova line upon which astrophage travels could wipe out all of creation, except for a faraway small planet named Tau Ceti. A team is needed immediately to be put into induced comas, go to Tau Ceti, determine why it is unaffected, and send probes back to earth–nearly 12 light years away. The odds of all this happening are so low that their spaceship is named “The Hail Mary,” a term that infers an act of desperation.

 

Ryland believes that his work is done, before Petrova Taskforce head Eva Stratt (Sandra Hüller) tells Ryland he is one of the three chosen for the one-way suicide mission. He protests that he is not an astronaut, doesn’t want to go, and isn’t ready to die. His refusal is ignored; the stakes are so high that he is forcibly sedated, plonked aboard, placed in a coma, and wakes up 4-5 years later (roughly 13 years by earth time). Ryland is alone in space–both of his colleagues died in their receptacles–until he encounters a giant array. After some gawking, he approaches the array and eventually meets an alien he dubs Rocky, whose language is based on music and echolocation. (Shades of Close Encounters of the Third Kind.)  The two learn to communicate and Ryland writes a computer program that allows them to “talk” to each other. Rocky, an engineer from the Eridani A system, is also alone in space, his 22 crew members dead from radiation exposure. Despite their linguistic, cultural, and physical differences, Ryland and Rocky become good friends.

 

From this point on, Project Hail Mary plays more like a buddy film than any sort of thoughtful first contact movie. (For my money, Star Trek: First Contact tops the thriller/insightful list.) Like almost all buddy films, there are funny moments–Ryland is a klutz and playful goof-off–times in which they save each other, mutual homesickness, and teamwork to stave off disaster. A lot of the “cute” cultural misunderstandings skirt the boundary between character development and cheesy. The bonding process is even worse, as in Ryland’s efforts to hug Rocky through his protective sphere. Not to mention that the Eridian Rocky looks like the Horta from Star Trek’s first season crossed with a Muppet decked out in sepia and ash.

 

I do give credit to Greig Fraser for his stunning cinematography. I wish the movie itself had been more worthy of Fraser’s craft. Andy Weir’s novel made me think; the movie made me sigh.

 

Rob Weir

John of John Shortlisted for the Booker Prize

 

 

 

 

JOHN OF JOHN (2026)

By Douglas Stuart

Grove, 400 pages.

★★★★★

 

In May, I was in England. Back in the States there was a discussion of what the “big” books of summer would be, a list peppered with schmaltzy romances, graphic novels, and the usual suspects (Collen Hoover, John Grisham, Stephen King, Danielle Steel…). In the U.K. the reading public anticipated John of John by Douglas Stuart. If the name rings a bell, he’s the author of Shuggie Bain, which won the 2020 Booker Prize for fiction. He followed with Young Mungo, which was highly regarded, but John of John is already shortlisted for this year’s Booker Prize. Stuart is Scottish and lives in New York City part of the year with his husband. He has been called a queer writer, but mostly Stuart’s characters are complex people some of whom simply happen to be gay.

 

John of John is set on the remote Outer Hebrides Isle of Harris during the late 1990s. As for the title, in many places individuals introduce themselves according to their lineage. The novel’s main character calls himself “Cal,” but that’s short for John Calum McLeod. His father’s name is also John. As Cal ferries across The Minch to Harris, he is asked his name and replies, “John of John of Ian of Ian the Breabadair,” the last word meaning weaver. His recitation situates Cal within four generations. In a wee place like Harris, with a population of just 1,900 souls, this matters. It now adjoins the Isle of Lewis; though they were once separate islands, and are quite different. I’ve been to both and rock-strewn Harris looks as if the glacier just left last week.

 

Twenty-two-year-old Cal has been told that “Ma,” actually his grandmother Ella, is seriously ill. He leaves his art school in Edinburgh to care for her, only to arrive and find she is as feisty as a golden eagle. Speaking of birds, Calum actually means dove in Scots Gaelic, but you can be forgiven if thought it might mean Calvin, as in the dour Reformation figure John Calvin, whose Scottish acolyte John Knox was even more strict. Harris is one of the last toeholds of the Free Presbyterian Church–pronounced “kirk”– as “ch” is usually sounded as a hard K in Gaelic. There’s little that’s “free” about the predestination-centered Presbyterians of Harris. You can imagine that Harris is a hard place to be gay, especially when your sheep-farming father is a kirk preceptor and deacon with decided views on how one should observe religion and a white-hot temper used to smack the wrongdoing out of his son. Cal cannot tell his father of his predilections, even though he has committed several “sinful” acts between Glasgow and Harris. Ella has suspicions, but she’s decidedly not a kirk-goer, refuses to speak Gaelic, and curses worse than any of the island’s fishermen.

 

Only a handful of islanders know Cal’s secret. A childhood friend, “Doll” Macdonald, has been a partner during bouts of drunkenness, though even he shares the view that Cal might marry his fair, book-smart sister Isla. She would welcome that, but she reads Cal pretty well and pivots to wanting to escape Harris and attend the University of Glasgow.

 

John the Elder has a very good friend, the soft-spoken Innes MacInnes and he, too, will factor into the gathering drama. Harris might be sparsely populated place, but how many humans do you need for big secrets, raging passions, hypocrisy, and violent temperaments to raise mayhem? John of John is a sometimes-harrowing tale of isolation, repression, pain, and a father-son relationship. For all of his good intentions, Cal can be as cruel as his father, and that’s not the only way in which he hasn’t fallen far from the family tree.

 

This is not a novel that depends upon thrills, high-energy plotting, or mystery. We see most things through Cal’s eyes, but can he be trusted to curate how his own drama transpires? In many respects, what is left unsaid or swept under the proverbial rug is more toxic than what is. I mentioned The Minch earlier, which has a reputation for being unpredictable to the point of treachery. In Harris legends, The Minch is the home of malevolent kelpies, shape-shifting spirits who lure fishermen to their doom. John of John often portends such dangers, but we have to wait to see how the various crossings wash ashore.

 

Rob Weir

Selena Fails to Capture Her Spark

 SELENA (1997)

Written and directed by Gregory Nava

Warner Brothers, 127 minutes, PG

★★

 

Thirty-one years after her murder, Selena Quintanilla Pérez remains the most popular Tejano singer of all-time. The Hollywood movie Selena is a recounting of her life–just not a very good one.

 Let me state from the outset my non-familiarity with arena-style Tejano music. I’m also fuzzy on how Tejano music differs from Norteña/o music other than the first is Tex-Mex and the other Mex-Tex. I know more about acoustic musicians like Tish Hinjosa (one of the nicest people on the planet), Carrie Rodriguez, Eliza Gilkyson, and Nanci Griffith. I state truth, not cultural insensitivity, when I say that it’s all Border music to my ignorant ears. My idea of a Border superstar is Linda Ronstadt. Okay, so I’m wrong about that!

Selena sent me to YouTube where I grasped her appeal, but it doesn’t change the fact that the movie is as flat as Panhandle Texas. It’s as if Director Gregory Nava, who also wrote the script, assumed that audiences would fill in the cinematic holes with preexisting reverence. Many viewers no doubt did so–and the movie made money– but most of Selena is a standard music biopic with all that genre’s strengths (the music) and all its weaknesses. (When was the last time you saw one that did not delve into the pitfalls of celebrity?)   

 Selena takes us from Selena’s childhood to her murder on March 31, 1995. Adult Selena is played by Jennifer Lopez; her childhood self is represented by young actor Becky Lee. You could get the gist of Selena’s bio by skimming Wikipedia, but I’ll save you the trouble. She was born in Texas and died there just 23 years later. Stage mothers are infamous in the entertainment field, but, Marcella Quintanilla Pérez (Constance Marie) was too busy keeping her music-obsessed husband Abraham (Edward James Olmos) from bankrupting the family through his own dreams of stardom. Abe had a band called The Dinos, but it played American doo wop and pop rather than Tejano material favored by Latinos in Gulf Coast Texas. Selena loved to sing even as a child and her precocious talent plowed a different road to fame, a family band with Selena as the frontwoman of a flashy, high-energy Tejano repertoire. The film opens with Selena thrilling a sold-out concert at the Houston Astrodome. 

 Then we back up in time to observe how the band Selena y Los Dinos came together. It consisted of Selena, her sister Suzette (Jackie Guerra), brother A.B. (Jabob Vargas), dad, and sometimes mom. Selena was the star, but her greatest skill was manipulating Abraham into dumping doo wop, moving to Corpus Christi, taking long bus tours to build audiences, hiring former heavy metal guitarist Chris Pérez (Jon Seda) to play blistering leads, allowing her to follow her own fashion muses (including wearing a bustier on stage), and blessing her elopement to Chris. Selena sang her family into fortune and became a Grammy Award-winning Tejano superstar. Selena even had her own boutique, salon, and merchandise stores that indirectly led to her death. A friend and superfan, Yolanda Saldívar (Lupe Ontiveros), was hired to keep track of merch and keep the books, but rancor ensued when it became obvious that Yolanda had been dipping her fingers deep into the family till. Her firing led to a meeting that ended with Yolanda fatally shooting Selena. (Yolanda is serving life with the possibility of parole.)

 It was a senseless killing, but we’ve seen this kind of biopic so many times that it’s nearly obligatory that the titular celebrity must die. To sustain what we already know will happen, more is needed. Lopez is perfectly fine as Selena, but the rest of the cast is too mannered and wholesome for its own good, including Olmos who is usually compelling. Selena’s family, even bullheaded Abraham, come off as a fluffier version of The Jackson Five. I couldn’t stop wondering who this script was for, Anglos or Mexican Americans; surely racism, language barriers (in Mexico), and Abraham's rigid Jehovah's Witness faith warranted more than a proverbial drive-by.  Aside from a stage set malfunction, Selena’s struggle to learn Spanish, and Yolanda’s rampage, there was very little grit to the film. Eleven years on the road and these and family feuds are all you’ve got? Bidi, bidi, bom(b) bom(b).

 Rob Weir

Fackham Hall a Hilarious Parody of Downton Abbey

FACKHAM HALL (2025)

Directed by Jim O’Hanlon

Bleeker Street, 97 minutes, R (language, crude humor, language, innuendo)

★★★★★

 

 

 

 

Assuming you’re not one of those Downton Abbey fans that is so enamored that you can brook no criticism of it, Fackham Hall is a must-see satire. It’s a silly venture into lowbrow humor that’s akin to watching an old Henny Youngman performance, meaning that you will laugh yourself stupid despite thinking you shouldn’t. Think Downton Abbey and Upstairs Downstairs crossed with Monty Python’s Flying Circus and Airplane and you’re on the right track. You’d not be wrong to assume a backhand slap at Julian Fellowes, the aristocracy-loving British writer who reminds me of Python’s “Upper-Class Twit of the Year” sketch. I’ve not laughed so hard at a comedy film in years.

 

We meet young pickpocket Eric Noone (Ben Radcliffe)–read “no one”–plying his craft on a London Street before ducking into his Catholic orphanage. A nun hands him a letter and offers him money to deliver it to Fackham Hall. After conning her into giving him a full British pound, he bicycles on his way before being smashed into by a car driven by Rose Fackham (Thomasin McKenzie). Watch how he parks his broken bike. I should mention that you should pay attention to everything in this film: things in the background, posters on the wall, road signs…. Even the video box bears the slogan, “Born to Aristocracy. Bred for Idiocy.” The gates to Fackham Hall proclaim incestus ad infinitum. One might suppose the Davenport family patriarch Lord Humphrey Davenport (Damian Lewis) is the dimmest bulb in the socket, but that would be shortsighted. He and his wife Lady Prudence (Katherine Waterson) are obsessed with marrying eldest daughter Poppy (Emma Laird) to a cousin who’s not too closely related as to invalidate the marriage. That’s because their three sons were lost in World War I, as we find out from hilarious scrapbook clippings. Also lost was Cousin Nathaniel “who was just a boy” when he too was lost. (We see him as a child in the trenches banging grenades together!) His mother Rose (Hayley Mills!), who narrates the film has spent the years since the war as a sourpuss crank.

 

There is, naturally, house staff. The butler Cyril (Jim McMullen) is a stiff who is a spot-on sendup of Downton’s Mr. Carter, and Mrs. Edna McAllister (Anne Maxwell) sort of channels Mrs. Hughes—if she had been vaccinated with a meanness serum. The vicar (Jimmy Carr) called upon to marry Poppy to the only eligible Davenport nitwit available, Cousin Archibald (Tom Felton), comes close to stealing the comedy script and running away with it via his act of saying aloud what’s in his subconscious before correcting himself by looking at the actual words from the wedding ritual! And what’s a wedding without loads of toff guests? There is Darvish Khalid (Ramon Tikaram) who acquired a limp during the war, but not for the reasons you would think; J. R. R. Tolkien (Jason Done), who has been working on The Hobbit for many years, has learned to speak Orc, and invites everyone to call him, “J.R.R. Tolkien, the Writer;” Bill Bobaggins, who is in love with his donkey, and whose name is among the many things Tolkien appropriates; plus, more people surnamed Davenport than one can imagine. As Poppy and Archie are about to be married, Poppy runs from the church and into the arms of the man she truly loves, a cut straight out of The Graduate. He’s a (night-)soiled bum who operates the local dung wagon. (As we find out later, Archie’s one of 22 times Poppy goes to the altar without getting married!) Poppy was probably right about Archie, though; he makes Lord Humphrey look like Einstein. But Lady Davenport–think Cora Crawley– is desperate to keep Fackham Hall in the family and begins to browbeat younger daughter Rose to marry Archie. In keeping with the Downton parody, Rose is deeply in love with Eric, who plays a Tom Branson/Artful Dodger mashup.

 

Things become a sticky wicket when Lord Humphrey is indeed killed–Archie almost did so in the obligatory “hunting” scene–and Inspector Watt appears to solve the crime and provide fodder for an Abbott and Costello routine. Will all eventually be tea and cakes among the twits? This is one of my favorite five-star terrible movies!

 

Rob Weir

The Snowman a Chilling Novel to Read as Winter Lurks

 

 

 

 

 

THE SNOWMAN (2007)

By Jo Nesbø

Knopf, 512 pages

★★★★

 

  

 

 

Get ready for it, faithful blog readers. I’ve been at the League of Women Voters annual used book sale and came back with a large bag filled with novels of favorite authrors and books I wanted to read years ago but was too busy to get to them. Older books are still good books!

 

I have read several Harry Hole mysteries from Norwegian author Jo(n) Nesbø. Hole might put you in mind of Michael Connelly’s Harry Bosch in the sense that both work on “cold cases,” serious crimes that were never solved. Both are prone to drinking too much, don’t suffer fools gladly, and have been unlucky in love. Harry Hole is also suspected of being out-of-touch with modern police methods and impossible to manage, hence he’s on everyone’s potential firing list whenever police screwup and the need arises to feed the media or public officials a scapegoat. Hole’s ace in the hole–so to speak–is that he is the only investigator in Norwegian history to have solved a serial killer case. (Being Norway, not the USA, that’s a short list!)

 

Several things rock Harry’s world. First, Katrine Bratt transfers into his cold case group in Oslo. She’s bright, beautiful, and from Bergen, which likes to forget that Oslo is the capital. Bratt exudes an inapproachable iciness and a whiff of (perhaps dangerous) ambition. She’s allegedly married, but seems to be coming on to Harry. Second, Harry’s ex-wife Rakel Fauke whose son Oleg looks upon Harry as a fatherly role model though biologically, he’s from a Russian dalliance before Harry or her current husband. Harry’s heavy drinking is partially linked to Rakel, the great love of Harry’s life who got away. She’s been cheating on husband # 2–with Harry–though she claims she only wants his sexual prowess. (They are Scandinavians, so what can I tell you?) Third, Harry’s drinking makes him seem even more of a dinosaur, something that young homicide cop Magnus Skarre occasionally spills in discussions with Harry’s boss Gunnar Hager. Harry’s always a step or two ahead of them, but he knows his head is on the chopping block.

 

Speaking of which, the first snow of the year leads Harry and Katrine into a missing persons case. Strange noises outside lead Birte Becker to investigate. Her husband is at a meeting, Birte tells her son Jonas to stay inside, and that’s the last she is seen. Did she run away? Unlikely as her pink scarf suddenly appears on the snowman they built and her cellphone is missing. When the ring leads Harry to the snowman, something more ominous is clearly afoot. If there is any doubt, Sylvia Ottersen, the mother of twins, also disappears. Police scouring the woods behind her barn make a gruesome discovery: Sylvia’s severed head upon a snowman’s body. Harry suspects a serial killer and Katrine unearths a pattern of disappearances of women with children 24 years into the past, always at the first snowfall.

 

Don’t be put off by the heft of The Snowman; it’s a twisty mystery with more suspects than a campout of patrons waiting for the mall to open on Black Friday. Several doctors are on Harry’s list, as is a missing Bergen cop, an obnoxious TV host who runs a prostitution ring, and Katrine. Questions abound. Why kill mothers? Why are doctors quiet about their research into rare medical conditions? Why haven’t crime scene forensics found more blood? What’s the significance of the killer’s MO (modus operandi)?

 

I found this novel both gripping and creepy. Perhaps it could have benefitted from judicious editing, as its pattern of “fingering” the wrong person as the Snowman wrong wears thin. Red herrings are standard in mysteries, and there’s always the possibility that the translation into English is to blame, but the quarter of the novel is, at once, thrilling and ragged. It sometimes seems that Nesbø stitched unused ideas into this novel. Two nearly fatal standoffs add tension, but steer The Snowman into adventure-story territory. It might not be a perfect mystery, but you will go through it like loose snow. It’s also far superior to the film made in 2017, which is hard to find, so warm up the cider and hunker down.

 

Rob Weir

 

 

Eleanor the Great, or Eleanor the Pretty Good?

 

 

 

 

 

 

ELEANOR THE GREAT (2025)

Directed by Scarlett Johansson

Sony Pictures Classic, 98 minutes, PG-13 (language, inferences)

★★★

 

June Squibb’s later-in-life career was resurrected when she appeared in Alexander Payne’s Nebraska in 2013. She was nominated for a Best Supporting Actress and has been in demand ever since. Some have dismissed her as a sort of Betty White Lite, though Ms. Squibb’s career has been far more substantive. White died at age 99 in 2021, so perhaps it’s time to crown Squibb as the queen of defying ageism, though she prefers pricking its hide with satirical barbs. At the same time, though, questions persist whether she lampoons ageism, or merely supplanted assumptions that the elderly are senile with stereotypes of comical cranks and rebels.

 

Scarlett Johansson made her directing debut in Eleanor the Great with June Squibb in the titular role. She plays Eleanor Morgenstein, a 94-year-old Jewish woman who has returned to New York City (from Florida) because her best friend and roommate Bessie Stern (Rita Zohar) has died. Shall we say that her new roommate, her daughter Lisa (Jessica Hecht), is all the things Bessie was not: pushy, frantic, judgmental, and a terrible listener. Eleanor quickly surmises that Lisa is too busy to pay attention to her, a truth reinforced in flashback sequences in which Bessie pours out her Holocaust survivor’s guilt and pain. Lisa wants her mother to go to the local Jewish Community Center in the belief that it’s simply a benign holding cell for old Jews. (For the record, Ms. Squibb is Jewish, having converted when she married Charles Kakatsakis in 1959.) In a classic screw up, Eleanor accidentally wanders into a support group for Holocaust survivors and, when pushed to speak, appropriates Bessie’s stories as her own, a  feeble and misguided attempt to feel as if she belongs.

 

Eleanor’s moving story–it’s not hers, but her mind is obviously sharp enough to remember and recreate what Bessie told her–makes her an instant celebrity among the group. It also catches the ear of Nina Davis (Erin Kellyman), a college journalism student working through grief of her own; her mother has recently died and she has lost her moorings. Analogous to Lisa, Nina’s father Roger (Chiwetel Ejiofor) is a successful-but-harried news anchor. Despite gaps of age, religion, race, and experiences Eleanor and Nina become close friends. In Nina’s eyes, the world-wise Eleanor becomes a mother substitute.

 

All is well until Nina wishes to profile Eleanor for a class project. Eleanor plays her assumed role so well that Nina’s father wants to profile Eleanor for a news story. Nina is hurt as dear old dad is stealing her story and Eleanor reluctantly agrees to go on the air. As generally happens in movies and in life, the bigger the lie, the deeper the hurt, humiliation, anger, and psychological damage is left in the exposure wake.

 

The problem with a story such as this is how to end it. Johannson wiggles out of it, but only in a sort of way that leaves her open to accusations of schmaltz, romanticism, and contrivance. Each is a valid interpretation of Eleanor the Great. Johannson came in for criticism–some of it unkind. I wonder, though, if the larger problem lies in the genre often tagged comedy-drama. It’s hard to laugh your way out of cultural misappropriation, as many have found out when caught lying about combat experiences, family pedigrees, academic honors, or in the case of ex-Congressman George Santos just about everything! Johannsson and script writer Tory Kamen opted for a soft landing that is sentimental in a mawkish way. Isn’t this a circumstance that calls for drama, not smiles and fluff?

 

For all of this, Eleanor the Great ranks at the top end of so-so movies. Squibb is a portrait of being conflicted but naïve, Kellyman is moving as a broken-hearted not-quite-a-woman, and Ejiofor is convincing as the kind of newsman who eats nails for breakfast. In other words, they work well together because each is distinct. I’m not surprised that most critics found it hard to whip up enthusiasm for the movie, or that the box office was less than $5 million. But if we lash our swords to the wall above the fireplace, Eleanor the Great can be seen as Eleanor the Pretty Good.

 

Rob Weir

 

 

 

 

KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON (2023)

Directed by Martin Scorsese

Apple/Paramount Pictures, 206 minutes, R (violence, language)

★★★★★

 

In the 1920s/30s, Oklahoma’s Osage Indians were the richest people in America. Killers of the Flower Moon reveals the secret of its title in the film’s opening sequence. A medicine man is conducting a ceremony during a flower of the moon ceremony, a coming of spring ritual. In this one, though, there is also a lamentation on the decline of the Osage. As he finishes and shots ring out, one hits a marshy pond, and up from the ground comes a bubbling crude. A 1906 treaty ceded mineral rights to the Osage, and overnight they own one of the richest underground oil reservoirs ever discovered.

 

Killers of the Flower Moon is noteworthy in other ways. It might be the last great film from director Martin Scorsese. It was also a box office bomb for several reasons, not the least of which was Scorsese’s ego. He spent over $200 million dollars on the film and had trouble finding a studio to commit to that sort of budget. Apple Studios finally greenlighted it, but its distribution deal with Paramount Pictures was such that it didn’t stick in theaters for very long. With PR, salaries, residuals, and other costs it needed to yield about $600 million to break even, and its $150 million box office receipts didn’t make a dent in that. It didn’t help that movie was nearly 3 ½ hours long. Many people dodged it for that reason.

 

Yet, Killers of the Flower Moon is one of the best films of the decade. Scorsese wisely based the movie only partly on David Grann’s best-selling book of the same title. Grann focused on how the conning of the Osage gave rise to the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The movie pays attention to this, but turns to the trial notes of Thomas Bruce White Senior (Jesse Plemons).  In practical terms this means the production crew fashioned a movie rather than trying to duplicate the totality of Grann’s non-fiction book. Instead, the film centers on the complicated relationship between Ernest Buckhart (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his Osage bride Mollie Kyle (Lily Gladstone).

 

Ernest is just back from combat in World War One. In 1919, he visits his brother Byron (Scott Shepherd), who works for their uncle William King Hale (Robert DeNiro). Though the Osage are so rich they buy cars and hire chauffeurs to drive them, they are deemed “incompetents” in need of white legal guardians to “manage” their money. Bryon and Ernest engage in direct robberies of Osage people, but discover that more can be made from graft, a talent at which Hale excels. Because the 1921 Tulsa race riot in which 300+ African American citizens were killed is fresh in everyone’s memories, the Osage seek gentler means of persuasion. But when their agent in Washington, D.C. is murdered and Osage bodies begin to proliferate in Oklahoma, tensions rise. This so-called Reign of Terror left more than 100 suspected murder victims, with roughly a third of them eventually traced to Hale. The movie glosses the extent of these, but zeroes in on Mollie’s family. Among the victims are her mother Lizzie Q (Tantoo Cardinal) two of her sisters, several kin, and nearly Mollie.

 

Ernest marries Mollie, just as Bill Smith (singer Jason Isbell) wedded her sister Reta. These marriages were engineered or approved by Hale, but Hale is given a Svengali-like treatment. Smith clearly cherishes Reta (Ja Nae Collins) as Ernest does Mollie. The open question is whether Ernest loves her more than he is afraid of his uncle. Eventually the Bureau of Investigation, the forerunner of the FBI, gets involved with savvy Native agent John Wren (Tatanka Means), prosecutor Peter Leaward (John Lithgow), and numerous others blowing the lid off the scam and murders. In all, there is a huge cast that includes Brendan Fraser and musicians Charlie Musselwhite, Sturgill Simpson, Jack White, and Peter Yorn in acting roles. Scorsese also included more than three dozen Native Americans in his film.

 

President Calvin Coolidge gets a shout out for supporting the investigation, but I won’t it is an absolute travesty that this film was nominated for ten Oscars and won zero, not even Robie Roberston for Best Original Score. The brilliant Lily Gladstone lost the Best Actress Oscar to Emma Stone, who did little more in Poor Things than appear naked. To use a baseball slogan, they wuz robbed.

 

Rob Weir