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

 

 

Avery, Gottlieb and Rothko in Gloucester

 

 

 

AVERY, GOTTLIEB & ROTHKO: BY THE SEA

Cape Ann Museum

Gloucester, MA (Ending September 27)

 

 

Adolphe Gottlieb "Over and Under" 

  

The above show is likely to end before most of you can get to Gloucester but if you can, be sure to see it. I wouldn’t call it my favorite art show of the year, but it’s certainly high on the list of the most intriguing. 

 

Milton Avery, "Gloucester Dawn," 1921

  

On the surface, these three would seem an unlikely match. Milton Avery (1885-1965) is best known for his throwback pre-Renaissance painting style, one that deliberately flattens the canvas. Avery is one of the preeminent colorists of American painting. There are discernible objects and people on the canvas, but he paid little attention to what their “natural” color should be. Faces are often blank or rendered so quickly that details dissolve into a mass of whatever color he chooses. You can read into them any expression that you wish, but most people say that they evoke calmness. His work is sometimes compared to that of Ernst Kirchner, though to my eye Avery’s work seems joyful and Kirchner’s danger and doom. Avery also painted domestic scenes and collaborated with his artist-wife Sally Michel Avery.

 

 

 

Mark Rothko. Wharf, 1924 

 

The most famous of the trio was Mark Rothko (1903-70) who was also the most polarizing of the three. His earliest inspirations were Paul Klee and Henri Matisse, but he was perhaps even more influenced by psychologists Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. The stereotype of Rothko, though, is that he only painted colors. Before you actually stand before such works you might think, “What’s the big deal? My 5-year-old could paint a canvas that’s all black.” No; he couldn’t! And no; Rothko was not mono-dimensional. More on this in a moment. 

 

Gottlieb, Boxes on the Beach, 1938

 

 

I confess that the name Adolphe Gottlieb (1903-74) was merely one I ran across from time to time, but knew little about. He was the founder of The Ten, a group that did much to popularize abstract expressionism. His pictographs caught my eye. To me they evince what you might get if you mixed sea motifs with Aboriginal and Japanese art. This, I hasten to add, is my emotional response to his works, not something you’d learn in Art 100.

 

So how do you hang a show of three artists who don’t immediately seem relatable? We can start with the fact that three were great friends. The show in Gloucester is there because all three came to Cape Ann during summers in the 1920s into the 1940s. Why Gloucester? Because it was several of the dozens of art colonies that thrived during the Depression and war years. It’s amusing the think of this now, but locales in the east alone such as Ogunquit, Gloucester, Provincetown, the White Mountains, the Brandywine region of Pennsylvania, Saratoga Springs, the Hudson River Valley, and sections of New York City were filled with artists who came there because they were cheap places to live! If you look in the right places, you can make out small shacks in which they lived (especially in the Perkins Cove section of Ogunquit, Maine).

 

Another important thing to keep in mind is that where artists end up often bears little resemblance to where they started. Avery, Rothko, and Gottlieb were all realists at one stage of their career; all three eventually embraced abstract expressionism, a term whose very ambiguity tells you something. Once one stops trying to paint realistically, new ways of seeing open up. Rothko, for instance, was once a member of the Industrial Workers of the World and could have spent his career as a propagandist. But then he went to Gloucester to paint boats and crashing waters. Next, he was a surrealist, but his career arc was one of simplification. Why not paint three color swatches for a beach, water, and sky?

 

Below I offer several paintings from each artist. I start with the ones that are most “realistic” (another loaded word) and end with one of their later works. Even if you can’t get to Gloucester, you’ll see their work elsewhere. What do they express for you?

 

 

Milton Avery: Confession: He's a favorite of mine! 

 

Portrait of Rothko 1933

 

Shore Sitters, late 1930s

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 Mark Rothko

 

 

 

You've seen how he started. What do you make of these?
 

 

 

           

 

Sand, Ocean, Sky

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

 

 

Adolphe Gottlieb 

 

Rockport, 1934

Mariners Incantation, 1945

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Forgotten Dream, 1946 

Note: the top photo is a Gottlieb work from 1959 

 

Hidden History Uncloaked in The Night Birds

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

THE NIGHT BIRDS (2007)

By Thomas Maltman

SoHo Publishing, 370 pages.

★★★★★

 

There are many books named The Night Birds, but the one to read is from Thomas Maltman, which was published in 2007. To call it a different kind of Western doesn’t do it justice.

 

First a quiz: Name the president who declined to stop the largest single-day execution in American history. Answer: Abraham Lincoln. It wasn’t traitorous Confederates dancing on the end of ropes. On December 26, 1862, 38 Dakota Sioux warriors were hanged in response to a clash between Natives and German settlers near Mankato, Minnesota. Maltman uses the Sioux uprising in his work of fiction, but also did his homework. As an old TV series once put, “Only the names have been changed to protect the innocent.”

 

Our narrator is Asa Senger, a lonely boy in 1876. An elderly Dakota Sioux man is found near a Kingdom Township home. This touches off fear in the area, though the man is a frail, trader. Minnesota was once a dangerous place for whites to be, even in areas where whites and Natives lived in relative peace. Though Asa was born in a few months after the uprising of 1862, his parents remain wary and retain their animus against the Sioux. Into Asa’s life comes Aunt Hazel, his mother sister. She has been in an asylum for 14 years because of her epilepsy. Bromide had been used to control epilepsy since 1861, but it took years for this knowledge to make its way into remote areas. The Sengers only reluctantly accept guardianship over Hazel and she is mostly confined to an attic room. Asa is warned that his aunt is delusional.

 

Asa, though, grows curious of his aunt, who tells him stories but swears him to secrecy. What tales she tells! At this point I should warn readers that both Germans and the Sioux had a penchant for recycling names, the Germans believing they paid homage to deceased relatives by naming babies after them, and mystical Sioux believing the spirits of the dead can be reborn. Hazel had a brother named Asa who died in the1862 massacre, along with both of her parents. The Senger family lived across a small river from a Sioux encampment and young Hazel slowly cultivated Sioux playmates. Her parents regularly traded with the Sioux. Though suspicious of each other, a fragile truce prevailed. Hazel learned some Dakota and grew close to Wanikiya, a boy roughly her age, who grows up to be an important person amongst the Dakota. Asa also learns that Wanikiya killed his “Uncle Asa” and that Hazel was a captive during the war. Her story is certainly not in keeping with the many so-called “captive narratives” that proliferated from Colonial period through the 19^th century.

 

The Night Birds is a multi-generational family story that, in its own unique way, is a melting pot story. Reading it will enlighten you about American history, peels back hidden cowboys-and-Indians myths, and shows how easy it is for victors to reinvent the past. At a time in which immigrants are imperiled in the United States, it also raises questions about who and what an American is. It is noteworthy that the Senger family had to flee Missouri because of their abolitionist views, yet somehow don’t connect the dots regarding Native Americans.

 

Maltman’s novel is filled with small details that help readers imagine life on the edge of the frontier. Maltman makes us contemplate what it would be like to plow land that has never seen a blade and to live where you nearest neighbors don’t look, dress, or speak like you. He also subtly juxtaposes individuals and circumstances. There is scalping, but it’s often done by white bounty hunters or in war as trophies. In a book in which Young Asa encounters Jesse James, who is a “savage,” the Dakotas who killed Asa’s forebears or the ruthless James-Younger gang?

 

Perhaps it’s best to muse upon the book’s title. The “night birds” are not owls or hawks; they are nocturnal nightjars, small fowl slightly bigger than sparrows who sleep during the day, roost on the ground, and are so well camouflaged you could be on top of one and never see it.  The are insectivores, but their prolonged call and trill is downright eerie. Now think of life with minimal illumination.

 

Forget books with similar titles; this older novel is one of the best books I’ve read this year.

 

Rob Weir