About a century ago, in the early 1920s, it was discovered that, in Pawhuska, a forgotten corner of Oklahoma (United States), where the white man had condemned the Osage Indian nation to live, there existed, under the soil, the greatest wealth of the moment: oil. Black gold in abundance. And so, as if it were a lottery, the subsoil of that poor land turned the displaced indigenous people into millionaires.
The existence of oil unleashed the envy – and ambition – of the whites and inaugurated a reign of terror of which the full consequences are still not known. It is estimated that, in those years, nearly a hundred Osage people were murdered at the hands of neighbors and even relatives, since the indigenous people had no problems marrying the white invaders. Not even the whites saw any problem in becoming the family of those millionaire aboriginals. A young man named J. Edgar Hoover led that investigation, and from his work arose the seeds of what would eventually, in 1935, be called the FBI: the famous Federal Bureau of Information that Hoover himself would head for decades in a form very doubtful.
There is the starting point of The Moon Killers, by Martin Scorsese, whose world premiere took place at the last Cannes festival and is now hitting theaters (before settling on Apple, the television platform that financed the project. ). The new film from the director of Taxi Driver and Raging Bull, among other milestones of modern cinema, is based on the investigative work of writer and journalist David Grann. A careful and inspired non-fiction book published by Random House, with the same title as Scorsese's film, and which, as a literary work, has the eloquent subtitle of “Oil, Money, Homicide, and the Creation of the FBI.”
Scorsese, at eighty years old, had been trying to confront the tragedy of the Native Americans for some time. At least since, in the seventies, he began working on a project with Marlon Brando about the Wounded Knee massacre, where hundreds of Indians died at the hands of the United States army. That project did not materialize.
Since then Scorsese has never wanted to make a typical Western, despite the fact that the Western, as a genre, is at the beginning of his love for cinema. Since, at least, his mother, when he was less than ten years old, took him to see Duel in the Sun (1946): the first film that the New York director remembers ever seeing in a movie theater. A film that Scorsese himself has recalled, on multiple occasions, the impact it had on him. Due to the use and abuse of saturated colors, its violent music and a hysterical melodrama marked by a current of latent sensuality. “My mother always said that she had taken me to see it because I liked westerns, and it was true, but I think that in reality she was the one who wanted to see it because the Church had condemned that King Vidor film. The truth is that, without really knowing why, I came out of that screening transformed,” Scorsese himself recalled in a Newsweek article.
In addition to being an unconventional western, perhaps a western that isn't even a western in reality, The Moon Killers is very much a romantic thriller. A story, at least, based on love that, with such precedents of death and murder, rests on the betrayal of all that. In short, an epic, complex story, difficult to classify. Marked by greed, racism and love. An ambitious film, of course. With a budget of more than two hundred million dollars and three and a half hours long.
To make it, Scorsese has once again counted on two of his most frequent collaborators. Two of his, we could say, male muses. One is Robert De Niro, of course. He couldn't be anyone else. Throughout his long career, De Niro has starred in Scorsese gems such as Taxi Driver (1976), Raging Bull (1980), One of Our Own (1990) and Casino (1995), among many others. Until we get to The Irishman (2019), Scorsese's penultimate film so far. The other actor, almost thirty years apart from De Niro, but also a regular in Scorsese's films, is Leonardo DiCaprio. The protagonist of titles such as Gangs of New York (2002), The Aviator (2004), Shutter Island (2010) or the most recent collaboration between the two, The Wolf of Wall Street (2013).
Scorsese had collaborated with the two actors on more than half a dozen previous occasions, but he had never managed to bring them both together in a common project. The cast is completed with big names such as John Lithgow, with two Oscar nominations, and Brendan Fraser, Oscar for his work in The Whale (2022), by Darren Aronofsky. But the real surprise of the film has been given, according to all the comments prior to its release, by the almost debutante Lily Gladstone, an actress of Native American origin who, until now, in film, had only participated in Certain Women (2016) by Kelly Reichardt.
Gladstone plays Mollie, the rich indigenous heiress, who falls in love with Ernest (DiCaprio), a young white man who arrives in Pawhuska, after passing through the First World War, with no more relationship to the place than his uncle William Hale, played by Robert De Niro. Like many of the events narrated in the film, the story of Mollie and Ernest is real. The couple had three children in the midst of all that death and in the midst of the suspicion that surrounded them as a family. “His story is not as simple as the confrontation between a victim and her executioner, no,” Scorsese has declared in successive presentations. “Despite all those deaths suspected of being incited by money, they were both a family and were in love.”
The Osage Nation, as a whole, has participated in the filming. Many of the characters seen on the screen and some of those who were behind the camera, such as technicians, are descendants of the people who were actually involved in the story. It took Scorsese years to gain the trust of the Osage and to understand their culture. The director did not want, he has said, “for his true voice to be lost.”
In the film, violence plays a major role, but in a less obvious way than in Taxi Driver, One of Our Own or even Raging Bull, those films that helped cement Scorsese's reputation as a director of violence. In The Assassins of the Moon, a fury that is more intuited than evident, one could say, prevails. In line with the nature of a relationship like the one between the couple DiCaprio and Lily Gladstone, where the tenderness of certain moments of intimacy gives way to suspicion due to so much death that surrounds them.
Despite being financed by a television platform like Apple, The Moon Killers was born, in the words of Scorsese himself, with the desire to bring people back to cinema. The Italian-American director trusts that films with a monumental feel, such as Oppenheimer or the imminent Napoleon, by Ridley Scott, or his own, will make the audience rediscover the taste for the big screen. For a long time, in his opinion, cinemas have been dominated by superheroes, a genre for which he has lost no opportunity to demonstrate his disdain. “Richness and depth have been lacking in recent cinema,” Scorsese said convinced at the presentation of The Moon Killers in Cannes.
