Ettore Scola has a sentence about the seventh art that is quite an enigma: "Cinema is a painted mirror". However, it often reflects life in all its realism, albeit colored by the artist's palette. This weekend saw the release of Els assassins de la luna, which is one of those films that reconciles you with cinema because of the story they tell, the actors' dialogues and the pace of the plot. And because the protagonists and the director are splendid. Seeing full movie theaters again convinces us that our world resists, that it has not yet completely collapsed.
The film's budget was 200 million. It is, therefore, a blockbuster like those of the past, with magnificent actors such as Robert De Niro, Leonardo DiCaprio, Lily Gladstone or Brendan Fraser, directed by Martin Scorsese, who makes a cameo in the last scenes. It's three and a half hours that pass quickly. The screenplay, based on a novel by David Grann (best book 2017 according to Amazon), tells the story of the serial murders in an Oklahoma tribe (the Osage Nation), which the discovery of oil on its land makes into a millionaire, but at the same time it makes it the target of unscrupulous ambitious people. It is a film about events from a century ago that shows us that the human condition has changed little. Greed, racism and injustice are still present in our societies.
There are brilliant phrases in the film, but few as current as one that Ernest (DiCaprio) says: "Sometimes you have to do one thing when you want to do another". A maxim that would be valid for the politics of our time, in which what we are promised and what happens in the end are not at all similar. In fact, this sentence recalls another one from One of Ours, where De Niro and Scorsese agreed, when the former proclaims that for him being a gangster is much better than being president of the United States. Because? Because nothing, and no one, determines their behavior. In Els assassins de la luna the protagonist could not be more current: he is a man who cannot get his sense of morality to prevail over his ambitions. Something that is also typical of those who command us in our days.
