One glance at the man who has come to court this young woman tells us something is wrong, but her admiring gaze suggests she simply can’t see it. Sometimes those who are in the gravest danger never do until it’s too late.
This is the first image of Lily Gladstone and Leonardo DiCaprio from the upcoming Martin Scorsese film Killers of the Flower Moon for Apple Studios. The film is based on the best-selling nonfiction book about a staggering series of “accidents,” poisonings, and shootings that killed members of the Osage Indian nation in the 1920s—most of them beneficiaries of a windfall of wealth after oil was discovered on their Oklahoma reservation.
Gladstone, best known for her role of the rancher in director Kelly Reichardt’s 2016 film Certain Women and the Showtime series Billions, stars as Mollie Kyle, an Osage woman who was heir to one such fortune. DiCaprio, reteaming with Scorsese for a sixth time, plays Ernest Burkhart, the nephew of powerful rancher William Hale (fellow Scorsese veteran Robert De Niro) who used brute force to control his corner of Oklahoma, which at that point had only been a state for a little over a decade. The law was basically what people like him said it was.
The Osage tribe settled there after decades of suffering and persecution. Forced from their homelands in Missouri and Arkansas on the Trail of Tears in the mid-1800s, along with tens of thousands of other Indigenous people, they were nearly exterminated before signing a treaty with the U.S. government in 1865 that allowed them to purchase tracts of hardscrabble land in northeast Oklahoma. The territory was described as so inhospitable that no one else would want it. That meant they might finally be left alone.
Then crude oil was discovered under the land in 1894. The Osage went from shortages of food and medicine to a literal eruption of wealth, tens of millions of dollars annually, thanks to the fuel-hungry industrialization sweeping the country that had so long harassed, uprooted, and killed them. But now they had something worth taking again.
This set the stage for a series of targeted killings that terrorized the Osage people as power brokers like Hale sought to seize control of those oil rights. As author David Grann chronicled in his 2017 book, it wasn’t possible for these Great Plains gangsters to kill their way into these riches. Only by marrying into the tribe could the rights be legally claimed by outsiders.
It’s a conspiracy so chilling in its calculation and premeditation that it seems inhuman. “What really got to me was the intrinsic sense of evil. What is it in us that makes us capable of committing these acts of evil,” Scorsese said when he met with Osage Nation’s Principal Chief Geoffrey Standing Bear in 2019.
That brings us back to this dining room, as DiCaprio’s Burkhart attempts to woo Gladstone’s Kyle, wrapped snugly in her wearing blanket and gazing at him with what looks to be hearts in her eyes. In 1917, they were married. In the years that followed, many of Mollie’s closest family members would die under violent or mysterious circumstances, consolidating wealth in her hands. Meanwhile, her husband and his family’s cold-blooded scheme closed around her.
The casting of Mollie has been the subject of intense interest to the people of Osage Nation. “She must put herself in [Mollie’s] world, how does someone know what part of the Osage ways to keep, what to put away, what western ways to adopt or resist or more importantly, who to trust, who to love or who to hate?” Jim Gray, former chief of the Osage Nation, wrote last summer on the news site Indianz. “God, I hope she’s Native.”
In February, Scorsese announced the casting of Gladstone, whose First Nation heritage comes from her father, who is Kainai (also known as the Blood Tribe of southern Alberta, Canada), Amskapi Pikuni (a.k.a. the Blackfeet Tribe) and Nimi’ipuu (the Nez Perce Tribe of the Pacific Northwest). She lived until she was 11 on the Blackfeet Indian Reservation in Montana, after which her family moved to Seattle.
The Link LonkMay 10, 2021 at 11:10PM
https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2021/05/killers-of-the-flower-moon-first-look
First Look: Leonardo DiCaprio and Lily Gladstone in ‘Killers of the Flower Moon’ - Vanity Fair
https://news.google.com/search?q=Flower&hl=en-US&gl=US&ceid=US:en
No comments:
Post a Comment