Trudging Back to the Well

On rewatching movies I don't like.

I saw Killers of the Flower Moon in November, the day it opened in theaters. As I got into my car afterward, a friend called. How was it? he wanted to know.

I took a moment to answer. “It was a respectable effort with many fine qualities,” I said finally.

“Uh-oh,” my friend said.

I sighed. “Yeah. Pretty much.”

Over the next days and weeks, it became clear that I was way out of step with critical and popular consensus, which normally wouldn’t bother me except that this time I actually agreed with many of the specific bits of praise. It was well-acted and shot and edited; it’s just that all of those virtues still didn’t add up to a great movie. The things that bothered me about Killers of the Flower Moon kept nagging at me off and on, until just a few days ago I did what I sometimes do with movies I don’t like, something I suspected even back in November that I would end up doing with this one: I sat down and watched it again.

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My propensity to rewatch movies I don’t like started in the late 80s with Philip Kaufman’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being. At seventeen, it bored me to death. I just wanted to see hot Europeans having melancholy sex; who cared about the Prague Spring, or Tomas’s political persecution, or Sabina’s mopey affair with boring old Franz (who was considerably younger then than I am now)? Afterwards, I lit my Gauloise¹ with a sense of having been mildly victimized.

But I also couldn’t stop thinking about it. I was bothered by not liking it. I knew my hyper focus on the sex stuff was kind of, well, teenage, that the boring parts (aka the other seventy-five percent) were in the movie for a reason and that if I could understand the reason, maybe I would understand the film. And somehow, my gut said the effort would be worth it.

So I cut school a few weeks later for a matinee rewatch, which didn’t really take. But two years later, I read Milan Kundera’s original book while home from college over Christmas. It was ostensibly a novel, but it felt more like a book-length essay with some fictional characters tossed in. I didn’t fully understand it, and I could have done with less of the rumination on kitsch. But mostly it enthralled me. And when I returned to the film for a third time, it enthralled me too. I know Kundera disagreed, but I think Kaufman’s film is a masterpiece, funny and sexy and bleak and enveloping. I can’t imagine my life without it.

And getting to that point taught me something important about movies: that they change according to who we are and what we know when we watch them.

Like Unbearable Lightness, some of my rewatches happen because I see and hate a movie before I’m actually ready for it. Say Anything, a teen film that I think takes some life experience to fully appreciate, entered my personal canon as a rewatch. So did the films of Eric Rohmer. My first, Boyfriends and Girlfriends, struck me on first watch at age twenty as one of the worst movies I had ever seen. And in hindsight, I understand why. It’s a romantic comedy with no jokes, no meet-cute, no giddy needle drops. No soundtrack at all! The characters sat around and talked forever about nothing. God, I hated it.

But a few years later, the lone art-house theater in my college town showed Rohmer’s Four Adventures of Reinette and Mirabelle, and I really wanted to see a movie, and so I gave the director of the worst film I had ever seen a second chance…and was thoroughly charmed. Maybe I just needed to learn how to watch Rohmer, I decided. So—ever the bookish girl— off I went to do more reading. Once I understood that the dryness and seemingly aimless chatter were the point with Rohmer, that this was “romantic comedy” cut down to the size and pace of real life, I fell. Hard. Truth be told, I still think Boyfriends and Girlfriends is lesser Rohmer. But it’s part of his world, and there’s not much I love more than living in an Eric Rohmer universe, now that I understand its rules.

And then sometimes I rewatch a movie I dislike because I want to see what I can see now that I’m freed from watching for story. I didn’t outright dislike Barry Jenkins’s Moonlight the first time I saw it, but it underwhelmed relative to the hype. Ugh, not another crack-mom movie I thought to myself. Not another kid who might choose the wrong path. (I’m fully aware of how cynical I sound, but I want to tell you the truth.) It wasn’t until the third act, the diner scene, that I felt like I was seeing something new.

But weeks later, a Facebook friend wrote at length about how Jenkins used his camera—not just to photograph black skin in a way most cameras fail to capture, but to create a “black gaze.” As someone who had spent literally decades yammering about the female gaze in film, I realized it was, uh, extremely white of me to overlook this aspect. Dammit, I thought, and trudged back to the theater, where I was now able to watch the how of Jenkins’s storytelling, not just the what. It was low-key revelatory. And a year or so later, watching it with my husband, it all gelled. “Jesus, that was great,” I said in surprise as the credits rolled.

“I thought you’d already seen it,” John said.

“I thought I had too,” I said.

Is Moonlight one of my all-time faves, or even my favorite Jenkins work? Nah². But do I love it? Oh, yes. For itself and for the way it helped teach me how to watch other black-gaze films, movies made both by and for black people, where white audiences can’t expect hand-holding or for the usher to distribute a little laminated glossary. I get a lot of joy and challenge and pleasurable confusion out of those films now. And strange as it sounds, going back to Moonlight in a state of mild disappointment was the key. Maybe I see more clearly without hope.

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So here’s my problem with Killers of the Flower Moon: there’s no suspense. From very early on, we know exactly who the bad guys are, what they’re doing, why they’re doing it, and how they’re getting away with it. On first watch, I was dumbfounded that Scorsese hadn’t let the mystery unfold through Mollie Burkhart’s point of view. I mean, here is this confident, wealthy, self-aware woman whose friends and sisters are dropping like flies, and who gets sicker and sicker herself. We know from the outside that she’s starting to put two and two together, but I wanted to see it through her eyes, to discover it along with her. ³

So by the beginning of the third hour, I was frustrated and a little bored with watching an organized-crime ring do its thing over and over while an increasingly weak and hollow-eyed Mollie just kind of watched. I wanted to be in her head, not mouth-breathing Ernest’s. And the final hour, with an underused Jesse Plemons and a seriously miscast Brendan Fraser, didn’t do much to bring me back. (As for the epilogue, I still don’t know what I think. Check back with me in a few years.)

And yet as with Unbearable Lightness, I had a craving to understand. But The Discourse was disappointingly simplistic: an important slice of history that deserved to be told. A searing indictment of injustice. The usual. Finally, a comment from film blogger and friend Tony Kuzminski gave me something to chew on. Tony said he could trace a through line in many of Scorsese’s films, from The Wolf of Wall Street to The Irishman to Killers, about how white people—white men, especially—are seduced into evil behavior that they genuinely believe is justified. As Scorsese aged, Tony saw him becoming more and more direct about this theme. Scorsese hadn’t centered the Osage because Killers wasn’t really about them, Tony said. It was more about how white people did what we did to them and got away with it for so long, and that was why Scorsese put the evil acts front and center, made us watch them over and over.

WELL NOW. I wasn’t sure I agreed, but here was at least an idea I could chew on, and I had it in mind when I cued up Killers on streaming the other night. And you know what? I think Tony’s onto something. I think Killers is in part a film about the daily slog of organized crime. To be clear, the daily slog involves the systematic dehumanization and plundering of a people, but the men involved don’t see it that way. They think they’re just, you know, looking after their wives. Ensuring resources are passed down to the proper stewards. Inheriting what’s theirs. When the feds finally come calling, the men are genuinely, almost comically stunned to be in the crosshairs. How can it be, when all they’ve done is help?

I still don’t think Killers is a great film, but it’s better now than it was in November. And isn’t it almost magical, the way a single set of images arranged in a specific order can become a whole new thing? And all because you looked at them again.

1. I was an unbearable teenager, yes.

2. If Beale Street Could Talk is my #1, though Medicine for Melancholy is also pretty wonderful. Same goes for The Underground Railroad. He’s just never made a bad film.

3. An aside: I did see complaints about this online, but they mostly felt like pat political statements about how Scorsese should have centered the Osage because it was just the right thing to do. And you know, fair enough, just like you could fairly say that the entire story would have been better in the hands of an indigenous filmmaker, maybe with Scorsese’s sponsorship as executive producer. But without digging deeper into how that would change the film as a work of art, such statements feel like bumper stickers to me. I might nod in agreement with a bumper sticker, but thirty seconds later I will have forgotten I ever saw it. So when it comes to questions of who has the right to tell a story and how that story should be framed, I’m not that interested in what’s proper or right. I’m interested in whether it works.

Also, Scorsese was clearly trying to avoid making another Mississippi Burning. He inverted the structure of David Grann’s book to de-emphasize the US government’s investigation, which could have felt a bit white-saviory. His portrayal of white greed and racism is unflinching. And yet he still chose to back-burner the Osage woman who is the most interesting person in the movie. Why? Maybe I’m naive, but I think it’s likely for more complex, intentional reasons than ‘because’s he white’ or ‘because he doesn’t care about women.’ No, he’s not one of our great poets of female experience—at all— but I can’t watch The Age of Innocence, Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, Goodfellas, Casino, or even The King of Comedy and come away thinking Marty just doesn’t think women are interesting.