One of the things I enjoy on this blog is comparing two disparate movies to discuss their similar themes. I've decided to make this a regular feature, and I should clearly start with the Oscar nominated movies. So we have one movie praised as a the culmination of a legendary director's career, and one by a first (and only) time director with a 31% at Rotten Tomatoes. One movie I felt mediocre on, and one that is my secret fave that no one else has seen. One claims to be a historical retelling, the other is a very far fetched fantasy - though probably both are equally believable.
As always, this review will bare all spoilers. One of which has no spoilers, and the other of which whose entire plot is a spoiler.
What do these two have in common that compels me so?1. Whatever else you think of them, they have astounding levels of craftsmanship.
Martin Scorsese CAN in fact take a 3.5 hour tale of an Oklahoma community and make it a tense thriller that is enjoyable to watch. Leo DiCaprio and Robert DeNiro are still at the top of their game, and in particular DeNiro has made "kindly grampa who also orchestrates killing" into what will be a beloved trope. But neither of them touch on fucking first timer Lily Gladstone playing a cypher who is a clever, jaded Native American woman but falls into a trap of love anyway, and can always feel the jaws of death slowly clenching around her community. She absolutely deserves that Oscar.
Whereas Antebellum asks Janelle Monae to carry an entire movie on her back, which she absolutely can. And Jena Malone picks up the slack for the villainous side of things. The production design is so rich and luscious, especially in highlighting evil. The scene transitions between the different settings are creative and great. And everyone who watches this movie HAS to make mention of the opening 5 minute shot that takes us through all the parts of a slave planation.
These are both quality films that are fun to watch and demonstrate real beauty.
2. Both wrestle head on with the historical injustices of racism. And did so in a way that got them a ton of controversy.
This is a rough one. It is clear both movies wanted to tell stories they thought were undertold, of how generations past have suffered and how that still resonates to the present day. It goes without saying that the "anti-woke" part of society (ie. people who have never even consumed some media because someone told them it was social justicey) would avoid these movies.
But the "woke" condemn them too for "white people telling other people's stories" and the awkwardness that entails, and for "exploiting pain and violence of a minority" which becomes the only way that minority is seen. Having seen both movies, I understand where these points are coming from. I don't find these problems ring so loud as to ruin the entire work for me.
I honestly think KotFM suffers more for this. But really because I always have this problem from Scorsese that I can't tell what story he is trying to tell. All of Scorsese's criminal epics have this problem: there isn't an arc so much as a flat line.
"A normal white man is not in any way distinct, just wants to get ahead and make money. He drifts without much agency into making some money illegally, and it works fine because no one in authority cares. He has wild success and lives it up outrageously. Then... some people in authority suddenly do care. And because our criminal was a) an untalented idiot and b) didn't think anyone cared, their crimes are very easily untangled and exposed. Then they get sent to jail, but are unrepentant. In fact the psychology of the central character has never changed the entire time: they were a brute who got lucky until they were a brute who got unlucky."
What are we supposed to take from this? Is our criminal a unique specimen, driven to his misdeeds by special circumstance or tragic upbringing? No, no, the director insists he has no excuse. Ah, so is our criminal the everyman, and any of us could be like him if the dice had rolled differently? No, no, he is specially evil and deserves our spit.
In KotFM this applies to the whole town. The Hale family were killing dozens of Osage members because no one (with authority) cared, so they could get away with it. They would walk up to any homeless man on the street they had never met before and ask "Say, will you kill my sister in law for me?" The hired thugs were always cowards and idiots, so they'd be caught the second any real law enforcement turned up, and they'd flip on the people who hired them.
In fact, that becomes the most confusing part of the story. Some white people think the Native American life has no value, and will conspire about killing them and covering it up without a second thought. But other white people think this is a terrible crime, and will be unrelenting in pursuing it. And there is incredibly little difference shown between these people. The hardest part of this movie is keeping track of "is this white man one of the killers, or someone trying to stop the killers?" Who could tell the difference between Ernest's brother (bad) and brother-in-law (good)?
You could say "not being able to tell this is what makes being a person of color so scary" and touche, but this particular telling feels like more of a cop out than that. It wants to present both "white people are so casually evil..." and "... that other white people feel they have to stop them."
(This is made very explicit in the most comedic scene, where one white man is asking a lawyer on the legality of adopting two half-Indian children, becoming their next of kin, and then killing them to get the money. The lawyer is appalled and the criminal can't understand. But the directing bypasses the implication that the lawyer WAS a part of a healthy society that does not approve of the murder of children.)
Neither movie satisfies either the woke or anti-woke, and as such most ideologically-driven people in the ever churning culture wars won't end up watching it. Which really is a pity.
3. They are at heart stories of class envy.
The thing that struck me most about these tales of racism is how much they are about class. Both movies feature rich, or at least respectable and successful, minorities and show how much white people seethe at this wealth as unjust. They are not universalist movies about how "no person deserves oppression, every person has dignity" but are demands to "see that these people are rich and high-status, regardless of the color of their skin.
This is not to say anything in either movie DOES say you should degrade poor people. It's just they find it more important to say "how can you degrade this person? They're rich damnit!" (And all good imperial colonizers know, the way to control a population is to get their leaders more concerned with their own elite status than with solidarity with their own poor.)
My favorite part of Antebellum is dead in the middle, a classic Mike Yanagita scene that leaves you wondering what the point of that was. Janelle Monae, her black lady friend and her white lady friend, go out to a fancy restaurant. At some point a man sends them over a drink, and her black friend sends it back because it is too low class and "we are champagne ladies." Eventually they leave and take separate Ubers. Nothing else of note happens.
For one thing, it is deliciously tense. At this point we know Monae will be kidnapped, and we're waiting to see how. So every moment is filled with a little dread and anticipation as we wonder "is this how they get her?" And all three actresses are quite good at such comedic dialogue. Fun times.
But what really makes the scene fit with the movie is all the class security. They are trying to insist so hard to the world that "we are high status, even if we are Black!" (As part of the scene, the two Black friends comment that the hotel staff is brusque and rude to them. The white friend says she didn't notice anything rude. The two Black friends share A Look. No mention is made of how hotel staff would treat people who can't afford their fancy rooms.)
An editorial note to be clear: these characters are not wrong. Treating someone who is rich (or well educated, or talented) like they aren't just because of the color of their skin IS a form of racism. And if it happened to you, you'd be rightly furious. It's just also true that if we end the day just by treating rich Black people like rich white people, most forms of inequality will persist.
It's impossible to analyze these movies without being pulled to the dread specter of Tulsa. What caused the furious explosion of violence wasn't just racism, but racism mixed with "eat the rich" class envy. "You mean they drive fancy cars while cutting my wages, AND they're Black!!!!" Which is not to say "this is a righteous socialist act", but rather that "it will be very hard for a minority to get a foothold in the American power structure if we burn them down every time they get wealth like cutting tall poppies."
4. Both movies highlight the absurd denialism of a villain's fantasy.
This one is a bit of a stretch, but I could not resist.
One of the biggest controversies of KotFM has been the compartmentalized image of Ernest Burkhart. In the movie (and some historical tellings), he tenderly loved his wife while slaughtering her people. And I guess that sort of character, who learns the Osage language while raising his half-Osage children, but also participates in systemic oppression, could be an interesting contrast for a tragic character.
But for Ernest? Just no. He kills his wife's sisters. He poisons his wife too. Maybe that's a sort of love, but it's a creepy possessive love at the very most. These are not the actions of a tender or caring normal man. Which either means their marriage was pretty unhealthy, OR Ernest was several standard deviations from normality, which cuts against Scorsese's "we all are guilty" message.
Whereas the brokenness of Antebellum's fantasy is its most interesting part.
The secret of the movie's setting is that white supremacist Civil War reenactors are kidnapping "uppity" black people (professors, famous artists) and imprisoning them on a fake plantation, basically to fill out their Antebellum LARP.
... the quick-witted among you will notice that you can't have confederate soldiers AND be "antebellum."
And the movie is full of this. The reenactors are rich and obsessed enough to get all the set design details for their little fantasy, but there are so many ways the fantasy can not be sustained. Soldiers keep their cell phones on them and they ring at inappropriate times. The Black prisoners keep mentioning their real life even though it carries a penalty of death. The slaves are kept at night in wooden sheds with open doors.
... which is very dumb, because any of the kidnapped victims if they run away, know there's towns and news crews just a few miles away if they can just get there. The reason chattel slaves of the 19th century didn't run away, was because there was just nowhere to go. To keep people nowadays, you'd have to build an actual modern day prison. But that would ruin the genteel fantasy.
It's warped to say all these anachronisms are the funniest part in a movie where men watch their wives burned to death. It is often a godawful experience. But the grisly inhumanity of it, that makes no sense even on its face, is kind of the point.
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