October Offerings Part 2: Killers of the Flower Moon & Cassandro

Next up in October, I watched one movie that was three and a half hours long and purported to be about Native Americans while really mostly just being about white dudes, and another that was an hour and a half long and focused on the world of Mexican wrestling and a gay man who was trying to break barriers as an "exotico." Both are based on true stories, and no points for guessing which film proved to be far more entertaining and compelling.

Killers of the Flower Moon: Sigh. I watched this movie just to get it over with. And I swear I went in with hope. I wanted this to be the kind of three and a half hour movie that is truly worth it, something where you go into the cinema and come out transformed and awed. But no, halfway through I started looking at the time and wondering why I was still trapped in the theater.

This film is Martin Scorsese's adaptation of David Grann's book of the same name. Set in the 1920s, this is the story of how a number of Osage Native Americans were killed in Oklahoma as part of a plot to get their oil rights. At the time, the Osage Nation was incredibly wealthy following the discovery of oil on their tribal land, but a crime boss named William King Hale (played very effectively by Robert De Niro) came up with a scheme to murder several members of the tribe and inherit their rights via his nephew Ernest (Leonardo DiCaprio, playing a both weaselly and hapless man to excruciatingly good effect) who was married to an Osage woman, Mollie Kyle (Lily Gladstone, a phenomenal actress who unfortunately spends most of this movie weeping as more of her relatives die tragically).

Look, I get that Scorsese thinks he started with a movie that was about two white dudes and he managed to actually incorporate a great deal more about Osage culture and tradition and make it "diverse." But at the end of the day, this is still just a movie about two murderous white dudes and the Native Americans are mostly hapless victims being exploited by colonizers. And yes, that is the history of America in a nutshell, but why not tell this story from Mollie's point of view instead? Also, not for nothing, but I had to do a lot of research to even understand the beginning of this film and how the Osage got all this wealth. Why not spend more time exploring that backstory that is exclusively Native American before we spend an interminable three and half hours with DiCaprio and De Niro bumbling their way through some gruesome murders and courtroom drama? This movie absolutely did not need to be this long - there was not enough plot to sustain it, and it was bloated and self-indulgent. Marty, you tried, but you failed.

Cassandro: Directed by Roger Ross Williams from a script he wrote with David Teague, this is a beautiful movie about the real-life lucha libre Mexican wrestler, Saul Armendariz (played with much heart and warmth by the always reliable Gael Garcia Bernal). In the early 1980s, Saul lived in El Paso, Texas but regularly crossed the border to wrestle as a character named El Topo in lucha libre matches. But after meeting a trainer named Sabrina (the equally amazing Roberta Colindrez), she suggests that he might be more suited to wrestling as an "exotico," a wrestler who performs in drag and incorporates feminine movements and gimmicks as they wrestle. 

Saul is openly gay, and the world of lucha libre is pretty explicitly homophobic, with people routinely yelling out slurs during matches and deriding the exotico wrestlers. Also, Saul's main argument against wrestling as an exotico is that they are never allowed to win. Nonetheless, Sabrina convinces him to give it a try, and thus, the character of Cassandro is born.

You have to watch the film to understand the transformation that takes place. There's some exquisite stunt choreography at play, and at its core, this is a story of how you can only be the most powerful version of yourself when you embrace who you really are. Cassandro brings such a wild and joyful energy to his matches that the crowd is swept away, and before you know it, people aren't screaming the f-word at him, and are rather chanting for him to win the match. This is a great biopic, destined to make you smile, and a reminder of how we always need more positive stories about people who break barriers and make the world see that there's nothing to fear by being different. And it's only an hour and a half long, so really, you have absolutely nothing to lose. Cassandro! Cassandro!