s Balzac wrote in ‘Pere Goriot’: “The secret of great fortunes without apparent cause is a crime forgotten, for it was properly done.”

In Killers of the Flower Moon, Martin Scorsese lays bare the genocide against Native Americans that is a foundational ground of this nation.

This crime was commi-tted by not by an individual, but by a system that got away with it through a series of acts of Congress, that through their different stages justified killings and displacements, but more importantly, through rewri-ting the narrative of the country.

This historical re-write was present in much of the mythology of Westerns that Scorsese enjoyed while growing up, and that now he unveils, true to his methods, through a character uncom-fortable in his own skin and tormented by the amorality that justifies his actions.

But, as opposed to the visceral approach of most of his films, Scorsese has chosen a distant and reflec-tive stance, favoring atmos-phere over narrative, denying us the easy satisfaction of moral superiority to the men on screen who managed to justify their hideous betra-yals of their loved ones and still pretend to have a soul, and confronting audiences with the sin by omission that must rightfully haunt the American soul.

– Alfonso Cuaron has directed such films as Roma, Gravity and “Children of Men.

Courtesy: Variety.com