The Color of Money

Look, everyone wants to talk about how this film mourns the Osage, but can we discuss how beige everything gets when Ernest arrives? The palette shifts from those gorgeous oil-soaked blues and blacks to this oppressive dusty nothing, and it stays there for three and a half hours.
Actually, that's unfair.

The oil fountain sequence commits so hard to its visual metaphor it almost wraps back around to working. Rodrigo Prieto shoots those men dancing in crude like it's holy water, which, fine, money as baptism, we get it. But then watch how he drains saturation from every scene where white people infiltrate Osage spaces. The wedding sequence particularly, all that forced joy rendered in washed-out yellows while Jacqueline West's costume department apparently decided everyone should dress like potato sacks. Mollie's traditional clothing becomes noticeable because her surroundings show evidence of illness.

The white Stetson hat continues to stay in my mind. You know, the one Mollie gives Ernest that sits wrong on his stupid head. West demonstrates her understanding of the situation through this scene but she makes all subsequent hats Ernest wears look excessively perfect. These are supposedly rough men doing rough things but their clothes never show it. Where's the sweat stains? The dust? DiCaprio sells Ernest as this thick-headed money grubber who tells us "I love money" with all the subtlety of a hammer, but his wardrobe suggests a Gap mannequin from 1923.

What works is Gladstone. Her entire performance shows her watching her reality fade away while she keeps up a pretense of being uninterested. "Of course he wants money. But he also wants to be settled," she says about Ernest. Her sisters know better. Her eyes show a hidden understanding which she keeps hidden from view. Her body position during Ernest's poison attacks exposes her situation better than any dialogue because she keeps her body rigid while making no effort to defend herself.

The movie presents itself as generous because it shows all the murders in full view instead of turning them into unsolved enigmas. We watch De Niro's Hale orchestrate everything with this grotesque paternalism, calling the Osage the finest people on earth while systematically destroying them, and somehow that's supposed to be more honest? Than what? We already knew who the wolves were. "Can you find the wolves in this picture?"Ernest reads from his uncle's book. They're not hiding.

The courtroom proceedings move at a slow pace which makes me feel like I am watching paint dry during an hot summer day. Jesse Plemons shows up as the federal investigator Tom White and delivers competence porn that feels imported from a completely different movie. One that might've been interesting actually. Instead we get three-plus hours of watching white people feel various levels of bad about genocide while Scorsese can't decide if this is Greek tragedy or procedural.

That radio show ending though.

Scorsese literally showing up to tell us Mollie died of diabetes, nothing in her obituary about the murders. Almost salvages the whole mess by admitting the mess exists.

Almost.