Sam Now

SAM NOW   ***

Reed Harkness

2022

IDEA:  A decades-spanning portrait of Sam Harkness, who embarked on a road trip with his half-brother to find the mother who abruptly left him when he was a teen.

BLURB:  There’s a whole category of documentaries that self-consciously turn the filmmaking process into a kind of therapy, either for the maker or the subject(s) in front of the camera. Many of these, such as Stories We Tell, Minding the Gap, or Dick Johnson is Dead, turn to family matters, using archival footage and staged scenarios to process deeply rooted traumas that would otherwise be difficult to confront. Reed Harkness’s Sam Now both fits and complicates this idiom. On the most explicit level, the film is an attempt by Harkness to give closure to his half-brother Sam, to help him heal from the wounds left from being abandoned by his mother, Jois, when he was 14. To do this, he continues a lifelong project of filming his brother - usually in playful 8 mm home movies - as a documented West Coast road trip in search of the absent mother. During the trip, Reed has Sam adopt an alter ego named the Blue Panther, in effect creating a fiction through which to stage a fantasy of reconciliation. But the brothers don’t need to create a fantasy, as fairly early into their journey they find the person they’ve been looking for. Most of Sam Now unfolds after the reunion, a putative catharsis that never quite comes. The film is wise about facing the reality that the people Sam, his mother, and his other family members used to be are no longer who they are now, and maybe weren’t even who they thought they were then. Harkness quickly realizes that “healing” may not even be possible, and that the best anyone can do is understand the social factors, often originating before our lifetimes, that influence the choices we make. Although Reed’s own perspective on his mother is under-explored - perhaps his filmmaking practice, and his focus on his brother, is his way of sublimating his feelings - Sam Now is impressively lucid and empathic in detailing the cycles of intergenerational trauma.

Killers of the Flower Moon

KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON   ***

Martin Scorsese

2023

IDEA:  In 1920s Osage County, Oklahoma, white settlers carry out a complex scheme to kill the community's Native American inhabitants and inherit their oil fortunes.

BLURB:  Sometimes, even when he’s not making a mafia movie, Scorsese ends up making a mafia movie. In Killers of the Flower Moon, the system of power through which William Hale exerts his control over Osage County has the unmistakable structure and logic of an organized crime syndicate, with Hale as the don enlisting various lackeys to do his dirty bidding. A self-proclaimed King in an opulent farmhouse separated from town, he operates through coercion, blackmail, and a sense of absolute impunity owing to his position as a powerful white man. Scorsese devotes the bulk of Killers of the Flower Moon to his machinations, which are carried out in systemic complicity by a host of white male accomplices at all levels of society, from his doltish nephew to a pair of physicians. The violence perpetrated against the Osage, through the hegemony of colonialism as well as in specific targeted murders (often shown, in a sign of the oppressors’ brazenness, in broad daylight), is depicted by Scorsese with a matter-of-fact bluntness that leaves no room for ambiguity about the institutional evil at play. While his indictment is forceful and damning, Scorsese’s focus on the figures of white supremacy presents a problem of perspective. He is so compelled by the slimy Hale and Burkhart that his Native American characters feel close to peripheral; even Lily Gladstone’s Mollie, the putative heart of the story, is shunted aside for much of the film as she withers away on her sickbed, seen mostly from the point of view of her more psychologically-legible husband. Were Scorsese and his co-screenwriter Eric Roth not comfortable narrating through the perspective of a Native woman? Even if so, could they not have given more of the film’s epic 206-minute runtime to the Osage themselves, to their thoughts and inner-lives, their experiences beyond atrocity? Instead of being that expansive historical-cultural portrait, Killers of the Flower Moon mostly hews to the Scorsese familiar of patriarchal violence, transposed to a context where it effectively and valuably, if staidly, highlights a timeless American fascism.