The Irishman (2019)

Where to begin regarding Killers of the Flower Moon? It’s another awesome collaboration between Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro. As well as another for Martin Scorsese and Leonardo Dicaprio. This is the first film to have all three together. Although De Niro and Dicaprio have joined forces before on This Boy’s Life, a pretty high quality, intense coming-of-age story from 1993. De Niro had a hand in casting Dicaprio for that movie, helping get the young star’s career off the ground. This was roughly around the time of his Oscar-nominated performance in What’s Eating Gilbert Grape.

This is Scorsese’s 27th motion picture, not counting his documentaries. And at 80, he’s hotter than ever.

Killers of the Flower Moon is something of an epic. I’m not sure if I would call it a Western. To me it’s more of a crime thriller, with a familiar cast of dirty, immoral characters that typically populate a Scorsese picture. Instead of the inner cities of New York or Boston however, we’re in rural Oklahoma during the 1920s.

Leonardo Dicaprio plays Ernest Burkhart, a war veteran returning home and looking for work from his Uncle, William Hale, played by Robert De Niro. Thanks mainly to oil, this is a very rich, prosperous time for the local Native American tribe the Osage. They wear expensive jewelry and drive fancy cars because all that in-demand ‘black gold’ is technically theirs to profit from.

When most of us think about diversity and representation in film, we usually think about three things: race, gender, and disabilities. However, there is an often forgotten topic... age. When you truly think about it, most media is about young or middle-aged people and many films about elders are ignored or demonizing (such as using them in horror to be creepy). Statistically, the world population of people aged 65 or older is around 10% (around 788 million people), and the U.S. population of elders is around 19% (around 63 million people). Those numbers are projected to double or even triple by 2050. A study in 2016 found that out of all of the speaking or named characters (in American cinema), only 10% were above the age of 60. This number is lowering every year and it's suggested that only 5 in 100 movies have an elder protagonist.

After leaving several million people out of the film industry, you would think that you hear about this more often. However, not many are talking about it. Even so, there are still quite a few films out there with elderly protagonists that more people need to be aware of. Here are just 12!

(P.S. Sadly, much of elderly cinema is focused on Alzheimer's disease/physical difficulties of aging, so be aware that it may be harder to find films without it.)