Film Review: Killers of the Flower Moon
“CAN YOU FIND THE WOLVES IN THIS PICTURE?”
Killers of the Flower Moon is a late style masterwork. A funereal procession of malignant conspiracy and opportunistic genocide disguised as epic western, Martin Scorsese’s three-and-a-half hour tragedy finds consistently surprising modes to unearth capitalist sin. Shining a megawatt spotlight on the rot underneath American exceptionalism, Killers of the Flower Moon mines the expected powerhouse performances from Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro, but it’s Lily Gladstone that burns holes in your consciousness. Minor spoiler ahead…
Upon walking out of my theater after Martin Scorsese’s blistering three-and-a-half hour indictment of insidious American exceptionalism, I heard someone grumble, dejected: “Well, it wasn’t Goodfellas, that’s for sure.” And he’s absolutely right. Killers of the Flower Moon isn’t Goodfellas. The third in a bracing triptych starting with 2016’s Silence and 2019’s The Irishman, Killers of the Flower Moon finds Scorsese once again scraping the gilded veneer off culpability, regret, and moral decay in a stark departure from his early films. The 80 year-old auteur - already venerated as perhaps the greatest American filmmaker of our time - has likely quarried one of the most self-assured late style evolutions ever: a full-throated rebuke of the rotten opulence that once made so much of his body of work tick, and a full-blooded transformation of popcorn embellishment into devastating, elegiac truth. Killers of the Flower Moon, by excavating a long-buried American atrocity against the Indigenous Osage people of Oklahoma, perfectly embodies Scorsese’s twilight verve, unflinchingly bathing the audience in a collective complicity and the director’s own white Catholic guilt.
When we first meet World War I veteran Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio), he’s just arrived at the train station of Fairfax in Osage County, Oklahoma. A township of displaced Native Americans awash in unlikely wealth due to the discovery of oil underfoot, Fairfax is bustling with activity. Burkhart makes his way through the streets as gaudy solicitors promise of striking it rich, gleaming automobiles line the roads, and the buzz of opportunity fills the air; the Osage live in beautiful homes and even employ white servants. But the money from oil is a cursed bounty, an illusion: The Osage don't control their riches. White intermediary guardians - assigned by the U.S. government - oversee their finances, and there’s naked, sinister jealousy that surrounds every well-to-do Native; many Osage women are married to white men, with greedy eyes on their wives' fortunes. But when Burkhart is driven by an Osage man named Henry Roan (William Belleau) through the restless oil derricks of the Oklahoman countryside, Killers of the Flower Moon snaps into focus. Ernest asks whose land he’s on. Henry sharply replies: “My land.”
“Killers of the Flower Moon finds Scorsese once again scraping the gilded veneer off culpability, regret, and moral decay…”
Based upon David Grann’s 2017 non-fiction novel Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI, Scorsese’s film gradually uncovers the same conspiracy as its source material: the murderous web of deceit and genocide designed to transfer Osage wealth into grubby white hands. Grann’s firecracker of a book is preoccupied with a suspense-laden procedural and its centering of the classic lawman archetypes that would eventually ferret out this deadly plot - a structure and styling perhaps a younger Scorsese would have loved to tackle and would have tackled with aplomb - but 2023’s Killers of the Flower Moon has something else on its mind. The screenplay, co-written by Eric Roth and painstakingly reconfigured several times during production, is much more fascinated with Burkhart and his Osage wife Mollie (a stunning, morose Lily Gladstone), and the tragic paradox of their marriage.
The decision to strip away Grann’s “whodunit” finds Scorsese astoundingly in touch with his late style trappings, plunging his audience into a noxious, unignorable complicity. From its opening moments, Killers of the Flower Moon makes clear its culprits of Ernest Burkhart and his uncle William K. Hale (Robert De Niro), perhaps two of the beadiest-eyed fucks in all of Scorsese’s oeuvre of bad men. Hale, a beloved “benefactor” and pillar of the Osage community, knows the customs and speaks the language, but when Mollie’s family is erased one-by-one in a gruesome, three-and-a-half hour procession of assassinations, there’s zero doubt who is responsible. DiCaprio’s Ernest is a simple character with a richer text: a charming, gullible dimwit, Burkhart falls easy for Mollie, but even more easily into the cogs of his uncle’s machinations. The tension of Killers of the Flower Moon asks: What kind of twisted love - or love at all - abides murder? “I just love money,” Ernest says at one point. “I love it almost as much as I love my wife.”
“The decision to strip away Grann’s “whodunit” finds Scorsese astoundingly in touch with his late style trappings, plunging his audience into a noxious, unignorable complicity.”
An unwavering gaze at the brutal expeditiousness of a certain brand of American opportunism, Killers of the Flower Moon takes no prisoners in making us watch. Disposing of the “violence is sometimes fun” varnish of Scorsese’s more boisterous yarn, each harrowing blow against the Osage is excruciatingly blunt: slow, patient poisonings are withering indignities and bullets act as unceremonious punctuation. But Killers is also far from insensitive exploitation; working with the Osage hand-in-hand, Scorsese aims to honor the victims and to examine the endless pattern of Native American death and displacement. Lily Gladstone’s Mollie - even in the face of the expected prowess of DiCaprio and De Niro - remains the film’s steely, solemn centerpiece; it’s a wrenching performance that burns holes in your consciousness even - no, especially - when she’s not on screen. Scorsese - along with director of photography Rodrigo Prieto and virtuoso editor Thelma Schoonmaker - also saves the film’s most astonishing flourishes for its scenes of deep reverence: a somber, sun-kissed burial of a peace pipe laments the encroachment of the white man, a slow-motion dance in a geyser of black oil marks the last of jubilance before a deadly pilfering, and a surreal depiction of the afterlife finds Lizzie Q (Tantoo Cardinal) - Mollie’s poisoned, fading mother - stepping from the arms of her wailing family into the warm embrace of her ancestors.
Killers of the Flower Moon is a malevolent, baroque lamentation of American greed and cruelty, fashioned into a piercing requiem for our country. Steeped in a blazing clarity, Scorsese’s latest continues his late style mission of opening our eyes to the terrible landscape wrought by religion, greed, and white invasiveness. Its incriminating ending - which won’t be spoiled here - absolves no one, pointing the finger at everyone watching and in particular, Scorsese himself. A gambit that a less-assured filmmaker would undoubtedly fumble, Killer of the Flower Moon’s metatextual denouement reflexively knows when it comes to a white man’s depiction of historic racial inequity, you can’t have your cake and eat it. No one is broaching the questions of who gets to tell what stories quite like Martin Scorsese, and at 80 years-old, there’s no one else like him reckoning with his own footprint on the cinematic landscape. Ernest Burkhart is at one point advised, “Don’t do something you’re gonna regret for the rest of your life.” He replies: “I ain’t got nothin’ but regrets.”
