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In ‘Killers of the Flower Moon,’ No One Is Spared

Telling the story of the mass murder of the Osage Nation, Martin Scorsese wrestles with himself, Hollywood as a whole, and the original sin of America itself
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Early on in Killers of the Flower Moon, a wealthy young Osage woman, Mollie Kyle (Lily Gladstone), presents her cash-strapped driver, Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio), with a flawless, new, white Stetson. She’s hoping that it might make him look more distinguished; where Lily is effortlessly regal, Ernest is rumpled and dirty. Arriving in the boomtown of Gray Horse, Oklahoma, in the aftermath of the Great War, he looks like something that crawled out of the trenches (even if his action overseas was limited to slinging hash). Ernest accepts his new headgear humbly, even though, tellingly, it doesn’t quite fit. As the film goes on, he marries into Mollie’s household and fortune and exchanges her present for a series of darker-colored substitutes, as if a stain were spreading across his wardrobe and, with it, his soul.

The other significant gift Ernest receives after rumbling into Gray Horse is an illustrated history of the Osage people bestowed by his uncle William Hale (Robert De Niro), a town father type who’s looked upon by the Indigenous community with an outsized respect. Hale wants his nephew to get the lay of the land; what the book shows him is the order of the food chain. “Can you find the wolves in this picture?” reads the caption of a painting where the large canines are front and center, menacing a group of tribespeople. A better question might be whether Ernest recognizes himself and his kin as the predators in sheep’s clothing. If Killers of the Flower Moon is a fairy tale, it’s a grim one—a study of corrosion and corruption, of outsized and carnivorous appetites, told from within the belly of the beast. 

Few filmmakers have ever been as suited to run—and howl—with the wolves than Martin Scorsese, whether on Wall Street or elsewhere. He’s compelled by characters who barely suppress their animal urges, whether they’re raging bulls, pool sharks, or conniving rats. The concept of the 80-year-old Oscar winner as a gangster-movie specialist is hopelessly reductive, but there’s no question that he’s fascinated by pack mentalities and the survival-of-the-fittest hierarchies therein. And in adapting David Grann’s bestselling nonfiction book about the 1921 Osage Nation murders—a series of profitable and clandestine killings perpetrated by white residents against their Native neighbors—the director has gone back to one of the primal scenes of American tribalism and grift, albeit with a sensibility that’s significantly different from that of some of his other classic crime pictures. Where the brilliance of a movie like Goodfellas lies in its kinetic, seductive sense of propulsion—the out-of-body high of being swept up in the spoils of the outlaw lifestyle before the bottom drops out—Killers of the Flower Moon has been meticulously bled dry of such illicit sensations. It’s not a coke-binge rush, but a toxic IV drip. Usually, when Scorsese’s really cooking, there’s some kind of immediately identifiable money shot, something that expresses the sheer aesthetic joy of filmmaking. But the closest that Killers comes is an early passage featuring several Osage men becoming drenched in the oil geysering up from their land. Their ensuing dance, shot in dreamy slow motion against the thrum of the late Robbie Robertson’s guitar-driven score, is a late capitalist baptism—and a death sentence. It’s beautiful in an ominous, terrible way; there will be you know what.

Certainly, there are visual and thematic similarities between Killers of the Flower Moon and There Will Be Blood, which were both designed by the great set builder Jack Fisk—a true, enduring hero of the New Hollywood who’s somehow working with Scorsese for the first time after yeoman efforts for Paul Thomas Anderson, Brian De Palma, David Lynch, and Terrence Malick. Fisk specializes in recreating civilizations mid-stride, in sprawling landscapes whose expanse betrays growing pains of industrialization; in Malick’s majestic Pocahontas riff, The New World, he turned the settlers’ and the Native Americans’ dwellings into provocative, distorted mirror images. As depicted in Killers, Gray Horse is at once spartan and bustling, and deceptively harmonious in terms of intermingling customs and cultures. The black-and-white, silent-movie-style frames that show us settlers and Native Americans living side by side—with the Indigenous characters occupying positions of social and financial power after the oil strike—don’t just establish the period or reinforce Scorsese’s cinephilia, but also call attention to the manufactured, stage-managed nature of all that smiling goodwill. Those images are juxtaposed with a blunt truth: that Hale (and men like him) has consolidated power by horning in on the Osages’ “headrights” to the oil money, installing his white friends and accomplices in sham marriages and then offing their well-moneyed spouses—carefully, so that the deaths look like accidents. 

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Ernest may not be very bright, but he catches on quickly enough. “I love money,” he says, often enough that it becomes his mantra. But Ernest isn’t a romantic poet of greed like Jordan Belfort, just a thug with a demagnetized moral compass. In his other films with Scorsese, DiCaprio has toggled between playing watchful, furtive stowaways (Gangs of New York, The Departed) and flamboyant visionaries (The Aviator, The Wolf of Wall Street). His character here has something in common with the first group in that he’s almost like a mole within his own marriage—monitoring Mollie to keep her from investigating the deaths of friends and family members and then gradually poisoning her with shots of tainted insulin at his uncle’s behest—but he’s also a bit out of Leo’s wheelhouse. DiCaprio has a surprising amount of range as an actor, but one thing he’s rarely asked to do is play stupid; as Ernest, he sets his jaw, deadens his eyes, and tries to be thick. 

On the one hand, the effort of DiCaprio’s acting is palpable, and in a different way than in The Wolf of Wall Street, where his going for broke was fully in coked-up character. At the same time, it’s fascinating to see a star defined for decades by a sort of shimmering, preternatural A-list charisma transform himself into someone so lumpy and uninspiring—especially in counterpoint to Gladstone, who projects a wary, melancholy sort of beauty, like a still life painting in three dimensions. In a way, Gladstone’s performance expands on her memorable breakthrough in Kelly Reichardt’s Certain Women, where her farmhand character’s unrequited yearning for a night-school teacher played by Kristen Stewart evoked complex feelings about identity and ethnicity. Mollie’s pride for her heritage is complicated by her desire to marry a white man, especially one who’s several leagues beneath her. What Gladstone is doing is actually very difficult: playing a woman of few words who’s quietly yet evidently doing battle with the voices inside her head. 

As a study of a domestic relationship—and of the transactional nature of romance—Killers of the Flower Moon cuts deeper than any of Scorsese’s other marriage stories. Juxtaposing Ernest’s moral blindness with Mollie’s eyes-wide-shut denial about her husband’s true aims, it etches two very different and sadly complementary portraits of denial. There’s a wrenching scene in which Ernest tries, with his limited powers of articulation and intellect, to embed a lie in something true—to convince Mollie that the medicine he’s giving her is the only thing that will save her life, without, of course, mentioning the poison he’s been adding to the dosage to keep her docile en route to her inevitable dispatching. It’s a pulse-pounding gaslighting scenario right out of Hitchcock—specifically, 1946’s Notorious—and yet instead of playing it for pastiche, Scorsese opts for an agonizing realism that does not preclude two terrible possibilities. One, that Ernest truly loves his wife, though not enough to stop hurting her; and two, that Mollie understands what’s happening to her and is too heartbroken to fight back. 

The question of what Mollie knows and what she chooses to repress is more central to Grann’s book, which focuses far more closely on her point of view, at least in the early passages. On the page, Killers of the Flower Moon is structured as a mystery, but in the movie we know from the start that Hale is a hypocrite whose hyperbole about the Osage being “the finest, wealthiest, and most beautiful people on God’s earth” is cover for his rapacious exploitation—a pusillanimous form of noblesse oblige given precise, demonic shading by De Niro—and that Ernest is merely doing his uncle’s bidding. What’s been reimagined in Killers is not the details of the story but the politics of its telling; it’s as if Scorsese were wrestling with his own well-honed instincts as a showman. 

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The revelation that the original draft of the screenplay by the director and Eric Roth was more than 200 pages long suggests something similar. In the book, much is made of the laconic Bureau of Investigation man Tom White, who descends on Gray Horse at the behest of J. Edgar Hoover. He’s depicted as a great investigator and wins plaudits for solving the case and bringing the perpetrators to justice. No less an icon than Jimmy Stewart played a composite version of White in 1959’s The FBI Story, which was effectively endorsed by Hoover. In Killers, though, White (played with tight, thinly smiling command by Jesse Plemons) is hardly a supercop; he’s almost an afterthought. And because we’ve already been privy to the operations of Hale’s outfit—the callous, insidious ways his men have marshaled different forms of betrayal and deceit against their neighbors—there’s no excitement in the Bureau’s investigation or even in the ensuing legal proceedings, which necessitate a late detour into courtroom drama mode. All that emerges is a sickening feeling of too little, too late.

That sense of anticlimax is memorably and brilliantly finessed in Killers of the Flower Moon’s final scene, which is already being deconstructed in various precincts and absolutely ranks with Scorsese’s most audacious gestures. After more than three hours of grueling, processional tragedy, we’re pulled out of Gray Horse and dropped into a space of pure rupture—a live performance of a period radio drama whose triumphal tone resembles something like The FBI Story. It’s a gambit similar to the one Wes Anderson tried earlier this year in Asteroid City, except that instead of holding the film together, this Brechtian maneuver threatens to break it apart—especially when Scorsese makes a brief but indelible cameo. Like so much in this deeply felt yet cautiously measured movement, his appearance is tinged with palpable humility; he’s there only to say that, when it comes to the Osage murders and an aftermath that’s still unfolding to this day, he can say only so much. 

Direct address of this kind has its pros and cons. For some viewers, breaking the fourth wall means breaking faith with drama itself. Which, of course, is Scorsese’s point: He’s calling attention to his project’s myriad inadequacies—as history, as representation, as reparation—not as an ethical get-out-of-jail-free card or an admission of his own waning powers, but rather to implicate the Hollywood apparatus he’s operated with such aplomb for so many years. 

As an auteur in the truest sense of the word, Scorsese necessarily—and unconsciously—repeats himself. He has obsessions and fetishes, and he always will. But I’m hard-pressed to think of another modern filmmaker of similar stature who’s tried something comparably daring on such a large canvas, and with so many people watching. The key to Scorsese’s gambit is that at its core, it’s not about doing something different. Rather, it’s an attempt by an artist to remain honest to himself. The only thing you can do, after willing yourself to leave the theater in stunned silence, is tip your cap to a legend.

Adam Nayman is a film critic, teacher, and author based in Toronto; his book The Coen Brothers: This Book Really Ties the Films Together is available now from Abrams.

Adam Nayman
Adam Nayman is a film critic, teacher, and author based in Toronto; his book ‘The Coen Brothers: This Book Really Ties the Films Together’ is available now from Abrams.

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