I am still actively buzzing from my screening of Martin Scorsese’s latest epic “Killers of the Flower Moon.” I reached out to my former film professor Jack Lilburn, who also saw it the same day, just to have someone to vent my initial emotions too. He simply responded, “Walk it off for a few hours before reflecting, young Bradbury.” He is right, the longer I sit with this film the more I love it, and the more I fear it.
Adapted from a novel by David Grann that is based on a true story, “Killers of the Flower Moon” follows the Osage Native American tribe in the early decades of the 1900s. After years of gentrification, the Osage ended up in Oklahoma, where they discovered oil, making them the wealthiest people in the world at the time. Because of this, white men ranging from lazy gangsters to methodical kingpins attempt to cut into their inheritance. It starts as essentially arranged marriages, eventually leading to murders. Make no mistake, this was an attempted genocide by Americans, and one that isn’t often acknowledged .
The film follows Ernest Burkhart (played by Leonardo DiCaprio) moving to Oklahoma with his uncle William King Hale (Robert DeNiro). Burkhart, being a greedy but somewhat likable guy ends up falling in love with an Osage woman named Mollie (played by Lily Gladstone, who grew up on the Blackfeet Nation reservation).
What starts as a somewhat optimistic, but still grim, first act evolves into domestic terrorism, as the body count increases and family relationships become more strained. It feels almost superfluous to mention the film making techniques because it is naturally phenomenal. Scorsese and his longtime editor Thelma Schoonmaker have distilled their filming and cutting to a perfect science after 56 years of collaboration. Scorsese gets exactly what he needs from his actors, while Schoonmaker helps him put the puzzle pieces together in the cutting room.
A heavy criticism of Scorsese films is their long runtime, and while I totally get that a three and a half hour film seems daunting and may not be everyone’s thing, the direction and editing makes that runtime fly by. Like my thoughts on his 2019 film “The Irishman,” this film felt like an odyssey, with its entire context being important. I also want to mention Rodrigo Prieto’s hauntingly gorgeous cinematography. This guy is on fire, going from the dazzling pinks of “Barbie” to the muted greens and grays of this film in the same year is incredibly impressive.
What holds the film together is naturally the performances. Scorsese pulled his two favorite actors into this project alongside several veteran character actors and newcomers, making the cast commanding and alive. In my opinion, the best performance is the subtlety terrifying King of the Osage hills, Robert DeNiro. Particularly in Scorsese’s films, DeNiro has no difficulty playing morally dubious characters, but here he is a straight up villain, constantly playing fourth dimensional chess with everyone around him so at the end of the day, no Osage gets their money. Barely raising his voice and using powerful glares that could melt a glacier, DeNiro conducts the violent actions in the movie so clinically he will terrify you.
In stark comparison, relative newcomer Lily Gladstone is the heart of the film, for which it desperately needed. With the film following so many reprehensible people, she is the bedrock that we as the audience need to see. When we first meet Mollie, she’s a calmly perceptive person-certainly over all the privileged white guys marrying her friends and family-but she finds an endearing charm to Ernest Burkhart leading to their marriage.
Over the course of the film, her debilitating diabetes and deceitful husband put her through emotional and physical hell. Not only that, but the toll of the deaths of her friends and family weighs on her enormously, which Gladstone performs perfectly. Her ability to express different emotions with only the subtlest eye movements and facial expressions is not only superb, but makes her grander emotional moments punch harder. The rest of the extras playing Osage Native Americans — who apparently were predominantly un-professional actors and were descendants of the Osage — give solid performances creating a truly lived in world with a natural, lived in experience that this subject matter requires to get right.
The only performance that is a little off is DiCaprio. Before the films official release, I constantly made the joke that he is using his voice from Quentin Tarantino’s ode to the movies
“Once Upon a Time in Hollywood,” but his character in this is practically Rick Dalton (DiCaprio’s character in “Hollywood”). Burkhart is a pretty dimwitted guy who is driven by opulent greed — and is a total pushover — getting in way over his head as he and his uncle’s murders increase in size and severity. The entire time he is sticking his jaw out in a large frown like he is doing a bad impression of DeNiro and it gets a little distracting as the film continues. But don’t get it twisted, DiCaprio is by no means bad, he’s doing his DiCaprio thing and if you like that you will not be disappointed.
Compared to his famous screaming matches from films like “The Departed” and “Revolutionary Road,” he actually takes a somewhat more subtle approach in this film and it’s still great (although he does have a handful of entertaining outbursts), as Burkhart is torn in two directions; by his uncle taking advantage of his greed and by his genuine affection for his wife and children. As the killings get more heinous, you start to lose the initial empathy for him that Molly saw, until maybe the very end when he finally suffers from some consequences for his actions. However, as those consequences also affect Molly, it doesn’t even feel like justice, just more suffering.
What particularly shook me was how truly miserable the film is — which isn’t a negative. The last time a Scorsese film made me feel this much anguish was probably “Taxi Driver”. While he is no stranger to despondency in films, something about “Killers of the Flower Moon” has an edge that you wouldn’t expect from a director in his 80’s.
Without spoiling the ending, the film in its entirety is all about how awful these murders were and how it’s generally forgotten in American history. These murders only pre-date the Holocaust by around ten years, and yet are not widely taught in history classes. Another large criticism of Scorsese is that he glorifies the actions of toxic and violent people, which I disagree with. If these worlds of crime weren’t enticing with their money and power, nobody would get involved in the first place, making their crash and burn hit harder. In “Killers of the Flower Moon,” Scorsese makes it as obvious as possible; these are terrible people that you shouldn’t root for. I remember people laughing as some of these characters lazily covered their ass for the crimes they have committed because they were so stupid. Scorsese has effectively made you feel the pain of people that suffered not just American capitalism, but an attempted genocide fueled by Manifest Destiny. The fact that white men would get married to Native American women, have kids with them and then kill all of them for the oil money is stomach churning.
Of Scorsese’s historical dramas, this is his most vicious. In a career constantly exploring religious guilt, this one is his most sinful. Like I said earlier, Scorsese is in his 80s; he’s been doing this for over half a century, but you cannot tell by this film’s subject matter and execution. This film bleeds an anger and exudes a fear that for any other filmmaker would be either their magnum opus or be too difficult to execute correctly. For Scorsese, it just cements how good he is at his job.
The sad reality is, Marty is indeed getting older and has been very publicly open about coming to terms with his mortality. While he is already making plans to direct another film or two, they might never come to fruition. Personally, “Taxi Driver” will always be my favorite of his filmography, but if this ends up being his final film, then God-damn, he is going out on a high note. In his own words, “What a picture.”