Killers of the Flower Moon (2023)
dir. Martin Scorsese
Rated: R
image: ©2023 Paramount Pictures
How many masterpieces can one person produce? We may never know, but iconic filmmaker – and elder statesman of cinema – Martin Scorsese seems determined to find out before he’s finished behind the camera. After the likes of Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, The Last Temptation of Christ, Goodfellas, and at least five other pictures that deserve consideration as masterpieces, Scorsese has done it again.
Killers of the Flower Moon is a sprawling, ambitious, deeply moving mashup of the director’s beloved gangster genre and his first Western, which wrestles with American sins that a not-insignificant portion of our population would like to bury and ignore forever.
Through the consultation and participation of over a dozen Osage Nation members, the Osage Nation Cultural Center, and the Osage Nation Museum, Scorsese took great care to include and lift up the voices of a marginalized Indigenous community. The Osage, like every other Indigenous peoples tribe within US borders, has suffered untold horrors and predation at the hands of the European colonial settlers who built the “land of the free” on the backs of millions of oppressed and terrorized human beings.
For his part, Scorsese took pains to present with honor and a great deal of empathy the members of the Osage tribe who were preyed upon in Oklahoma in the 1920s and ‘30s when they became the richest citizens in the country after they discovered massive oil reserves under their feet.
Scorsese’s approach to the film didn’t start out this way. In the (not so) grand tradition of movies like Dances with Wolves, Scorsese’s initial strategy for adapting author David Grann’s bestselling 2017 true crime book was to focus on a white savior. One of the main characters of Grann’s book is Tom White, an agent of the then-nascent Federal Bureau of Investigation. (The character Tom White in the film version of Flower Moon has to explain a few times exactly what the FBI is.)
White is the man who ultimately got to the bottom of who was systematically killing Osage Nation members during this period of Prohibition through the early years of the Great Depression. But in Scorsese’s film, White – played by the incomparable Jesse Plemons – doesn’t come on the scene until the last third of the movie. Even then, he’s a tertiary, but vital, character who connects the dots of this abominable criminal enterprise.
A great-grandson of one of the actual victims, Henry Roan, spoke to Scorsese when the director met with the Gray Horse community in preparation for filming the story. His words, along with those of others, convinced the filmmaker to focus on the humanity of the Osage victims, not simply the white man who brought charges against the killers. Scorsese completely overhauled the script, with co-screenwriter Eric Roth, as a result.
This change of approach is evident within the first seconds of Killers of the Flower Moon. The opening sequence of the film depicts an Osage burial ceremony. During it, influential Osage politician Paul Red Eagle makes a statement, in addition to an absolute barn burner of a speech that comes from the same character later in the film, that would make someone like Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (R) blush.
It should.
DeSantis is one of those white political fevered egos running around who is desperate to pass fascist laws that gag teachers from examining uncomfortable truths about our country’s history, all in the name of protecting white children’s (and, let’s be honest, their parents’) feelings. Red Eagle’s speech includes a mournful lament about how the Osage children of the early 20th century will learn a different language than those of their ancestors. Soon, their sacred traditions and their very way of life will be completely destroyed by white hate and greed.
Red Eagle is portrayed in the film by Everett Waller, an Osage Nation member who currently serves as the tribe’s minerals council chairman. Later in the film, Waller, as Red Eagle, is even more blunt when he rages against the white men who are like “buzzards circling our people” in an attempt to get at the unbelievable wealth that the ocean of oil has brought to the Osage. As soon as the money started flowing, Red Eagle says, it also brought the white man, desperate to capture that wealth for themselves. You can see this in action the second the tribe members get their hands on a disbursement check. White photographers will commemorate the occasion with a keepsake, for a small fee, of course.
Scorsese casts non-professional actors like Waller and other Osage members to achieve an authenticity of their way of life, and as a way to honor their dignity and humanity. What we lose in professional polish from these performances, we more than gain in a genuine portrayal of the lived Osage experience.
What makes Scorsese such a good fit to tell this story of greed and murder is his past filmography and professional preoccupations. Flower Moon might be a Western, but that’s more a consequence of its time period and setting than anything else. As you might expect from the director of Mean Streets, Goodfellas, and Casino, at its heart, his latest picture is a gangster movie. So – and I’d like to think Scorsese actually had this thought at some point during the project’s gestation – instead of a White Savior film, he set out to make a White Devil film.
Enter the man behind some of Scorsese’s longest and most fruitful artistic collaborations, Robert De Niro. The legendary actor plays William Hale. Scorsese’s other muse (if you will), Leonardo DiCaprio, is Ernest Burkhart, Hale’s not-too-bright nephew. Hale, the “King of the Osage Hills”, enlists Ernest in his vile schemes to shore up as many Osage oil rights – called now, as in the film’s time period, head rights – as he can get his hands on, by any means necessary.
One of those means is through marriage. After returning to the U.S. following his service in World War I, Ernest accepts an invitation to work for his uncle. Physical ailments preclude the younger man from performing any strenuous manual labor, so Hale sets his nephew to driving a cab in the local area, which includes the Osage reservation.
Hale is what used to be referred to as a pillar of the community. He speaks the Osage language fluently and is a friend to their community, funding the medical needs of tribe members and serving as the benefactor of community resources like schools, roads, and hospitals. Hale, who likes to be called “King” as a nickname, tells Ernest that the Osage are the finest people on God’s earth.
He suggests that Ernest court one of his regular fares, an Osage woman named Mollie Kyle. Ernest is receptive to the advice, mostly because he’s grown sweet on Mollie anyway. She has suffered terrible loss in her life. In one chilling sequence, Mollie recounts, in voice over narration accompanying stark black-and-white still photographs of the victims, all the Osage in her community who have died under mysterious circumstances but whose murders have received, as Mollie says again and again, “no investigation” from the authorities.
There’s something sinister immediately below the surface of King’s suggestion to Ernest to marry the Osage woman. Whenever the subject of the Osage comes up between the two men, and, more importantly, when there are no Osage within earshot, King breaks down how the head rights of various Osage would flow in the event of their deaths. According to Hale, marrying a woman with “full-blood head rights” would, among other things, be a sound business proposition. It doesn’t hurt that Mollie has a mother and several sisters whose head rights would all flow to her in the event of their demise.
Hale might be the most psychologically broken character on whom Scorsese has trained his camera, even more so than Travis Bickle. The ease with which Hale exalts the Osage people to their face, while at the same time telling his nephew – after Ernest and Mollie have married – that the younger man’s willingness to sleep with an Indigenous person must be some sort of “preversion,” is chilling.
We also see Hale take out a life insurance policy on the aforementioned Henry Roan, against a loan that Hale made to him. From what I previously mentioned about Roan, you can guess at the fate that befalls the poor man.
Scorsese weaves another shameful hate crime of American history into the background of his film. At one point, we see a theater full of people, Hale among them, watching contemporaneous news reel coverage of the aftermath of the Tulsa race massacre. This was a 1921 act of terrorism in which a mob of white attackers murdered innocent Black citizens and destroyed the Black Greenwood District of Tulsa, Oklahoma, for no other reason than that they were living in one of the wealthiest Black communities – nicknamed Black Wall Street – of the time.
It’s an episode of white terror in American history that most white people, myself included, had no knowledge of until discussion surrounding its 100th anniversary in 2021 forced a national conversation on the topic. One of the murders that Hale orchestrates – like a true mob kingpin, he carefully arranges the dominoes, but he makes sure to be nowhere near them when the first one is knocked over – involves a bomb decimating the home of someone who stands in the way of Hale attaining more head rights. As Ernest and Mollie scramble out of their house in an effort to figure out what has happened, we hear someone off-screen lament that this is Tulsa all over again.
The beating heart of Killers of the Flower Moon is Lily Gladstone as Mollie Kyle/Burkhart. It would be understandable to take Scorsese to task for locking his Indigenous characters into suffering. The criticism that the only role white storytellers allow marginalized people to hold on screen involves their misery and exploitation is valid. But Gladstone delivers an unimaginably rich, complex portrait of Mollie.
Through Gladstone – who entered my radar in 2016 via a similarly moving performance in Kelly Reichardt’s delicate Certain Women – we see Mollie’s joy and devastation. The quiet, knowing smile and little laugh that bubbles up from Mollie as Ernest tries to woo her gives the character a tangible depth. Similarly, Gladstone telegraphs, through a pinched face, her barely contained rage at her overseer when trying to gain access to her own money.
(In an act of complete degradation, the US government at the time deemed most of the Osage “incompetent” to manage their oil wealth, so they were forced to beg for their own money from these government appointed overseers, as well as to justify how they intended to spend it. In one quick tracking shot, we see Mollie’s overseer leading the local KKK chapter in a city parade.)
As Mollie finally learns of her husband’s involvement in King Hale’s reign of terror over her people, Gladstone makes us see how hate and love for the same person can be inextricably bound up together. Ernest’s heinous actions against Mollie herself, involving the at-the-time revolutionary new medicine insulin – which she was receiving to treat her diabetes as a trial with only four other people in the world – shocks the conscience. Gladstone should be a shoo-in for an Oscar Best Actress nomination come awards season; in a just world, Flower Moon would catapult her to stardom.
Leonardo DiCaprio gives a nuanced, emotionally layered performance as Ernest Burkhart. DiCaprio is one of those actors who believes that the most acting is often the best acting, causing him to sometimes lean on affectations in order to define character. There are a few scenes where he goes a bit overboard with Ernest’s underbite, causing him to give Ernest faint Sling Blade vibes. (But, as someone who has a quite prominent underbite himself, I was appreciative of someone as handsome as DiCaprio making it look good.)
In King Hale, Robert De Niro delivers a villain as mesmerizing as he is two-faced. Like any talented conman and harmful criminal, we believe every word that comes out of Hale’s mouth, whether that be praise for the Osage people or his furtive conversations with Ernest about coveting their wealth. De Niro, as is his habit, brings the character to horrific life.
Though his screen time is limited, Jesse Plemons – a Texas native – evinces an awe-shucks demeanor as G-Man Tom White, another Texas native, that masks the character’s determination to solve this murderous crime spree. Plemons wears the bright-white Stetson like he was born in it.
Robbie Robertson, a founding member of The Band who died only months before Flower Moon premiered, provided the score for his old friend, and one-time roommate, Scorsese. One of Scorsese’s early forays into documentary, The Last Waltz, was a concert film of The Band’s farewell performance with guests that included Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, and Neil Young, among others. The performances that Scorsese captured for posterity in The Last Waltz are wonderful.
Robertson’s score for Flower Moon often consists of nothing more than the hint of a bass guitar and a harmonica running quietly underneath the nefarious activity of the criminal syndicate. His track Osage Oil Boom, which accompanies the Osage’s joyous celebration at the discovery of oil on their land, is a funky guitar rock riff that adds a modern counterpoint to a century-old story.
This anachronistic approach to the score harkens back to Scorsese’s habit of using rock-and-roll songs in his movies; the director was a pioneer, in the 1970s, of the now-standard practice. Robertson’s score flows in waves, helping Scorsese build mini-climaxes again and again over the course of the film’s nearly three-and-a-half hours.
After eight decades on the planet, five-and-a-half of which he’s spent as a filmmaker, Martin Scorsese continues to reinvent himself through the stories he tells. Killers of the Flower Moon is a triumphant opus that adds to Scorsese’s legacy as a preeminent voice in American and world cinema.
Why it got 4.5 stars:
- Killers of the Flower Moon is, quite simply, a masterpiece.
Things I forgot to mention in my review, because, well, I'm the Forgetful Film Critic:
- Despite this possibly being my longest review to date, there is so much more I could write about here. Instead of that, I’ll leave it at this: See Killer of the Flower Moon as soon as possible, if not sooner!
Close encounters with people in movie theaters:
- I saw Flower Moon twice. As much as it disturbs me for what it says about the state of theatrical exhibition, my first screening was a private one. I was the only person in the theater, essentially renting out an entire auditorium for 12 bucks. It was a late-afternoon screening on a weekday, but still. Bad omen for cinema, but incredible experience for little ole me.