Review: Killers Of The Flower Moon

Image courtesy of Paramount.

 

The final line - spoken in a surprise cameo appearance - of Martin Scorsese's "Killers of the Flower Moon" is the most devastating in its summation of how the horrors that the Osage Nation faced during a series of murders that plagued them in the 1920s were nonchalantly swept under the rug. The film's coda - which I won't spoil - is sure to leave some heads being scratched, but it comes back to the question of preventing oppressed people from being able to tell their own story and, instead, allowing that story to be relayed by people who look like those who are doing the oppressing.

The film is an immense, three-and-a-half hour historical drama that occasionally plays like a romance, at times like one of the gangster pictures in which Scorsese has specialized these past 50-plus years, and even a true crime procedural and courtroom drama. At the heart of this story are three stunning performances - two by Scorsese regulars (Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro), and the third by Lily Gladstone in what is sure to be a star-making performance as Mollie Burkhardt, an Osage woman whose family is murdered for the oil on their land throughout the course of the film.

As the film opens, we learn that the Osage had been pushed off the land they originally inhabited and forced to live in Oklahoma. As luck would have it, they landed on a veritable goldmine - black gold, that is - and, naturally, the very people who forced them to relocate now make fast work of ingratiating themselves into the Osage community and marrying their women to be able to get the head rights for the land should their spouses die - a frequent occurrence that the film's primary villain (De Niro's William Hale, a wealthy cattle rancher who has gotten the Osage to trust him) refers to as "bad luck," and not the epidemic that it actually is.

Overnight, the Osage found themselves among the nation's wealthiest inhabitants because of the oil bubbling under the surface of their land. The film is told through the eyes of Mollie and her husband, Ernest (DiCaprio), Hale's nephew, who has returned from World War I and gets work as a driver. Ernest's second job is doing misdeeds for Hale and Ernest's older brother, Bryan (Scott Shepherd), who is married to Mollie's sister, Anna (Cara Jade Myers). 

While reading a children's book on the Osage to learn about the people among whom he is living, Ernest reads aloud the line, "Do you see the wolves in this picture?" In Scorsese's film, the wolves aren't hard to spot and their grisly work is carried out not only in the shadows, but also in broad daylight.

Hale sees an opportunity for Ernest to marry Mollie to secure the head rights for the oil on her land, and while Ernest agrees to go along with this ploy, he and Mollie also genuinely seem to fall in love. In fact, there never seems to be much doubt about this, even when Ernest begins to take part in acts - at Hale's behest - that put his wife's health in danger.

"Flower Moon" is a long historical crime epic that often bears some similarity to Scorsese's best work in that genre - a courtroom scene at the end reminded me of "Goodfellas," as did a series of scenes in which Hale begins to clean up his messes as the law closes in on him by bumping off those with whom he did business. But in terms of tone and style, it also fits in with the director's late work, most notably "The Irishman" and "Silence," slow burn films that deal with matters of conscience. "Flower Moon" could also be considered part of a trilogy - along with "The Irishman" and "The Wolf of Wall Street" - that depict the moral rot at the center of the nation that he calls home.

The film is impeccable in sound and vision, from Rodrigo Prieto's sweeping cinematography and the late Robbie Robertson's score, which is a near-constant thrum, to Jack Fisk's detail-heavy production design. DiCaprio gives one of his most impressive performances as Burkhardt, while De Niro is frightening as Hale, a man who treats those around him like family and close friends, and still orders their deaths when he finds a way to make a profit from it. 

Gladstone is the heart of the film, and her performance is the type that might typically get overshadowed because it is so subtle. She often tells her character's story with her face in the style of a great silent actress. The film is loaded with great bit parts and supporting roles for everyone from Jesse Plemons as lawman Tom White and Tantoo Cardinal as Mollie's mother to a roster of musicians - Jason Isbell, Pete Yorn, and Sturgill Simpson included.

One of the elements that makes "Flower Moon" so powerful and haunting is its depiction of injustice as an ever-present way of life among the white people and Osage living together in Fairfax, Oklahoma. Mollie may be richer than most of the white men in town, but she has to account for her spending to a banker who also happens to be the leader of the local KKK branch and who sits on a jury during a trial involving the film's crooked characters near its end. Hale and his associates discuss the murders of the town's Osage characters as business transactions, and during one of the film's powerful early scenes, Mollie narrates a number of unexplained deaths in the territory, ending each scenario with the words "no investigation."

Scorsese's original plan for the film was to tell the story from the perspective of White, the BOI investigator sent by J. Edgar Hoover, but conferring with the Osage nation and DiCaprio resulted in a film that tells the story from the perspective of Ernest and Mollie. The result is a great film that feels authentic and epic in scale, yet intimate in its portrayal of a marriage built upon lies against the backdrop of one of this nation's great injustices. 

It has long been held that filmmaking is a young person's game, and that directors' late work tends to not be as potent as their earlier films. At age 81, Scorsese is still cranking out one great film after another. He has been called the greatest living filmmaker, and it's difficult to argue with this assertion. "Killers of the Flower Moon" is one of the year's best.