Film review: With Killers of the Flower Moon, a creatively energized Martin Scorsese conjures the details of a brutal chapter in American history
The genre-mixing epic digs into the deception and carnage that ensued when the Osage discovered oil
The wealthy Osage sisters in Killers of the Flower Moon.
Killers of the Flower Moon is now playing at the Scotiabank Theatre and other cinemas, including IMAX theatres
INDIGENOUS PEOPLE IN traditional blankets and fine jewellery step out of shiny new Model Ts driven by white chauffeurs, as 1920s roadsters race around mud streets, chased by whooping, whiskey-drinking cowboys.
In his engrossing late-career masterwork Killers of the Flower Moon, director Martin Scorsese revels in the period details of a strange and shortlived time and place: early-1920s Osage County, Oklahoma, where oil rights made members of the Osage nation the richest people on earth, overnight. At the exuberant peak of his craft, the director (cowriting with Eric Roth) adapts David Grann’s nonfiction bestseller with a visceral, bustling, chaotic quality that feels different from the fact-packed book—and from the rest of Scorsese’s oeuvre. At times there’s so much onscreen in this wild and dangerous place that you want to hit pause to take it all in. (You’ll be able to do that once it hits Apple TV, but you should watch it on the big screen, in all its busily intricate glory, this month.) The result is an epic, genre-pushing mix of crime saga, mystery, Western, historic drama, and romance, with an unusually keen sense of social injustice.
The danger comes, of course, from all that money—and Scorsese, true to form, gradually exposes the brutal violence that sets into the town, as white folks try to get their hands on that gushing cash in deeply unsettling ways. That the resulting carnage—an estimated 60 murders by poison, strangulation, bombings, stabblings, and gunshot—took such a footnote in history, becomes a moving metaphor for the treatment of Indigenous people around North America and the world.
To his credit, Scorsese gives the first and last scenes to the Osage themselves. The opening words are in their ancient language, when the burial of a ceremonial pipe unleashes a rain of black gold from the cracked earth (barren reserve land forced on them by the government) that changes their lives.
Robert De Niro and Leonardo DiCaprio in Killers of the Flower Moon.
We first see Fairfax, Oklahoma through the eyes of Leonardo DiCaprio’s Ernest Burkhart, a First World War veteran who arrives by steam train to work with his uncle, William Hale (Robert De Niro)—the cordial cattle rancher who’s unofficially known as the King of the Osage Hills.
Ernest is a dull, troubled soul—DiCaprio’s usually boyish face has a weathered quality here, helped by some bad teeth and a mouth set in a permafrown that only turns to a kidlike grin when a fight breaks out, or he gets his hands on whiskey. In the first third of this three-and-a-half-hour epic, there’s an intriguing mystery to his motivations.
Hale’s become obvious earlier on, when he asks DiCaprio if he is attracted to “red” women. Later he schools him in “headrights” and “full blood estates”—essentially, that the way to get your hands on oil money is to marry an Indigenous woman. “That’s good business,” he says with a smile.
De Niro is in top form, unusually restrained as a ruthless mob boss disguised as a graceful southwesterner who speaks Osage fluently and wears wire spectacles, fine hats, and impeccable jackets.
When Ernest meets and eventually marries enigmatic Mollie Kyle, we’re not quite sure if it’s for love and money. As played by the remarkable Lily Gladstone, she’s the reserved and beyond-dignified contrast to her carousing husband. He openly admits he’s lazy, and she knows he’s a “coyote” after her inheritance, but they share a clear attraction, and even care, for each other. Mollie remains an enigma—not because Scorsese doesn’t develop her enough, but because she’s a woman of few words, her griefs, her worries, her torments kept secreted inside. Together, she and Ernest end up living in a chaotic house with kids, her suspicious mother Lizzie Q (a strong Tantoo Cardinal), and her hard-partying, gun-toting sister Anna (an electric Cara Jade Myers). Will Ernest give in to the sinister manipulations of his uncle, or learn to love and trust from Mollie? Do we detect guilt in his furrowed brow? Several sisters stand ahead of him in line for his wife’s land rights, after all—and at least one already has a mysterious “wasting illness”.
To his credit, the creatively energized Scorsese plays loose and innovatively with the traditional whodunnit structure. As with his greatest films— Goodfellas, Raging Bull, Taxi Driver—he’s more interested in the moral murkiness. That means moments of blunt-force violence juxtapose with tender scenes of domestic intimacy and extended depictions of leisure—garden parties, golf games, small-town parades, and traditional Osage weddings. The deception is beyond callous, the methods of killings unspeakably cruel. What’s exhilarating is the way Scorsese dives into the mess, the way he pushes fearlessly into the story’s darkest corners—let’s name it what it is: genocide—and yet also captures the humanity, community, trust, and capacity for forgiveness on the Indigenous side.
Compared to the book, Scorsese puts far less emphasis on the Osage incident’s role in the development of the FBI, though Jesse Plemons, when he finally turns up as a soft-spoken agent, is fantastic.
The director has many more tricks up his sleeve, particularly in the film’s brilliant denouement, in which he switches gears to comment movingly on the way stories are passed along—acknowledging, in his own darkly wry way, the fact that he’s a white director depicting Indigenous tragedy.
Featuring soaring camera work by longtime collaborating cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto, Killers of the Flower Moon finds a master motion-picture maker moving fluidly between genres and styles. (Think old-timey black-and-white sequences and sweeping bird's-eye-view drone-shot sequences.) There's beauty here—say, the titular purply flowers that speckle the golden earth—but such ugliness, too. Scorsese fully succeeds in immersing us in a haunting period of American history—and then keeps us there when we want to avert our eyes.
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