Killers of the Flower Moon
Martin Scorsese sharpens American history to a cruel point.
Certain stories from history sometimes carry the same bleak charge that horror films do. A horror-film character contemplates exploring a dark basement; we desperately don’t want him to; we know he must because we’re well aware of the kind of story this is. History comprises such stories as well, their horror compounded by our knowledge that the people in them aren’t fictional constructs but actual persons whose sufferings and cruelties had weight and substance. We already know how things will end for them because their ending is established fact, sometimes literally set in stone. In a sense, we are living out the grim denouement of stories whose central characters died long ago.
If that sounds doomy, well, Killers of the Flower Moon invites such contemplation. Martin Scorsese has received criticism in the past for supposedly making his characters’ misdeeds a little too exciting, but such arguments will find no support in his latest film. Scorsese’s filmmaking is as dynamic as always, but he permits his killers nothing like Goodfellas’ Copacabana entrance or Jordan Belfort’s wild parties. What remains is the sick feeling of watching bloody-minded men attend to their business. We know that it will end only one way.
The film wastes no time in getting down to that business, despite its luxurious length. Its prologue efficiently establishes the setting and the stakes for the Osage, a Native American nation that the US government relocated to land that turned out to be rich in oil, which brings them great wealth while also exerting pressure on their already threatened culture. After that, we’re introduced to shiftless World War I veteran Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his uncle William Hale (Robert De Niro), who have been onscreen for barely ten minutes before they’re discussing a scheme for Ernest to marry into an Osage family as a way to gain access to their lucrative land rights. The eventual culmination of their plans is clarified in a brutal montage in which white men murder the Osage who have grown to trust them. The logic is simple and deeply disturbing: kill your Osage spouses and neighbors, inherit their wealth.
Scorsese’s choice to tell this story primarily through Ernest’s perspective is double-edged (why center a story about oppression around the oppressors?), but it pays off. Scorsese has spent a career reckoning with corruption in its various forms, and he forces viewers to reckon with it as well by making it difficult for us to deny our kinship with the corrupt. A simplistic morality tale would make it easy for us to imagine ourselves on the side of the angels, but (as we already know from the quotation of John 9:24-25 that closes out Raging Bull) Scorsese is less interested in comfortable judgments than he is in helping us see.
We see that Ernest, though he does monstrous things, is not a monster. No one is more keenly aware of this tension than his Osage wife, Mollie (played by Lily Gladstone in a film-anchoring performance). Mollie could not love a monster, but she could love a man, even one as venal and weak as Ernest. Gladstone walks a tightrope in her scenes, balancing Mollie’s trust of her husband with her heartbreaking awareness of his deficiencies. She sees him; Gladstone’s eyes say as much as her dialogue. Scorsese keeps the audience balanced on the same knife’s edge as Mollie for the entire film.
The fact that he is able to do this without even slightly compromising the film’s moral acuity is a marvel. Some of the images in Killers of the Flower Moon simmer with righteous dismay, as potent as anything Scorsese has ever created. He speaks volumes with a brief shot of Ernest and a white friend casually crossing the street through a throng of Ku Klux Klan members on parade, barely even acknowledging them except with a passing social pleasantry. When De Niro’s Hale burns a field just to make a few bucks from the insurance, Scorsese films his men through a haze of heat and smoke, transforming them into petty devils engaged in infernal sport. The moment recalls the spectacular fire spout scene from Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood, pointedly forging a connection between enterprising American avarice and perdition.
And through all 3.5 hours of its runtime, Killers of the Flower Moon never loses sight of the human cost of all this callous striving. Scorsese and his longtime editor, Thelma Schoonmaker, offer a shattering edit in the film’s closing act that condenses years of bloody history into a moment. A man remembers the night he murdered an Osage woman, getting her drunk before propping her up on a rock in the forest and shooting her in the head. Schoonmaker cuts sharply from that scene to a shot of a young girl—the murdered woman’s niece—dead from disease, lying on a bed while her mother wails over her. In that moment the two deaths are linked, and the desolation feels unbearably tangible.
When the concept of genocide is invoked, this is what it means: the systematic extinguishing of entire families, their existence ended with the finality of a heavy book being snapped shut. The audience already knows, in an abstract sort of way, about the toll that manifest destiny exacted from indigenous people, so Scorsese is going to make us feel it through a story about one specific family. And he doesn’t stop there. Static shots of dead Osage people, laid out for burial or simply bleeding out on the ground, are a recurring visual motif. The more of them we see, the more we cycle through emotions: respectful observance giving way to shock, shock turning to outrage, outrage melting into grief. It didn’t have to be this way.
For all its cinematic power, though, Killers of the Flower Moon feels haunted by a sense of its own insufficiency. Rather than giving us some closing title cards that tell us where the film’s central characters ended up, Scorsese stages a fourth-wall-breaking coda that imagines the epilogue as a rinky-dink 1950s radio drama. Actors read out and briefly reenact the characters’ fates. This ending draws us into the mindset of a dramatist who wants to tell the truth about a past injustice but senses the impossibility of the task. His efforts will always come up short somehow. But he tries anyway because what else can he do? He can only offer a final shot that removes himself from the picture entirely. The horror story devastated the Osage but did not destroy them. The flower moon will bloom again one day. —Kevin McLenithan
★★★★
Terrific analysis, Kevin. I appreciate that we are given the explanation by DeNiro's character early in the film about the power of the Osage's knowledge and communication when they are silent. Though he is the central villain in the story, he is also one of the most clear-eyed about the situation. (See also his jailhouse prophecy late in the film about how this series of outrageous evils will be received by the culture.) Molly's choices of when to stay silent in conversation are her most powerful moments of truth-telling, such as the confrontation between her and Earnest over the administering of her insulin.
The moment when (spoiler, I guess) Scorsese himself appears onscreen was absolutely stunning to me. He put himself as the "writer/director/filmmaker/auteur" of this film in the midst of a completely inadequate and very white telling of the story. It seemed to me as well a confessional that acknowledges that though he is the one privileged or powerful enough to tell the story today, he stands in a tradition that is connected to a long history of white tellings of Native stories, both onscreen in films that he grew up loving, and in other arenas. He has to acknowledge that, and putting himself onscreen is the only way to do that in a way that can ironically decenter him and turn our focus back to the Native people. And so (once again, without words) the Osage get the final screen image and sounds after this confessional denouement in their tribal dance and song.
It's a beautiful work that is masterful without the least showy as in earlier films. Just a quiet confidence in the filmmaking team that has a lifetime of making masterpieces behind them, from Jack Fisk to Thelma Schoonmaker to Rodrigo Prieto to the old pals DeNiro and Scorsese themselves.