Killers of the Flower Moon ’s Ending Is More Than Just a Surprise Cameo

This article contains spoilers for Killers of the Flower Moon.

I once got the chance to ask the greatest living American filmmaker how he felt about the fact that he was going to die. It was 2006, and Robert Altman was doing interviews to promote his latest movie, which would also end up being his last. A Prairie Home Companion is set during the final performance of an old-fashioned radio variety show, the last before the station’s new owners bulldoze the theater to make room for a parking lot, and it’s a movie haunted by the specter of mortality—figuratively, in the sense that it’s about the passing of a dwindling art form, and literally, in the sense that the performance’s audience includes a bona fide angel of death. But even though the 81-year-old Altman had used the acceptance speech for his honorary Oscar earlier that year to reveal that he’d had a heart transplant a decade prior, and even though A Prairie Home Companion was made under the condition that Altman have another director, Paul Thomas Anderson, on set as a guarantee that there would be someone to finish the movie if he abruptly dropped dead, I still felt anxious about raising the subject of his imminent demise to one of my artistic heroes. So I hemmed and hawed, but Altman was impatient to get to the point. “For me, the picture’s about death,” he said, cutting me off midsputter. “Nobody’s said much about that.”

Every director makes a final film, but not all of them live or work long enough to make a film that feels truly final. Some have their careers unexpectedly cut short by the vicissitudes of the entertainment industry—Billy Wilder, one of the greatest directors of Hollywood’s golden age, spent the last two decades of his life trying in vain to make another movie—and others simply aren’t the type to work through their issues on screen. But when they do, it adds to a small but fascinating microgenre of movies their makers either know or suspect might be their artistic epitaph. The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial, which premiered shortly after William Friedkin’s death in August, was produced under conditions similar to A Prairie Home Companion’s, with Guillermo del Toro taking on Anderson’s role as standby, and it seemed like a curious swan song for the director of The Exorcist and The French Connection, a modest chamber drama from a man known as “Hurricane Billy.” But look closely at Kiefer Sutherland’s portrayal of Captain Queeg, especially the droop in the corner of his mouth, and you can see a poignant self-portrait of a once-respected elder whose time has come and gone. Agnès Varda’s Varda by Agnès, which debuted a month before her death in 2019, plays like a self-curated retrospective of her 60-year career, part memoir and part eulogy. It ends with her vanishing into a sandstorm, musing on the ephemeral nature of art while creating yet another image destined to outlive her.

Killers of the Flower Moon isn’t intended to be Martin Scorsese’s final movie, and God willing, it won’t be. But it is saturated with its maker’s sense of his own impermanence. And it culminates with a coda in which Scorsese himself takes center stage, a cameo infused with a deeply moving sense of finality. When he steps into the spotlight, he shares with his audience the feeling that his time may already have passed, and that we might not see his like again.

Human fragility is a constant in Scorsese’s body of work—in his 1967 short The Big Shave, a young man slides a razor across his face until the sink is awash in blood—but it’s particularly present in the movies he has made in the past decade. In Silence, Jesuit missionaries endure brutal torture rather than renounce their faith—its closing shot follows the camera as it burrows into a funeral pyre—and The Irishman ends the story of a self-mythologizing mob assassin with the image of him sitting alone in a nursing home, caught between the emptiness of the life he has lived and the void that will soon claim him.

The Irishman pushed back against the ravages of age, using digital technology to take decades off its septuagenarian stars, but Killers of the Flower Moon makes peace with the inevitability of decay. (It’s the first movie that allows itself to show that Leonardo DiCaprio is pushing 50.) But not every life ends naturally. Estimates of how many Osage Indians were murdered for their oil wealth in the early decades of the 20^th century range from dozens to hundreds, in part because the white men who orchestrated their deaths had the power to stonewall investigations, and in part because many of those investigations were never opened in the first place. But the movie takes stock of them as individual crimes, even if that stock-taking is sometimes necessarily brief. Before we meet Mollie (Lily Gladstone), the Osage woman who will wind up married to DiCaprio’s murderous Ernest Burkhart, she makes her entrance as a voice, solemnly listing the names of several Osage and their recorded causes of death. Scorsese’s camera, however, shows us what the official record overlooks: A woman marked down as a suicide is shot as she is leaving her house with a baby in her arms, her killer gently taking the child and laying a gun in her lifeless hand. Most often, though, the cause of death is no cause at all. “No investigation,” Mollie says, following one name after another. “No investigation.” “No investigation.”

Killers of the Flower Moon, which is based on a nonfiction bestseller by David Grann, is a movie about history: how it is shaped and retold, and how that telling can both sustain and deform it. But it is also a movie about knowledge and the intangible heritage that defines a culture, and a nation, beyond what the records can show. It opens on a burial, but what’s being laid to rest isn’t a person; it’s a way of life. In a scene taken from a book by the Osage author Charles Red Corn, the tribal elders inter their own traditions, symbolized by a ceremonial pipe, in order to better adapt to the modern world, where the discovery of oil on the apparently worthless Oklahoma land to which their people were displaced has suddenly made them all rich. “It is time to bury the pipe with dignity,” one says, “to put away its teachings.” The new world comes in quietly, in the form of a silent newsreel recounting the necessary history, but soon the screech of steam-powered trains and the whoosh of oil derricks fills the air.

Technology keeps marching onward, including the machinery of storytelling itself. As Osage crowd the main street of Fairfax, Oklahoma, lining up for their monthly disbursements, they’re swarmed by white men with still cameras, offering to preserve their images “for posterity” at grossly inflated prices. Scorsese might be the only person who could have told this story at this scale (the movie cost roughly $200 million), but he’s acutely aware that even his mastery is strained by the moral necessity of imagining Mollie’s interior life alongside those of Burkhart and his uncle William Hale (Robert De Niro), who was eventually sentenced to life for the murder of Mollie’s cousin Henry Roan. Gladstone’s performance is tremendous, a portrait of quiet strength tempered by the blindness of love, but it’s a more iconic, less individualized portrayal than DiCaprio’s or De Niro’s. Earlier this week, Christopher Cote, the language consultant who taught Gladstone to speak Osage, admitted to mixed feelings about the film. “As an Osage, I really wanted this to be from the perspective of Mollie and what her family experienced, but I think it would take an Osage to do that,” he told reporters. “I think that’s because this film was not made for an Osage audience, it was made for everybody, not Osage.”

Killers of the Flower Moon is monumental in every sense, a nearly three-and-a-half-hour epic that, like so much of Scorsese’s work, boldly excavates the moral rot at the core of American enterprise. (It hardly even registers as a surprise when the white man in charge of handling the Osage’s wealth turns up at the head of a Ku Klux Klan parade.) But though it often feels like a triumph, the movie ends by confronting its own failures. Instead of using end-credits text or a closing montage to inform the audience of the eventual fates of its characters, Killers’ epilogue comes in the form of a radio play, much like the one in A Prairie Home Companion. In front of an appreciative live audience, a group of actors, musicians, and sound effects technicians—all white, nearly all men—stage the end of the story as an overheated melodrama, approved by the FBI and brought to you by Lucky Strike. (A version of the story was in fact broadcast in 1932 as an episode of The Lucky Strike Hour.) We find out that Hale and Burkhart were both convicted and eventually pardoned, the Osage response to which is rendered in pidgin English by a white voice actor. It’s a painful and pointed reminder of how often American history is processed, when it is at all, through stories of white male antiheroes whose depravity is read as moral complexity—and how often Scorsese’s movies have fallen into that category.

Although Grann’s book, subtitled “The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI,” is built around the federal investigator Tom White, the script was reworked to make him a minor character who appears only in the final act, in order to make Mollie a protagonist rather than a mere victim. But the story is still defined by Burkhart and Hale’s crimes, and whatever life Mollie lived before and after the murders rests outside both its boundaries and its imagination. Unlike the men who tried to poison her, Mollie died young—Burkhart outlived her by nearly 50 years—and there’s not even enough information about what happened to her after their convictions to merit its own Wikipedia page.

Ultimately, all Killers of the Flower Moon can do is acknowledge this failure of history. The radio show ends with the reading of her obituary, whose bullet-point sketchiness—“She was a full-blood Osage. She was buried in the old cemetery in Gray Horse beside her father, her mother, her sisters, and her daughter”—underscores how much more there was to her existence. It feels almost like an apology, not least because the person who steps to the microphone to read Mollie’s obituary is Scorsese himself.

The cameo lasts barely a minute, but Scorsese still makes it feel momentous. Up until that point, the radio broadcast has been crammed and chaotic, full of corny accents and on-the-nose sound effects, but the sound drops to a hush before Scorsese comes into frame, perhaps the only moment of silence in Killers’ 206 minutes. He even takes a beat to put on his eyeglasses, as if underlining the limits of his own vision. And when he’s done reading Mollie’s obituary, he speaks the last line of the movie: “There was no mention of the murders.”

Scorsese’s directorial cameos have often been self-referential winks, usually quick cutaways to him in the vicinity of a camera. But this one feels more resonant, and more final. It’s as if he’s looking back over his career, knowing everything he’s accomplished, and still feeling: It wasn’t enough. Have the years he spent making this movie served to correct the record, to popularize an atrocity as great as the Tulsa Race Massacre, or will history swallow it once again? Despite the way he’s lifted the careers of younger filmmakers like Ari Aster and Joanna Hogg, despite all his Film Foundation has done to preserve the history of film around the globe, he still sees the medium to which he has devoted his life sliding inexorably toward theme-park spectacle—not a mode that he unilaterally disdains, despite what thin-skinned Marvel fans may hear, but one he worries has eclipsed the movies that mean the most to him. The fact that an 80-year-old director is perhaps the only one who could conceivably secure a budget like Killers’ to tell this kind of story does not bode well for the future of his beloved art form.

Martin Scorsese isn’t planning to end his career with Killers of the Flower Moon—he’s already at work on several other projects, including an adaptation of another of Grann’s books. But Killers still feels like a goodbye, if not necessarily a permanent one. In a recent profile, Scorsese explains that he’s come to treat each encounter with an old friend as if it might be their last. He’s ready to take his final bow and cede the stage. The old master gets Killers’ last word, but not its last image. After he’s finished speaking, the movie cuts to an overhead shot of an Osage ceremony, bodies circled as drums and chants fill the air. It may be time to put away his teachings, but their voices are just beginning to be heard.