Killers of the Flower Moon Is a Cathedral of a Movie

When Martin Scorsese’s Silence was released in 2016, I wrote that, though I ardently hoped it would not be his last, that meditative and deeply personal film would have made a fitting capstone to an illustrious career. In the seven years since, the now octogenarian master, his career well into its sixth decade, has made both another sweeping big-screen epic, The Irishman, and a project for the small screen, the playful semi-documentary Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story.

If he wanted to spend the remainder of his life resting on his laurels as one of the most beloved and influential artists in any medium, while continuing to be a force in the world of film preservation and a supporter of up-and-coming cinematic talent, his repose would be more than well-earned. But as is clear from Scorsese’s soul-searching recent interviews (the one upside of the ongoing SAG-AFTRA strike is that, by keeping actors from promoting new releases, it’s given us extra Marty face time), the director of Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, The King of Comedy, After Hours, The Age of Innocence, Goodfellas, The Departed, The Wolf of Wall Street, and [insert your own celebrated masterpiece and/or underrated genre experiment here] has never been one for laurel-lounging. With Killers of the Flower Moon, an adaptation of the nonfiction bestseller of the same title by David Grann, Scorsese explores what is for him new terrain—his first Western, only his second feature (along with Kundun) to foreground the lives of nonwhite characters, and one of the few (alongside The Age of Innocence and Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore) to place the experience of a female character, in this case the Osage woman Mollie Burkhart (Lily Gladstone), at or near the center of the story.*

Killers of the Flower Moon is set during the 1920s, when a series of brutal murders stretching over years sowed a climate of fear across a swath of oil-rich Oklahoma territory legally belonging to the Osage Tribe—but primarily and corruptly controlled by white businessmen, lawmen, and con artists. Like Silence, Killers of the Flower Moon is a cathedral of a movie, cavernously huge in ambition and scale, yet oddly intimate in its effect on the viewer. But if Silence was a cathedral in the austere Romanesque style, Killers is full-on Gothic, its surface a profusion of gargoyles, monsters, sinners, and saints.

Killers’ setting, a lonely stretch of prairie dotted with frontier settlements (Gray Horse, Pawhuska, Fairfax, and a disreputable gambling outpost called Whizbang), has something in common with the urban jungles that have often served as the location for this filmmaker’s work. In these unpaved mean streets, social hierarchies are overturned as well-off Osage families build and furnish grand houses, wear their wealth in the form of jewels and furs, and get around town in fashionable cars chauffeured by white servants. The intertitles of a silent newsreel that appears early on capture the combined sense of amusement and resentment that this carnivalesque reversal of norms creates in the wider culture. But for all their economic might, the Osage lack political and social power—or more accurately, the freedom to exercise that power, since many holders of underground mineral rights, including Mollie and her family, require white “guardians” to access their own money.

Partly as a result of this legal setup, marriages between Osage women and white men in the territory are not uncommon. Two of Mollie’s sisters already have white husbands, so it’s no family scandal when Mollie marries her hired driver, Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio), newly arrived in town after military service in World War I. Ernest’s uncle is William King Hale (Robert De Niro), a powerful local rancher with a longstanding connection to the Osage community. “Call me King,” this soft-spoken yet lordly man tells his nephew by way of welcome. The ostensibly intimate moniker turns out to be a chilling sign of both Hale’s authoritarian nature and the far reach of his influence.

From the start, Ernest and Mollie’s relationship has an economic element that both parties fully acknowledge. As he sweet-talks her late one night at her graciously appointed dining-room table, she parries his flirtation with the dry observation that “Coyote wants money.” But her joke is a form of flirting too, and Ernest laughingly acknowledges his appreciation for life’s finer things. A good deal of time is spent early on establishing this fact, which will later become the movie’s aching heart: For all the racial, social and economic divides that make their marriage fraught with the potential for exploitation, Mollie and Ernest are in love.

Unlike Grann’s suspensefully constructed book, Scorsese’s adaptation never withholds the truth behind the two-dozen-plus murders that will eventually tear through the community. From the start we see how Hale manipulates the gormless Ernest, and hear how the older man’s pious speeches at Osage religious and social events contrast with his private machinations. But the conspiracy to destroy Osage lives and capture Osage wealth extends its tentacles much farther even than Hale’s circle of influence. Gradually the magnitude of the scheme expands to include the local doctors, two brothers who also happen to be the area’s go-to undertakers; the insurance companies that make it easy for white settlers to collect hefty settlements on Indigenous lives and property; and the complicity, whether through malevolence or systemic neglect, of local, state, and federal officials. Late in the film, an officer from the United States’ newly formed “Bureau of Investigation” shows up at the Burkharts’ door to ask questions about the unsolved murders in Osage country, and what has for two-plus hours been a love story embedded in a portrait of organized crime suddenly morphs into a heart-pounding courtroom drama, as the weak-willed Ernest flails between his fear of his powerful uncle and his real, if twisted, loyalty to his broken, bereaved, but still trusting wife.

An early draft of the script, like Grann’s book, paid considerable attention to the federal investigator Tom White (Jesse Plemons), whom DiCaprio was at first slated to play. But in part at the actor’s suggestion, Scorsese and his co-screenwriter Eric Roth (Forrest Gump, Munich, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, the 2018 A Star Is Born) did a complete rewrite, focusing instead on Mollie and Ernest’s marriage and reducing White’s role to the final hour of the film. Scorsese has said that this change was crucial to discovering what Killers of the Flower Moon should be: not a cops-versus-bad-guys whodunit but “a template for that tragedy of love, trust, and betrayal of the Indigenous people.” Without ever hammering the point home, the film makes Ernest’s monstrous betrayal of Mollie a kind of scale model for the foundational American crime of Native American genocide, one that leads us to sense our own complicity in this vast web of violence.

What’s hard to convey in the format of a review is the enveloping, overpowering experience of watching Killers of the Flower Moon. The opening scene, in which an outdoor Osage ritual is interrupted by the sudden explosion of a geyser of black oil, is accompanied by a soaring score by Robbie Robertson, a part-Indigenous Canadian musician and longtime Scorsese friend who died earlier this year. The cinematography, worthy of an Old Master painting, is by Rodrigo Prieto (The Wolf of Wall Street, Silence, The Irishman). The almost dementedly intricate production design, created by the legendary Jack Fisk in his first collaboration with Scorsese, brings the past to life in the smallest and most unexpected details, such as a billiard parlor that contains its own in-house barber station. The costumes, splendidly imagined by Jacqueline West, also deliver jolts of surprise: Mollie’s wedding outfit, while based on a historical photograph, fits into the time’s popular image of neither a white nor an Indigenous woman.

The sense of idiosyncrasy and specificity that makes this film feel so different from a standard period Western comes not just from the craft side, but from the performances. As played by the stupendous Lily Gladstone, Mollie is quiet, watchful, reserved—but never stoic or pitiably long-suffering in the style of a stereotypical onscreen “Indian.” We see her experience longing, lust, grief, suspicion, forgiveness, and fury, even as she’s obliged to conceal her true feelings—and the extent of her awareness of the deceit all around her—in order to survive in a white-controlled world. Scorsese has been criticized in the past for failing to deliver female characters as complex and believable as the men his movies usually showcase. In the portrait of Mollie Burkhart, embodied by a performer as intuitive and artful as any he’s ever worked with, he has outdone himself. DiCaprio, too, gives a career-best performance as the deservedly miserable Ernest, who lacks both the brains and the backbone to resist the pernicious influence of his uncle (played by De Niro with a malignant cunning that can’t help but evoke some of the skilled practitioners of false piety in our current political moment). In the late scenes where Plemons’ straight-laced investigator interrogates Ernest with cool efficiency, the DiCaprio character’s stammered self-contradictions and cowardly reversals even provide some dark and much-needed comedy.

At 3 hours and 26 minutes, Killers of the Flower Moon makes for a long sit even for those who’ve grown used to our era of ever-extending runtimes. It is never dull, though the scope of the storytelling and the sheer quantity of side characters are so enormous that the movie requires a fair amount of focus and concentration on the viewer’s part. My only substantive critique of this sublime motion picture is that, as befits an epic on the David Lean scale, it could have used an old-school intermission. This would have provided a break for the audience’s backs and bladders, but just as importantly, it could have allowed the jumbo-sized story a bit of room to breathe. I can even pinpoint the place in the narrative where such a pause might have made sense, perhaps accompanied by that gorgeous score as a way of keeping the audience anchored in the movie’s world.

I’ll end not with the statement that Killers of the Flower Moon could stand as a worthy swan song for its creator (though that is certainly true), but with a profound wish that the swan keep singing. Scorsese has already spoken about his desire to adapt another nonfiction book by David Grann, The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder, and also chatted with no less a world figure than the Pope about making a film about the life of Jesus, something he’s done before with 1988’s controversial The Last Temptation of Christ. Killers ends on a breathtaking stylistic swerve, an epilogue that recasts the tale of the Osage murders in a storytelling medium other than film. I’ll preserve the beautiful surprise of this sequence by noting only that it represents an unprecedented moment of self-disclosure and self-critique from an artist keenly aware of the moral responsibility he bears in recounting a true-crime story in which his ancestors, and those of any white member of the audience, were on the side of the criminals. His passion to keep making work that expands his and our sense of what art can and should do, and his ability to turn out one of the best films of his career this late in life, is proof that he is more than equal to the task of carrying on.