Killers of the Flower Moon Is an Epic of American Betrayal
Martin Scorsese has made a career telling stories that tackle issues of justice, retribution and betrayal. From his overt and poetic crime films, through to his dark comedies, religious parables and character pieces, he has long been drawn to stories where the ambiguities of life collide with the complexities of survival, and where day-to-day choices result in consequences sometimes obvious, and sometimes far more subtle and insidious.
With Killers of the Flower Moon, he crafts an ambitious historical drama that’s tragedies echo to this day, an observation of a criminal case that transformed the U.S. justice system and, perhaps too subtly, an allusion to the ongoing epidemic of murders targeting Indigenous women—acts of unsolved violence that are left to languish, continuing to afflict both my country of Canada and Scorsese’s native land.
Killers of the Flower Moon is based on David Grann’s nonfiction book, which includes the subtitle “The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI.” The film focuses much of its time on the murders themselves, perpetrated as part of a superficially complex (but at its core avaricious) plan to part a people with their windfall wealth. The displaced Nation of the Osage—kicked from their lands back East and forced to travel West, their population decimated—found themselves at the heart of a financial miracle. By coincidence or providence, the land that they called their own in Oklahoma proved to be a rich oil deposit, and the boon resulted in what was then extraordinary wealth for the Native population—but also enormous opportunities for exploitation and violence from those set to extract the oil. The Osage were granted certain economic benefits, but the very withdrawal of their funds was tightly monitored, a paternalistic system that did little to protect from those nefarious in their intentions.
One way the system could be subverted was through marriage, and it’s here that the film takes its central story, landing somewhere between love and larceny. Lily Gladstone plays Mollie Burkhart, a beautiful young woman who is helping care for her elderly mother (legendary Cree/Métis actress Tantoo Cardinal). At the behest of his powerful cattle rancher uncle William Hale (Robert De Niro), returning soldier Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio) is encouraged to flame the sparks of affection with Mollie both for personal benefit and to potentially secure a line into this lucre.
Thus sets out a sprawling, epic tale of double cross and malfeasance, told with a deliberate pace and a three-and-a-half-hour runtime that engages throughout. Thelma Schoonmaker manages at all times to propel the story with a gentle push, and there are more than enough jaw-dropping shots lensed by Rodrigo Prieto to sate any cinephile.
It’s easy to see American touchpoints here, resonating with everything from De Niro’s starrer The Untouchables to a similarly oil-soaked, poetically violent There Will Be Blood. The police procedural element doesn’t come until quite late, and while Jesse Plemons and his posse are wonderfully reserved, there’s a courtroom scene that owes more to Perry Mason or A Few Good Men than anything slightly more subtle. In fact, for all the casting decisions that are almost universally excellent, the inclusion of newly minted Oscar-winner Brendan Fraser is truly egregious, his hamming up in a brief role being an unwelcome tonal shift in what is otherwise a tightly controlled telling.
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