Killers of the Flower Moon

Warning: I include spoilers.

Chronic back pain combined with the flu (ugh!) sidelined me yesterday so I took the opportunity to finally catch up with Killers of the Flower Moon. To my mind it’s among Scorsese’s 5 or 6 best movies, a great achievement and I can see why he and De Niro sat there at the Oscars so glumly like a couple of grandmothers at a wake when a sweep wasn’t theirs. In the fullness of time, probably decades from now, it will surely be given its due within the context of Scorsese’s career. If it proves to be his last movie, he will have ended on a very powerful note. I found his cameo at the end of the film incredibly moving. It was like a kind of sign-off, made all the more powerful because he had the wisdom and grace to let the Osage have the last word. The voice of the natives does bring up an inherent difficulty, and not atypically I am going to spend the bulk of my analysis of this film, which I admired a great deal, talking about its flaws.

I first became aware of William King Hale, the Richard III-like villain of Scorsese’s adaptation of David Grann’s book, when I was doing family research about a decade ago. My great-grandmother was a Hale; and her mother was born in that same part of East Texas near the Oklahoma border where W.K. Hale came from. I found no near relation, but as I tried to express in my 2021 piece about my family history and interactions with Native Americans over the past four centuries, such people as he are still “my people”. It’s the same fabric, the same culture. People bury it, outright deny it, evade it, look downright embarrassed when you talk about it, but it is the truth. That’s the value of a movie like this one, and that’s why I particularly loved Scorsese going on camera at the end of this film. This movie works as a history of America particularized. De Niro’s Hale comes across as righteous, Godly, kind, and benevolent at the outset, and proves to be a greedy mass murderer. Like Scorsese’s earlier, much more flawed Gangs of New York the film puts his Italian gangster stories in the broader context of a violent America. “Judge not” says Hale in the movie, and though his statement is self-serving, it is a reminder that bloodshed is bloodshed, whether the perpetrators originated in Sicily or Great Britain. Men are monstrous; it shouldn’t be a news bulletin to anyone who’s ever cracked a history book. (In light of this it bugs me a bit that he cast De Niro and DiCaprio as his leads. Both are only half-Italian, but they sure aren’t Oklahoma crackers; they can’t even do the accent.)

DiCaprio’s prominence on the poster above telegraphs who’s story it is, as told here. At 50 he’s twice too old to play to Ernest Burkhart, Hale’s weak-willed and simple-minded nephew who’s at the heart of the story, but I guess marquee names are how $200 million movies get made. It does make for a chuckle, though, when the BOI investigator played by Jesse Plemons, 14 years DiCaprio’s junior, keeps calling him “son”. We’re almost at the point where Leo could have used some of that AI technology from The Irishman. Anyway, the story is about how Burkhart carries his uncle’s water for him, getting drawn into dirtier and dirtier deeds, including the slow (attempted) murder of what he loves most in the world, his wife Molly (Lily Gladstone). The end game is oil rights. The Osage were one of the few tribes on this continent to luck into a sweet piece of the American dream. Unsurprisingly, they were set upon by jackals almost immediately.

Burkhart’s dilemma is what interests Scorsese here, and he clearly considers it the avenue by which he hopes the audience will do a little soul-searching. Unfortunately Burkhart’s conversion happens contemptibly late in the game and only when he is compelled by external circumstances. It reminds me of my wife’s jokey summation of Valkyrie (2008) as “that movie about the guy who was on the fence about killing Hitler“. Some of the things Leo’s character does in the movie will make you physically ill, or ought to. I always thought that Scorsese had something of an unconscious sadistic streak, second only perhaps to his fellow Catholic film-maker Mel Gibson. Theoretically it’s to make you feel the wrong that is being done, but it has always felt voyeuristic rather than empathetic to me.

We know that Scorsese cares, else why make the film at all, but as with others of his generation (see Green Book), the major piece of the puzzle that he is missing, and that alienates some, is in the perspective. This undeniably great movie is out of sync with our historical moment. In 2024, audiences are excited about the emergence of previously unheard voices, and of misrepresented groups getting to tell their own stories. It’s something I’ve been grappling with a lot myself as an artist. For some (liberal white men) there is an impulse, a well-meaning one, to do one’s part by telling the stories of those who have been harmed by this culture. But ultimately that’s still elbowing your way in, maintaining your dominance with velvet handcuffs, whether you realize it or not. Objectively, this is Mollie’s story, the crucial revelation is hers. And the story is for the Osage to tell. Powerful guys like Scorsese would accomplish the goals of a project like this better by helping it get made by native artists. I anticipate the smartass and incorrect Hollywood answer: “It wouldn’t get made”. My rejoinder is quite simple. Movies don’t need to cost $200 million!

“Their time is over” says Hale of the Osage in the film. The same might be said of a certain approach to story-telling.

Formally, though? It might be Scorsese’s best film. For such a long movie it has some scenes that are wonderfully economical. I loved how it was shot and staged. I was floored by the excellent art direction, and loved all the music, the late Robbie Robertson’s, but also all of the period records that anchor us in 1920s Oklahoma. (Coincidentally, I’ve been working on my own version of one of them, Henry Thomas’s “Bull Doze Blues”, better known to most people in its adapted form as Canned Heat’s “Up the Country”. Robertson also has a recurring theme in there that evokes The Doors “Five to One”.) Naturally we were thrilled to see our friend Vince Giordano in the old time radio formatted epilogue, a brilliant conceit. And as I said, the Native American music, used most powerfully at the very end, as if to exorcise bad spirits, and lay the dead to rest. In an ideal world, Killers of the Flower Moon might be perfect punctuation mark to put at the end of traditional westerns as a genre, the “Last Western”. It would be nice, but history is never nice.