Review: the righteous self-aggrandizement of Killers of the Flower Moon

Few films, and few filmmakers, are accosted with the unilateral zeal that attends the work of Martin Scorsese. From his earliest days as a poster child of the Hollywood Renaissance, any new undertaking from this most revered of American auteurs is instantly beset with critical and commercial interest: praise, prizes, giant cardboard cutouts in multiplex lobbies. Mr. Scorsese’s is one of the few names in show business that does not come from a comic book to solicit such hoopla. 

To be frank, I’ve never been a Scorsese devotee; in fact, I consider myself something of a detractor. But his output over the last decade has intrigued me more than that of any previous era in his filmography: The Wolf of Wall Street (‘13) was both an egregious spectacle and a startling indictment of capitalist culture that came closer than any other film to predicting the rise of Donald Trump… Silence (‘16), a passion project for Scorsese, echoed The Last Temptation of Christ in its indulgent, myopic sense of spirituality while affirming its director’s humanitarian concerns… and The Irishman (‘19) was a saturnine elegy to a world of men with names like Pacino and Pesci, who built their artistic identities on the backs of slaughtered hoods. 

Coming on the heels of these recent efforts, Killers of the Flower Moon – based on David Grann’s best-selling account of the Osage murders in 1920s Oklahoma – is a coherent next step for Scorsese, and a smart integration of his various focuses: it is another indictment of American business, another secular cry against genocide, and yet another opportunity for the great director to reunite with Robert De Niro. 

That partnership may be more compelling, taken as a whole, than any individual film that director and actor have made together. What began as a couple of New York kids making movies about the mean streets of their adolescence has evolved into a pair of industry titans play-acting at Midwestern gentility. 

As I mentioned already, Killers of the Flower Moon details the hundred-year-old murders of over twenty wealthy Osage people. A federal case helmed by agent Tom White (played by Jesse Plemmons) of the newly-formed Bureau of Investigation sought to identify who had killed several Indigenous landowners whose property granted them access to large deposits of oil. In the end, it was discovered that William “King” Hale (De Niro), a prominent cattle rancher, orchestrated the killings – often with the assistance of his nephew, Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio), who, at the time of his arrest, was in the midst of poisoning his wife, Mollie (Lily Gladstone), an heiress of one such oil-estate.

To a certain extent, a story like this doesn’t run too far afield of Scorsese’s comfort zone: it bears light thematic similarities to Goodfellas (1990) and Gangs of New York (‘02), and the men he’s asked De Niro to embody over the years are to be recognized for their propensity for doing terrible things. And yet, with Killers of the Flower Moon, it feels as if there’s no place left for Scorsese-De Niro to go: how much farther can two men get from Little Italy? 

(Or maybe this is just the start – for if De Niro can play William King Hale, why not Julius Caesar? Richard III? Genghis Khan? I can think of worse than Scorsese trying his hand at Shakespeare, though I can also certainly think of better.)

There’s a bewildering awe one feels in watching De Niro as Hale. Accoutred with driver’s goggles and a Stetson hat, swathing his famed, gravelly voice in a Texan accent, he’s an utter stranger. But when his face crinkles into that familiar, sinister grin, we catch a glimpse of Travis Bickle. How surreal to find a paranoiac ‘70s Manhattan taxi driver alive and well-fed as a power-hungry rancher in nineteen-twenties Oklahoma. 

All these years later, Robert De Niro is still a public menace.

This juxtaposition in De Niro’s personae is as eloquent and misguided a revelation about American brutality as anything I’ve ever seen. I say “misguided” because Scorsese – who gave the great actor his breakthrough in Mean Streets (‘73) – treats Hale as the central villain, more so than he did Travis Bickle nearly fifty years ago. In Taxi Driver, Bickle is a deranged threat to other people, yes, but he’s also framed as a sort of perverse hero: disillusioned with the status quo, adverse to mainstream politics, and coming to the defense of a teenage sex worker.

As dangerous as Bickle is, he’s still less dangerous than the world in which he finds himself; it’s the political infrastructure of New York that hangs overhead in Taxi Driver, that drives one passionate man towards vicious defiance of institutional apathy. Yet in Killers of the Flower Moon, it’s the federal agents who become heroes – stepping in to solve the murders, to toss a few rotten apples (i.e. Hale) out of the barrel. 

I don’t mean to suggest that there was anything even perversely “heroic” about William King Hale. But diabolical though he may have been, the greater, more substantive persecution of Indigenous Americans has always been at the hands of the United States government. Focusing on Hale distracts from the systemic, federally-mandated genocide which enabled him and other heartless opportunists to take advantage of the Osage people in the first place. 

It’s a little perplexing that the filmmaker who saw fit to challenge governmental neglect in mid-century Manhattan doesn’t also do so when it comes to the FBI visiting tribal communities.

Of course, Scorsese’s perspective is that of the assimilated son of European immigrants. The powers-that-be have been kind to him, so that the punk who made Mean Streets is now a fêted, rich gentleman who’s courted by Apple. His artistic preoccupations have followed this trajectory, too: though sensitive to civil rights, and a staunch advocate for global cinema, whether he’s centering the caustic whims of stockbroker Jordan Beflort or ruminating over Jimmy Hoffa’s mob ties, this great American director continues to make films that don’t do anything to seriously shake, let alone shatter, a bourgeois understanding of American politics.

Such a sensibility is reflected in Killers of the Flower Moon’s narrative focus. The obvious centerpieces of the movie are De Niro’s and DiCaprio’s scenes with one another: when Burkhart first makes his way to his uncle’s homestead, Hale calmly lords over the younger man — initiating him into the family business by offering warmth and easy talk by a cozy fireside. The scene lasts for several minutes and remains locked on the pair’s shifting features. Later on, there’s a hushed conference between the two within the walls of a pool hall; a fraught reprimand over the tiled floors of a foreboding Masonic Club; and a stilted, charged reckoning through the heavy bars of a prison cell.

All of these scenes are lengthy, and constitute the moments where auteur and actor-producers are most in sync, consolidating decades of collaborative experiences into a series of interactions that loom with qualified gravitas. The Scorsese-De Niro-DiCaprio trifecta is the reason most people will see this movie, and happily, that unholy alliance does not disappoint. 

Incidentally, DiCaprio has never been better – or rather, he hasn’t been this compelling since the earliest days of his career. For the last twenty years, there’s been a concerted effort by the star to maintain his stature as a romantic lead, e.g. Titanic, The Aviator, The Great Gatsby, etc. Yet DiCaprio has always been most interesting when he isn’t being glamorous, as is evidenced by his Artie in What’s Eating Gilbert Grape (“Gilll-BERRRT!”), the scrubbed desperation of his mole-policeman in The Departed, or the crackling egomania of his enslaver in Django Unchained. 

Here is the first time, perhaps, that Leonardo DiCaprio has allowed himself to look un-handsome, or less than heroic: his face is flat as a hub cap, or the wedge of an axehead. His hair is yanked downward in a greasy part. His mouth is one stark line – humorless, like a scar on a withering tree stump. He cowers and hides, nods his way into atrocities at his uncle’s beckonging. He says he loves his wife, yet goes along with poisoning her. 

There is nothing redemptive about Ernest Burkhart – there is room only for pity, if even that. He is DiCaprio’s most revelatory performance in a decade, because, with this character, the actor shows us that he was born to play weak, ineffectual, and pathetic. There’ve been hints of it through the years; we’ve merely been distracted by his, as Mollie puts it, “coyote blue eyes.”

And speaking of Mollie – it is both understatement and fact to say that Lily Gladstone is luminous in this movie. With a moon-shaped face and wry interiority, she capitalizes on her recent collaborations with Kelly Reichardt (Certain Women, ‘16, and First Cow, ‘19), proving not only that she’s a great actor, but that she has the command of a great star. There is something eternal, something timeless about her presence onscreen; her portrayal of Mollie – specifically, her capitulation to Ernest’s lies and subsequent descent into illness – reminded me of Ingrid Bergman’s performances in Gaslight and Notorious, two films where the legendary Swedish actor played women who are manipulated and, in the latter instance, poisoned by their husbands. 

I’m sure this similarity in plot was not lost on Scorsese, who knows everything when it comes to film history, so I’m all the more dismayed that he didn’t seize the opportunity and elevate Mollie’s consciousness to a more central narrative place. Ostensibly, Gladstone claims the third lead in Killers of the Flower Moon, behind DiCaprio and De Niro, and her screen time does reflect that ranking.

But that’s my point – she’s the third lead. Not the lead.

Mr. Scorsese has been accused of sidelining women characters throughout his career: his only film to feature a sole woman protagonist is Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (‘74 – significantly, a project he did not spearhead, but that was offered to him), and as recently as The Irishman it was pointed out that, in the midst of so much male banter, players like Anna Paquin had virtually nothing to say. 

A similar charge can be leveled against his depiction of Mollie – who is, to be fair, by disposition, a more reserved figure than either Hale or Burkhart. Her stoic knowingness is held in contrast to the bumbling cruelty of her husband, and the duplicitous solicitations of her uncle-in-law.  

Yet even this apparently just distinction in their characters causes an imbalance between Gladstone and DiCaprio on screen. We always know where Ernest is at mentally – his schemes, his confusion, his sense of guilt – but Mollie is a bit more indecipherable. We don’t journey with her, or encounter the male characters through her eyes; rather, we watch her suffer, and roil in anguish while continuing to trust the very man who is causing her so much pain. 

The audience is never permitted to get a closer read on Mollie’s “ignorance,” and it is disorienting. At around the two-and-a-half hour mark, I found myself thinking: She’s too smart. How could she not realize what her husband is doing to her? There’s room in the psychological recesses of this tale to consider how Mollie may be allowing herself to be manipulated – that, in a darker sense, she may be drawn to Ernest’s abuse. Perhaps there is an allure to his cruelty, and a compulsion toward self-sabotage lurking within her. But Scorsese never asks these questions of his female lead, and forfeits Gladstone’s measured depths in favor of DiCaprio’s erratic petulance. 

Watching Mollie suffer, as opposed to leaning into her point of view, is a moral dilemma that may be applied to the film’s overarching relationship to its Osage characters as well. I consider Scorsese’s depictions of their murders disrespectful, needlessly ostentatious. This is another criticism he’s weathered over the years, and one that I hold to in my perennial argument against his films: from the operatic carnality of Taxi Driver and Raging Bull (‘80) to the crisp viciousness of Goodfellas and The Irishman, Scorsese employs violence as an expression of style. It is his signature, a showcase for creative virtuosity that is also distinctly alienated from real human pain. 

When De Niro bloodies Harvey Keitel’s white tank top in Taxi Driver, or when DiCaprio is splattered by Martin Sheen’s fallen corpse in The Departed, it is to make a visual gesture. Yet why must an audience witness violence? Must we see it in order to comprehend it? I doubt that Scorsese comprehends the violence he puts onscreen – otherwise, I should think, he likely would not show it. 

If, in his earlier work, this propensity for reveling in gore borders on the unethical or exploitative, its presence in Killers of the Flower Moon comes across as downright abusive. The ongoing genocide in Gaza has sparked renewed conversations among activists about the facility with which Eurocentric media outlets display the brutalized bodies of Black and brown people – namely, how exposure to these images enforces viewers’ perception that non-white folks are predisposed to suffer, to be beaten and trod upon. Martin Scorsese has made a three-and-a-half hour movie in which most of the talking goes on between two white men, while a host of Indigenous characters are paraded in front of the camera in various states of physical compromise – often being shot in the head, their lifeless bodies dumped in rivers, or ponds of crude oil. 

For all its concern towards the people of the Osage, Killers of the Flower Moon has little to ask of them, and is primarily interested in watching them die.

It is important to call out powerful artists for not doing enough to enlighten themselves and liberate their work. Some things are more important than “artistic license,” and Killers of the Flower Moon is a prime example of personality getting in the way of respectful storytelling. The solemnity of this movie’s subject matter doesn’t stop Scorsese from claiming the spotlight, quite literally: it ends with a depiction of the inner workings of a 40s’-era live radio play, complete with makeshift sound effects, recounting the aftermath of the Osage murders. 

When it comes time for one of the voiceover actors to relate Mollie’s fate, everyone suddenly steps away. And lo, Mr. Scorsese himself emerges onscreen as the radio show’s producer. Under a gossamer stage light, with silver-haired authority, he delivers her obituary. 

One could easily take satisfaction from this little cameo, and get a kick out of the radio show shtick – another of Scorsese’s trademark winks at old-school technology. But this choice also reminded me of how, in the nineteenth century, the memoirs of formerly enslaved people like Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs were often published with introductions written by white abolitionists. These introductions attested to the veracity of the memoirs; they were publishers’ attempts to authenticate Black voices for white audiences. 

When Scorsese delivers Mollie’s eulogy, after relegating her to second-class status for the entirety of his movie, it bears an air of righteous self-aggrandizement – as if the filmmaker’s presence were a gesture of humility, rather than yet another way for Scorsese to make it all about himself. Look at how responsible I am, he’s saying. Look at how good I am for telling this story.

Killers of the Flower Moon is a Scorsese movie, and is therefore essential viewing. But it is also a reminder that even great directors can get in the way of the stories they tell.