**½/****
starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Robert De Niro, Lily Gladstone, Jesse Plemons
screenplay by Eric Roth and Martin Scorsese, based on the book Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI by David Grann
directed by Martin Scorsese
by Walter Chaw I think Martin Scorsese is perhaps too principled a filmmaker to indulge in the dark poetry of Killers of the Flower Moon; too bound by limitations he’s aware of and wary of violating, too respectful of the horror of the history to mark it with the crackle of verve and vitality. A sober topic deserves a sober treatment, no question, yet Scorsese at his best is doing lines off the hood of a vintage Impala, not running lines with actors and advisors, all with competing interests and hardwired biases, to find the most cogent, most reasonable way to approach a tripwire. He’s so careful not to set off the powderkeg that is the Osage Murders of 1921-1926 that he doesn’t set off any sparks at all. While I don’t think Scorsese is capable of making a bad movie, with things like Hugo and even The Irishman, he’s shown he can make movies that are enervated in the fatal way of a conversation you have with a beloved elder you’re lucky to engage with but dread, too, for the repetitiveness and dusty formality. I’m not saying Scorsese was the wrong person to adapt white-guy journalist David Grann’s NYT-feted true-crime book Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI, a celebration of an organization that has done grievous harm to these very people it swooped in belatedly to protect this one time. On the contrary, he’s told what is probably the most palatable version of that story–but it’s a story I don’t want to hear. I guess I’m saying I have a hard time investing much in devalued institutions and their saviours.
I was hoping, in other words, for more of the self-searching and self-excoriation of Scorsese’s late-career masterpiece Silence and less of the checklisting of The Wolf of Wall Street, a film that was celebrated as a puckish bacchanal when it plays like a stately Sunday stroll around Hedonism Lake. Consider the passion gap between it and Scorsese’s smouldering, tragic The Age of Innocence and ask which one feels more mired in the Victorian age. What better analogue for what whites did to Native Americans than Portuguese missionaries impotently peddling their religion in 17th-century Japan, causing great harm to people who trusted them and departing in a state of apostasy away from Catholic mythologies of cultural superiority? Killers of the Flower Moon opens in a promisingly expressionistic fashion that might finally be too oblique. In a ceremonial stick hut, the disembodied eyes of generations of ancestors peering in from the outside, a group of Osage bury a ritual pipe that has been used as a part of storytelling for as long as any of the elders can remember. They’re putting it into the ground to say goodbye to their way of life; the colonizers are coming to take their children–we presume to Residential Schools and the horrors housed therein–and the only way the Osage can see to preserve what’s left of their heritage is to entomb it. But no one comes for the children, and although we may infer why that is, we never really know. The first problem with Killers of the Flower Moon is that for the metric ton of information it imparts, it leaves out a few small details that feel necessary. I think we’re meant to bridge the gap between this first scene and the next, where a group of Osage dance shirtless in a black geyser of oil. Maybe it’s the oil wealth that has saved the Osage from dissolution through their children being stolen. Maybe it’s the oil that dooms them to having their lives being stolen instead. I’m putting it together as fast as I can, though I needn’t have hurried.
If the film were a tone poem, as it seems like it might be in its first five minutes, a certain lack of historical detail would be forgivable, nay, expected. But Killers of the Flower Moon sees itself as a meticulous, rigorous ethnographical document and, as such, at least for me, is notably and distractingly deficient. When the story proper begins, it focuses so tightly on the travails of one family that the scope of its horror is exorcised. Why not mention that a spate of murders occurring amongst the Osage during this period is suspected to number into the hundreds, not isolated to five women from one family? Why not describe the humiliating state of conservatorship the outwardly wealthy Osage had to endure despite the richness of their land rights? Why not explain the relationships between the conservators and the film’s grand bogey? I suppose the extent to which you see it all as a MacGuffin to an awkwardly handled central romance is a matter of personal predilection. To me, it feels like a kind man, Scorsese, reaching his ninth decade and wanting to tell a tragic love story to foreground the abusive relationship between Indigenous Peoples and their relentless oppressors. Even if making this a love story suggests a measure of absolution for a confessed serial murderer.
The film’s central beneficiaries of oil wealth are old Lizzie Q (Tantoo Cardinal) and her four daughters: Mollie (Lily Gladstone), Anna (Cara Jade Myers), Reta (Janae Collins), and Minnie (Jillian Dion). Each of the four sisters is doomed to be married off to a white man and then murdered so that their husbands can claim their inheritance. The ringleader of the plot is cattleman William Hale (Robert De Niro), beloved in the Osage community for the largesse he ladles upon them from a coffer built of the Osage community’s own wealth. When his nephew Ernest (Leonardo DiCaprio, playing a barely-sentient underbite) returns from war looking to get his self-described “lazy” and “money-loving” ass taken care of by wealthy friends and relatives, William encourages him to court Mollie, not expecting Ernest to actually fall in love with her. Scorsese has said the pre-pandemic incarnation of the film would have spread over four hours and taken on the perspective of the FBI (then the Bureau of Investigation) behind agent Tom White (Jesse Plemons, who steals this movie by acting less) and their successful attempt to solve the case, thus proving themselves as a concept that should be enthusiastically adopted. Scorsese credits DiCaprio with asking if the focus of the film shouldn’t shift to “within” the Osage community and therefore around Ernest–with, naturally, DiCaprio playing Ernest instead of Tom White. Scorsese agreed and, two years into the writing process, changed gears. If you ask me, shifting focus to within the Osage community means centring Mollie and her sisters, not another pasty PTSD rummy from the Great War who’s used as a patsy for a robber baron from a Western Passion Play–though I think Scorsese recognized that such a change is a different story altogether with, ideally, a different director.
So the compromise is a Killers of the Flower Moon that indeed feels compromised. The first Native American filmmaker, James Young Deer (whose history is as colourful and occasionally criminal as that of Scorsese’s signature antiheroes), did a version from the Osage perspective in 1926, Tragedies of the Osage Hills, that promised a true accounting of the murders of Mollie and her people with a cast of “hundreds of real Indians.” It has, as with most of our silent-film legacy, been lost. Ninety-seven years later comes the second attempt to tell this forgotten atrocity, this time by a legendary white director who spent considerable time with Osage leaders, hiring consultants and language coaches, immersing himself in Osage culture, but still telling the story of a white guy who earns a measure of historical redemption at the cost of the graphic rending of the bodies of Indigenous Peoples. The deliverers of that redemption? J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI. Let’s ask Leonard Peltier his thoughts on the heroes of Killers of the Flower Moon. That’s not fair and beside the central point, I suppose, said point being whether the film is successful on its own merits, given its understandable limitations and laudable restraint. I say “laudable” because it might be tempting for a less thoughtful and empathetic white filmmaker to try to tell this story from the Osage point of view, which I think is possible to do–and even do well–but unlikely. And, yes, the film is good. It’s a straight-line slog with a tension wire held across its proverbial forehead for the duration, but good? Sure. Of course. Good.
What it isn’t is transcendent. An unfair expectation, maybe, but Scorsese–who is not incidentally one of the foremost champions of world cinema, of minority and women filmmakers, of film’s art and preservation–has provided us more than his fair share of transcendent cinema. His needle-drops are rapture, and his editing partner, the great Thelma Schoonmaker, has helped navigate a filmography packed with meditative exercises on the one side and punk rebellions on the other. But this one is…work. It reminds me of Akira Kurosawa’s last few films, in which he was given more to reverie at some remove than in his vital masterpieces. And it reminds me of the late writings of Freud and William Faulkner, spent in care and self-editing as opposed to the messiness of sturm und drang. Scorsese doesn’t step in anything here, but what if he had? What if its epilogue, replicating a performance of a live radio broadcast and arriving in place of the usual biopic conventions (photos of the real people, a sentence or two spelling out the characters’ ultimate fate), was how the entire film was framed? In other words, what if the picture were told as an artifact of a forgotten past turned into entertainment for a semi-engaged auditorium and the fourth wall was periodically broken to remind us how we like to make melodrama out of abomination? A Henry V (1944) that begins on a literal stage and occasionally reveals a dusty proscenium between scenes to offer crucial context to the full extent of American atrocity? What if Killers of the Flower Moon were audacious instead of cautious? What if, in a fit of uncontrollable outrage, Scorsese whipped his cameras like prized thoroughbreds or, failing that, turned it all into a hallucinogenic, Romanticist/Expressionist fugue, the capper to a spiritual quartet (quintet? I’d include his Life Lessons segment from New York Stories) of guilt and conscience begun with The Last Temptation of Christ, Kundun, and Silence? Instead, and this is the real frustration, here is this Killers of the Flower Moon, which someone with more time left and less genius could have done just as well.
