Gangsters of the West: Film Review of Killers of the Flower Moon
★★★★★
Attribution: Fernando de Sousa from Melbourne, Australia, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
By Geoff Carter
Martin Scorsese is one of the most versatile and gifted film directors working today. He has directed movies in a variety of genres, including psychological thrillers (Shutter Island, Taxi Driver, and Cape Fear) historical dramas (The Age of Innocence and Gangs of New York), documentary concert films (The Last Waltz and No Direction Home), biopics (The Aviator and Raging Bull), comedies (After Hours and Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore), and even musicals (New York, New York). And yet, fromm his oeuvre of over twenty-six feature length films, seventeen documentaries, and one anthology piece, Martin Scorsese is most widely known for his work in gangster films—even though he has only directed six of them in his entire career: Mean Streets, Gangs of New York, The Departed, Casino, The Irishman, and—of course, Goodfellas. And yet, those are the ones that stick to him.
Mr. Scorsese’s latest project, Killers of the Flower Moon, is set in 1920s Oklahoma and centers on the Osage tribe who had been forced off their native lands of Missouri and Kanas onto a reservation right smack dab in the middle of what turned out to be a huge Oklahoman oil field. The Native Americans become rich—and richer—while the whites in the nearby town of Fairfax waste no time in trying to separate the Osage from their money.
The movie is a sprawling affair, spanning over three and one-half hours. It encompasses the Osage Nation, their history, and the strange circumstances under which dozens of them mysteriously died. Killers of the Flower Moon is a crime story, a love story, a thriller, and a history. It is also a gangster movie in disguise.
The story opens as Osage elders are burying a ceremonial pipe to mourn the assimilation of their ways into white society. Shortly afterwards, several members of the tribe stumble upon the oil, making the entire Osage nation independently rich (even though every tribal member is appointed a white guardian to help manage the money.
Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio) returns from World War I to live with this brother Byron (Scott Shepherd) and their Uncle Bill “King” Hale (Robert DeNiro), known to the locals simply as King. Hale has a reservation ranch and portrays himself as a friend to the tribe. He speaks the native language and bestows gifts on his Osage friends. When Ernest arrives, King takes him aside and speaks to the many advantages of marrying a rich Osage woman.
Ernest takes a job driving a cab. The scenes in Fairfax, particularly after the oil companies’ paydays, are bustling sequences, the streets packed with well-dressed Osage and chattering Caucasian hucksters and hustlers. One photographer tells a Native American couple he will take their picture for a mere forty dollars—a little over six hundred dollars in today’s money. The greed is ubiquitous and shameless, and a microcosm of our shameful history of manifest destiny and white supremacy. The Indians are still being robbed in Fairfax just as they were on the open range; it’s just that this time around the thieves have to be slightly more subtle.
Scorsese inserts black and white photographic stills and staged newsreel footage into the beginning of the film, giving it an atmosphere of historic authenticity. Later in the movie, genuine newsreel footage of the burning and looting of Black Wall Street, a wealthy African American neighborhood of Tulsa, is shown.
Mysterious deaths begin to plague the Osage nation soon after they strike oil. Men are shot, women die from mysterious illnesses that baffle the local doctors, a house is firebombed, murders are covered up, and no one cares to investigate. Hale attends all the funerals and says all the right things, but the audience soon (almost from the beginning) discovers what he really is. Working with the Burkhart brothers, Hale pulls together a web of killers, swindlers, thieves, and arsonists to help him rob, terrorize, and murder the native Osage people. His closest criminal accomplices are Ernest and Byron—family. They never relay orders within shouting distance of King Hale. Sound familiar? The Hales and Burkhart Brother are no less gangsters than the Michael Corleone or Tony Sopranos. The shrewdness and sheer audacity of Hale is breathtaking—as is his capacity for evil. After he persuades Ernest to pursue Molly (whom he finally marries), Hale designs a plot to murder the entire family in order to get their headrights.
Although this sprawling epic lasts a little over three and one-half hours, the narrative never drags or stalls. In fact, as the story winds to its conclusion, the dramatic resolution of Hale and Burkhart’s final fate—while expected—is still gripping. While guiding us through this landscape of clashing cultures, historical drama, a love story, and an insipid racist evil that is uniquely American, Mr. Scorsese somehow draws all these disparate elements into a cohesive tapestry of an American dream gone sickeningly bad. Not that it’s obvious—at least at first.
On the surface, the relationships between the Osage and the whites in Fairfax seem relaxed and cordial, but the tensions run hard and deep. The Osage know they are hated by the whites twice as much as any other tribe. Once because they are Indians, and once more because they are rich. Scorsese’s direction of a seemingly tolerant town, which even sports a scene of KKK members marching in a parade behind a group name “Mothers of Indian Veterans”. The hate is hiding in plain sight, and Scorsese’s choices in direction, encompassing every element from mise-en-scene to dialogue to historical references underlines this sensibility. After all, it is the backbone of the story.
Ernest takes a job with his uncle to make some money. He meets Molly (Lily Gladstone) and she seems to take a liking to him, and he—it seems—to her. While he constantly professes his love for her and eventually becomes a good father to their three children, Ernest is always in thrall of his uncle, never failing to do his bidding. It’s obvious that Molly loves him. How he feels about her is—to be generous—ambiguous.
DiCaprio does a marvelous job capturing Ernest’s greed and obeisance to his uncle while simultaneously conveying a loving and caring sentiment toward his family. The brilliance of this performance is that he convinces us that a man this evil has love in him—even when that love is at odds with his greed.
Lily Gladstone carries a magnificent sense of gravity in her portrayal of Molly. She is stoic and reserved at the beginning of the film, but her humanity and her feelings for Ernest are obvious. It is a performance of nuanced subtleties and understated control. She makes it look far too easy.
DeNiro is DeNiro. Although he is a magnificent and versatile actor, his persona—like those of classic film actors James Stewart or Humphrey Bogart—is stamped on every one of his roles, but his portrayal of King Hale is chilling in both its avarice and its relentlessness. The man was an engine of destruction.
In my opinion, this is Martin Scorsese’s best film. I’m more than aware of his groundbreaking work in cinematic masterpieces like Raging Bull, Goodfellas, Taxi Driver, and The Irishman. These are all great films, but Killers of the Flower Moon is a story that transcends its own reality, its own history. It is a quintessentially American tale, an example of robber, murder, and mayhem taking place under the mantle—the white sheets—of racial superiority.
It is a wide-ranging and all-encompassing film. It is a Western, a love story, a murder mystery, a love story, and a gangster film. It is epic and it is intimate. It is—quite simply—brilliant.