Format: Streaming video from Apple TV on basement television.
My latest quarter in school ended Friday and my grades are due tomorrow, but I finished them this morning. It seemed like a good time to knock out the longest movie on my list, Martin Scorsese’s latest magnum opus Killers of the Flower Moon. I went into this expecting something like a mystery. Turns out that that’s not the case; Killers of the Flower Moon is a gangster movie. It’s just a gangster movie that takes place in 1920s Oklahoma, involves the Osage people, and is about oil. Still, it’s very much a gangster movie.
After World War I, Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio) shows up in Oklahoma at the behest of his uncle, William King Hale (Robert De Niro). King Hale runs a ranch, aided by Ernest’s brother Byron (Scott Shepherd). The ranch is in Osage country, and in previous years, oil was discovered on Osage land, making the people fabulously wealthy. And this is the problem—the Osage have the oil rights, but because they are native, they don’t have any real power. And so they start dying, and their deaths are not investigated.
What we learn early on is that King Hale appears to be a friend to the Osage. He speaks their language and is friendly with many of them. The truth, though is that many of the deaths in the area have been done at the behest of King Hale, all in an effort to acquire the headrights of the oil. A part of this involves Ernest marrying into the Osage tribe. Ernest accomplishes this by marrying Mollie (Lily Gladstone), and while the romance between them seems legitimate, it’s one that is destined for problems, since King Hale wants her oil rights. This is evident when among the various deaths in the Osage community are her sisters, mother, and her brother-in-law.
At times, Ernest seems tangentially connected to all of this, but there are times when he is much more directly involved. Mollie and the Osage hire a private investigator to get to the bottom of Mollie’s sister Anna’s (Cara Jade Myers) murder. We see the private investigator beaten to death, and then eventually we see that it was done by Byron and Ernest. So, even if Ernest loves his wife, he’s actively conspiring against her.
Eventually things spiral out of control to the point where the new Bureau of Investigation sends out an agent (Jesse Plemmons) to look int the murders. And this is where everything starts to unravel for Ernest, King Hale, and the others, especially when Mollie finds out that her sickness that nearly kills her comes from the tainted insulin that she has been given.
It's not a shock that Martin Scorsese can get anyone he wants for any film that he is making. Killers of the Flower Moon has a number of cameo performances or minor parts. These include John Lithgow, Brendan Fraser, Elden Henson, Larry Fessenden, Barry Corbin, and even Jack White. It’s a reality that not a lot of directors could manage to pull off.
This is a hard movie because it’s a cruel movie. I went into this almost entirely cold, knowing only that it was about the murders of some native people. I genuinely expected that this was going to be a film where DiCaprio was playing the guy trying to figure out what was happening, not the guy committing the crimes. It turns the film from the murder mystery I thought it was going to be into a dark portrait of a man pulled in terrible directions by his obligations to family, both in the person of his uncle and that of his wife, and not really knowing where his loyalties should lie.
This is, of course, not simply a movie about the murders of the Osage people. It’s a story of racism, and the reality that the people of the time genuinely didn’t care what happened to the native people. The fact that the Osage had oil money undoubtedly caused a great deal of resentment, and that is what is played out in front of us. This is on the surface about money and oil, but the racism runs deeper here and pervades the entire story. Nowhere is this more evident than the fact that they can’t even collect their money without a legal guardian, since many of the Osage people were simple declared incompetent by virtue of being Osage.
Scorsese, of course, is a master of his craft, and the reason Killers of the Flower Moon works as well as it does is because it is a gangster movie, and Scorsese’s gangster sensibilities are brought to bear on the tale. It’s easy to imagine scenes from this being lifted almost word for word from Goodfellas, and you can almost feel the presence of Nicky Santoro from Casino getting whacked in a cornfield in the background.
It’s Lily Gladstone who is the most interesting to me here. Gladstone plays Mollie with minimal dialog and with not a great deal of facial expression, but there are rivers running deep in her. This might be the hardest thing to do as an actor—show that kind of depth of emotion without actually showing it overtly. Is her nomination category fraud that should have been a supporting role? Perhaps, although she’s certainly one of the three main players here. De Niro is great, but of course he is. There is a sort of elfin menace to him in this, someone who would happily see you live or die depending on whether or not he took an insurance policy out on you. As for Leo DiCaprio, the dental appliance he was fitted with does a lot of work for him. It distorts his face in strange ways, and the man looks as uncomfortable as he should in this morally blackened role.
Is it too long? Possibly. Honestly, it might have worked better as a miniseries.
Why to watch Killers of the Flower Moon: It’s an infuriating story for the right reasons.
Why not to watch: Honestly, this probably should have been a miniseries.
