Scorsese targets gangsters of a different sort in ‘Killers of the Flower Moon’
After a career full of stories about American gangsters, Martin Scorsese appeared to give his final word on the subject in 2019 with “The Irishman,” a masterful, career-culminating achievement that recontextualizes his own work, especially the landmark “Goodfellas” from 1990.
With so many great films on his resume, Scorsese, at age 80, doesn’t need to prove his vitality as a filmmaker. He does it anyway with “Killers of the Flower Moon,” a Western-infused epic that examines monstrous greed in ways that echoes “The Irishman” while showcasing a whole different American tragedy.
The fact-based film is based on the book of the same name by David Grann, focusing on a series of murders that occurred in Osage Nation in the 1920s after an oil discovery made its landowners rich. The book, subtitled “The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI,” had a heavy focus on Tom White, a white FBI agent who investigated the crimes. Scorsese, on the suggestion of star Leonardo DiCaprio, decided to steer the film away from its procedural roots to instead focus on a few of the murders, notably William King Hale (Robert De Niro), a businessman and “friend” to the Osage who orchestrated many of the heinous crimes against the tribe.
As a result, the screenplay, written by Scorsese and Eric Roth, doesn’t even introduce Tom White (played by Jesse Plemons) until two hours into its sprawling three-and-a-half-hour runtime. Instead, “Flower Moon” follows Ernest Burkhart (DiCaprio), a simple-minded war veteran who has the allegiance to his Uncle Hale tested by a romance with Mollie (Lily Gladstone), an Osage woman with a huge stake in her family’s newfound wealth.
DiCaprio is the definitive lead in “Flower Moon,” though Scorsese wastes no time revealing Ernest’s true nature. He’s a foolish, morally bankrupt man with an obsession for money and pleasing his kin, to the point that he’s capable of terrible things under Hale’s beckoning. It’s a tricky performance for DiCaprio, a movie-star known for his inherent likability. In that regard, “Flower Moon” makes for a compelling (and long) double feature with Scorsese’s 2013 black comedy, “The Wolf of Wall Street,” another brilliant movie about a despicable “protagonist.”
De Niro, meanwhile, captivates as a soft-spoken, deeply manipulative Hale, a man who represents America’s worst impulses and history when it comes to greed, exploitation and White power. Hale is a man who disparages the KKK in public and offers friendship and counsel to Osage community members while simultaneously working behind the scenes to murder them. He masquerades as a leader, rarely raising his voice to anyone, and yet the evil inside him is never in doubt.
The anchor of “Flower Moon” is Gladstone’s Mollie, a vibrant and wise woman who recognizes the betrayal around her but nevertheless falls for Ernest, who also builds an affection for Mollie despite his uncle’s manipulations. The movie eventually narrows on the Mollie-Ernest relationship, particularly in how Ernest seemingly compartmentalizes his love for his family while committing heinous acts against the community at large.
At three-and-a-half hours, the greatest accomplishment here may be the movie’s sharp pacing and editing choices. If the movie drags at all, it happens when the story necessarily sidelines Mollie’s character for a stretch in the middle as Scorsese lays out the scope of Hale’s influence in Osage Nation. Maybe a better movie exists that puts Mollie squarely in the lead role, as “Killers” simply isn’t quite as compelling when her character isn’t present. Scorsese, at least, seems to understand the inherent shortcomings of a white filmmaker attempting to tell her story, and, in one of the film’s more provocative moments, addresses his limitations in the movie’s epilogue.
As to be expected from a $200 million Scorsese project, the technical components of “Killers of the Flower Moon” are flawless, from the aforementioned editing, to the see-it-on-as-bigger-screen-as-
All told, “Killers of the Flower Moon” tells a compelling story about one of the country’s darkest and largely ignored tragedies, and Scorsese’s efforts to deviate from the procedural elements of its source material allow the filmmaker to expose more facets of American gangsterdom.
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Tyler Wilson can be reached at twilson@cdapress.com.