Martin Scorsese’s masterpiece epic Killers of the Flower Moon is remarkable – and unique in Scorsese’s canon -- for the stillness and hush of its storytelling.
The deliberate lack of dramatic inflection mirrors the impassive stoicism of the Osage in the face of the white occupiers, and it also reflects the moral blankness of those white occupiers as they implement the criminal agenda of manifest destiny.
And this is why Killers of the Flower Moon is a work of genius. You emerge from it gutted, and guilty, and redeemed by the catharsis of great art.
The film opens with an Osage ceremony, the burial of a pipe, and closes on an Osage drum circle, and the story is – elegantly -- set between two additional bookends: as a prologue to the events of the early twenties, black-and-white silent movie titles explain that because of the oil on their land, the Osage became per capita the richest people on earth. The epilogue that ties up the events you have watched is told as an energetic live 1930s radio broadcast, brightly lit, with a red curtain, full of percussion and dramatic sound effects, narrated in part, with relish and gusto, by Scorsese himself.
This radio show is more emphatic than the body of the film, where nothing shocks, nothing jars, the light is dull, the colors muted, there is no din, and when an explosion comes, it’s muffled.
The soundtrack by the great Robbie Robertson-- who died just as the film was completed-- is a hypnotic drum heartbeat that carries each scene into the next so smoothly that the film’s three-and-a-half-hours dissolve into a kind of no-time. You are immobilized in a passive space between your life and the story you’re being told, lulled into dully witnessing death after death of Osage men and women, many of them the relatives of the oil-rich Mollie Kyle.
All these deaths are part of various schemes by the rancher-crime boss William ‘King’ Hale to exploit the Osage by any means, legal or criminal, marry his family to their oil rights, poison them, shoot them. The murders are implemented by Hale’s poor-relative nephew Ernest Burkhart, whom he has pushed to marry Mollie Kyle; the heavy work of shooting and bombing is carried out by poor white odd-job men.
On the murder scenes, the blood never looks red, just dark , oily, and sticky.
The scenes in Killers of the Flower Moon have little contrast, the light is almost gummy. You wonder why the visuals are so attenuated, so dim, and then you realize what Scorsese has done.
The way a story is told is the story. Form equals function.
The script, by Scorsese and Eric Roth, is adapted from David Grann’s book about the investigation into a series of murders of Osage men and women of Fairfax, Oklahoma in the early 1920s. Maggie Burkhart, the grand-daughter of Ernest and Mollie Burkhart, persuaded Scorsese to move the focus of the movie away from the investigation and to the relationship between her grandparents. Scorsese, whose expertise is in stories of criminals, chose to present the criminal conspiracy from the point of view of its dimmest perpetrator.
The story begins as Ernest Burkhart steps off the train and into the swirling oil rush crowd of Fairfax, Oklahoma. A stocky youngish man (Leonardo di Caprio is 49, ‘youngish’ is me being overly nice) who has just returned from the First World War, where he was not a combatant but a cook, Ernest has a furrowed brow under his doughboy hat, an underbite that curves his mouth down into a stiff rictus, the confused expression of a bulldog.
He is collected by a driver sent by his uncle Bill Hale , a tall Osage who introduces himself as Henry Roan and drives Ernest into the only sweeping panorama of the Oklahoma landscape in the entire movie. Ernest sees wide grasslands with oil derricks pumping out the riches all the way to the horizon, asks “whose land is this?’. Henry replies “Ours,” then corrects it to “Mine.”
In a really great movie, every scene is a microcosm of the movie.
Then Henry drives Ernest onto Uncle Bill’s ranch, its land dotted with as many bovines as there were oil wells, but cows are the lesser riches .
Robert De Niro is uncle Bill “Call me King” Hale, and it’s a performance of alarming brilliance . With a voice and demeanor as calculated and tailored-to-be-reassuring as that of Ronald Reagan invoking “Morning in America” on his campaign trail forty year ago, De Niro, whose shoulders have narrowed as his hands have widened and whose mouth now droops at the corners in a rictus of his own, plays the most consciously evil character in a film about evil and its victims.
Bill Hale calls himself the friend to the Osage. He is unstoppably rapacious, with an ingrained, self-important, withering racism. To him the Osage are mere obstacles standing between him and the oil rights. He’s always looking for the angle that will profit him, be it theft, murder, or insurance fraud. He grills Ernest at the dinner table—subtext, what’s he going to do to make this dumb lunk of a relative earn his keep ?-- he metes out condescending approval to whatever Ernest says, it’s fine he was just a cook in the war, soldiers have to eat, and the weak gut ? that means he can be a driver. He asks “You like girls?” and as Ernest gives a bulldog grin, Uncle Bill’s mastermind comes to rest on the solution that Ernest can be mated to the Osage Mollie Burkhart.
“A sickly people” he says of the Osage, not quite licking his lips, but in that tone of thoughts and prayers compassion
And I kept hearing the voice of Ronald Reagan.
Ernest indeed becomes a livery driver in Fairfax, where the rich Osage go shopping in Pierce Arrows driven by uniformed white chauffeurs. He drives the impassive, steady Mollie Burkhart, who obediently declares herself “incompetent” to the guardian of her fortune, because that’s what the whites compelled the Indians to do so they could control their money. Ernest becomes Mollie’s driver, chats her up , until at last, on the threshold of her mother’s house, she hands him the gift of a white Stetson , and asks “You want dinner?”
As they sit at the dinner table, served by a white maid, a storm starts up and Mollie asks Ernest that they stay quiet during the rain.
And then love affair begins. Mollie sees the limitations of Ernest— “He’s not that smart,” she tells her sisters, “but he’s handsome.” And that, despite the near permanent bulldog frown.
And then they marry, and have children. And he will give her insulin for her diabetes, but will it be only insulin?
The sickly heiress, the opportunistic pawn, the evil mastermind, a family of collateral victims, and all for the subterranean riches; the story’s dimensions are moral, political, geological. How guilty is Ernest Burkhart, given his limited understanding ?
This is not a film about the banality of evil as much as about the dullness of those who follow the orders of evil. The contract killers, those who fire the guns and set the bombs, are idiots. The doctors who sin through omission and prescription are hypocrites protecting their asses.
But uncle Bill “call me King” Hale is a different animal. And he makes you wonder if the American spirit isn’t at heart made of greed, self interest, and cold self-importance.
Why do the Osage accept the insults of the whites? The film suggests that their resignation comes from an understanding of deeper forces at work than the wrinkles of temporal success and failure.
Who owns the land? The Osage were displaced from Missouri onto this patch of Oklahoma, the oil was a fluke, the Osage knew how to protect their rights.
All property, in fact, is theft. All land is stolen.
There are two extraordinary , Oscar-worthy performances beyond that of De Niro. Lily Gladstone, who plays the beautiful Mollie Burkhart, the firm, luminous, unassertive Osage whose patience is the film’s great mystery. She’s a better-looking Mona Lisa, and Scorsese lights her to emphasize her resemblance to a Renaissance Madonna, but her essential quality is more rooted, more implacable than those Italian virgins, almost mineral in its solidity. I read that Lily Gladstone, who has Blackfeet , Nez Perce and European ancestry, defines herself as a They. I can’t write ‘they’ about someone in a female part. Here, she is her.
And then there is William Belleau, who deserves an Oscar. He plays the driver whom we met in the first scene, Henry Roan, Mollie’s cousin, a sad young man who was once with her, and who loves the bottle. When he asks the doctor “What can you do about my melancholia?” he speaks for every sad, lost young man who’s learned the word for his condition but will never be free of it. An actor in control of how much of his own damage he allows out, he shows not only Henry Roan’s vulnerability but also the young man’s humor and verve. It’s a rare, great, heartbreaking secondary performance.
Leonardo Di Caprio produced Killers of the Flower Moon, along with Scorsese and Steven Spielberg. Conspiracy of the talented.
The best thing I’ve read about Killers of the Flower Moon is the long article by Noah Gallagher Shannon in the New York Times Magazine: a profile of Jack Fisk, who designed the sets, and at some points made them by hand, to create the world in which it happens.
Epics are immersive worlds. This one is worth repeated journeys.
It occurred to me what a different film it would be with a version of the young Brad Pitt in the part of Ernest Burkhart. So that when Mollie tells her sisters “he’s not that smart, but he’s handsome “, you would understand the helplessness of her attraction to him.