Killers of the Flower Moon
Apple TV+This piece was written during the 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes.
Without the labor of the writers and actors currently on strike, the movie being covered here wouldn’t exist.
Martin Scorsese knows his time is slowly running out, yet still has the urgency to make as many movies as possible before it’s over. 2019’s The Irishman felt like the filmmaker’s testament to the type of films he will most likely be remembered the most, and a swan song for the gripping screen presences of Al Pacino, Robert De Niro and Joe Pesci, who, in their own right, showed the world what acting truly is. It isn’t perfect, particularly its shoddy de-aging that makes most of the film look like a Call of Duty cutscene and a sluggish finale that leaves an impactful 210-minute-long picture with a whimper, but it will be remembered as a once-in-a-generation event, for those who grew up with them on the big screen, and the new film fans who have the opportunity to see this legendary pairing in a new motion picture, which will never happen again.
Scorsese has so much more to say, and he fully knows it. His latest film, Killers of the Flower Moon, examines greed, corruption and injustice head-on, through the figure of Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio), who arrives in Fairfax, Oklahoma after the war to work for his uncle, William King Hale (Robert De Niro). While he is not physically able to perform any strenuous tasks, Hale asks him to drive some of the locals around, including Mollie (Lily Gladstone), who will soon become Burkhart’s wife. However, during their marriage, Mollie’s sisters get brutally murdered, and nothing is done to find out who is committing them.
It turns out that Hale has been ordering people to kill the Osage people in an attempt to profit off their deaths and claim their oil, which they discovered. Hale may appear initially friendly to the Osage and is known by the tribe for bridging the gap between the Natives and the Caucasians, but is only doing this to gain their trust. This event invertedly leads to the creation of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (though, at the time, dubbed the BOI), with agent Tom White (Jesse Plemons) arriving to Fairfax to investigate the murders, immediately suspecting that Ernest and William may be in on it.
From there, Killers of the Flower Moon picks itself up, but the film’s deliberately slow pace hinders most of its emotional impact. With every “long” movie, there’s always the age-old runtime debate that keeps propping up on social media, with filmgoers expressing their opinions on whether or not it is justified for filmmakers to make 3-hour+ long movies. Many complain, but the same people who groan about having to “sit through” a 206-minute movie also watch the latest season of Stranger Things in one go. The hypocrisy is mind-boggling, but they also do not realize it. No movie is ever too long or too short. Pacing matters, and if Scorsese felt it necessary to tell his latest story, adapted from David Grann’s book of the same name, in 206 minutes, then let him do it.
However, Scorsese never once justifies the film’s lengthy runtime, resulting in an oftentimes bloated and lethargic effort, blunting any emotional impact on a horrifying story that it would’ve otherwise had with a shorter runtime. Scorsese and co-writer Eric Roth spend most of Killers of the Flower Moon’s first hour setting up the relationship between Ernest and Mollie, and makes it feel personal as they sit at the dinner table and intimately discuss about each other. It’s one of the film’s most emotionally poignant sequences, and a true tour-de-force for Lily Gladstone as the movie’s best performance. There’s no doubt she will get nominated for an Academy Award, though the question remains if she will win. In that specific sequence, she looks at Ernest with an ounce of fascination, instead of passionate love, but it’s also the same way he looks at her when he asks what color of skin she has, to which she responds “My color.” In that specific scene (and in its ending), Scorsese gives agency to Mollie, and never treats her as an object or a stereotype. It’s perhaps the movie’s greatest achievement.
In that regard, Mollie should the film’s central point of focus, and main protagonist, who experiences massive grief and heartache in seeing her sisters being killed one by one, while being taken care of by her husband who is secretly responsible for these murders, with his uncle. It should be terrifying to realize that perhaps Ernest may not be as good of a person as she thinks he is, and the slow realization that he is contributing to these barbaric acts should absolutely question her place with Ernest. But Mollie is unfortunately sidelined for most of the movie, bed-ridden, and slowly poisoned by Ernest, while Scorsese instead diverts the focus on the killers themselves.
But this story shouldn’t be about the killers, nor should it divert itself once more once the BOI agents arrive and begin to control the narrative. Killers of the Flower Moon should be about Mollie, who would theoretically be the film’s emotional anchor and sole protagonist, whilst Ernest and William are fully treated as antagonists instead of having a moral grey area where audiences have the opportunity to attach themselves to the characters once Scorsese gives them an unwarranted redemption arc.
Because the point of the movie is to directly show evil and barbarism in plain sight. William never hides the fact that he is ordering the murders through casual conversations, and even brags about the fact that “too much dynamite” were used in an attack, or yells at Ernest that a victim should’ve been shot in the front of their heads instead of their back to make it look like a suicide. Those conversations are terrifying enough, and paint the protagonists of the story as irredeemable.
But the latter half of Killers of the Flower Moon seems too focused on attempting to redeem Ernest from the barbarism he enabled, while tending to someone who will eventually get murdered by the people, he’s with. It doesn’t work, and stretches the runtime to unbearable lengths, where Ernest is faced with a moral dilemma to testify against William or keep his mouth shut. The impact would’ve been even more felt if he questioned his own morality during the Fairfax murders, but Scorsese never does so, and leaves his arc mostly unfulfilled by the time the film is over.
That being said, DiCaprio and De Niro are simply riveting to watch together, with De Niro’s Hale exercising a true iron fist over Burkhart. It’s one of De Niro’s best contributions with Scorsese, even if DiCaprio’s performance is largely unimpressive without the Taxi Driver star in front of him. It seems to wobble around caricatural and stern, but there’s never a clear focus on where he should land.
At times, his portrayal of Burkhart is unintentionally funny, which removes some of the tension and sense of dread that Scorsese desperately tries to establish. Supporting performances from Plemons, Pat Healy, Scott Shepherd, John Lithgow and a two scene-stealing Brendan Fraser add enough investment to at least keep the viewer engaged, though many of the movie’s grand ensemble appear for a small chunk of the movie or even extended cameos. Still, Fraser’s presence added more dramatic tension to the proceedings than most of what Scorsese sluggishly establishes in its first two acts. A legend in his own right.
Scorsese has been collaborating with cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto since The Wolf of Wall Street, which was his last good-looking movie. Ever since the shift from film to digital in Silence, the emulsion of film is obviously gone, and the texture in making the worlds feel vibrant and lived-in is gone. The Irishman’s blocking made it feel televisual instead of intimate and cinematic, though its script and performances largely saved the picture. The same can be said for Killers of the Flower Moon’s sweeping panoramic shots that feel far too artificial to look somewhat decent and its overreliance on extreme close-ups make its more emotional scenes feel distracting instead of staying in the truth of the action.
Some have argued that Scorsese couldn’t make Mollie the focal point of Killers of the Flower Moon, because he is not Osage and it would be cultural appropriation to make a film from an Indigenous perspective without a Native filmmaker at the helm. Absolutely no one will argue with that, and this specific argument showcases the root of the film’s problem. This is not Scorsese’s story to tell, and he shouldn’t have made Killers of the Flower Moon. By robbing Mollie of strong agency and focusing on the white murderers who committed some of the most despicable acts in all of history, he shifts the movie into an overall rote and undercooked examination on the banality of evil, and undeservedly attempts to give Burkhart his own redemption when Mollie is the one that should be in control of the narrative.
There’s a specific recurring shot of an owl that appears when the Native characters are at death’s door, or are at least foreshadowed that their time is almost up. It’s one of the film’s most lyrical moments, but is never deemed as essential to its thematic underpinnings, since Scorsese does not let the Osage be in charge of the film. It’s a cardinal mistake from one of cinema’s greatest living auteurs. Instead, it should’ve been a story he supervised to ensure it would’ve gotten made, but helmed by an Indigenous creative with the experience to tell their story based on their truth, while he focused on something else.