Killers of the Flower Moon review — Martin Scorsese's epic of oil ...
Robert De Niro and Leonardo DiCaprio star in a film based on a true story of crime and corruption in the 1920s
Robert De Niro and Leonardo DiCaprio in ‘Killers of the Flower Moon’ © Courtesy of Apple
Receive free Film updates
We’ll send you a myFT Daily Digest email rounding up the latest Film news every morning.
Having capped off his decades-long cycle of Italian-American gangster movies with The Irishman in 2019, Martin Scorsese needed to find another bloody chapter in US history. Evidently he didn’t have to look long. David Grann’s 2017 non-fiction book Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI provides the source material for his new epic account of crimes committed against a community of Native Americans in 1920s Oklahoma. It begins with beaming Osage faces as oil is discovered on their land and they are granted headrights. It doesn’t take long for smiling white faces to appear, bringing with them alcohol, sugar, diabetes and death.
Robert De Niro is conniving cattle ranger William “King” Hale, who has ingratiated himself with the locals while fixing his eyes firmly on the long-term acquisition of their newfound wealth. Leonardo DiCaprio is his nephew Ernest Burkhart, freshly returned from military service and as money-hungry as he is gullible. This is no Henry Hill to De Niro’s Jimmy Conway, even if Ernest ultimately fares no better than his Goodfellas counterpart. If anything, he is a naïf closer to the hero of Forrest Gump, whose scribe Eric Roth co-wrote the Killers of the Flower Moon screenplay with Scorsese.
Hale steers Burkhart towards a union with open-hearted yet cautious Osage woman Mollie Kyle (Lily Gladstone), but marital bliss is shortlived; one by one, her family members start meeting with early and gruesome deaths. Can nothing be done to stop the slayings — or at least to investigate? As one character puts it: “You got a better chance of convicting a guy for kicking a dog than killing an Indian.”
Through its middle act, the story treads water somewhat, yet all the while it builds a bleak portrait of bottomless white greed and the ruthless drive for supremacy. DiCaprio spends much of the time exuding strained confusion, his eyes squinty, his mouth downturned into a Brandoesque sulk. How much does his simpleton character comprehend of all of this? Is his love for Mollie anything but genuine? These become the key questions. Meanwhile De Niro lays on the unctuous charm as the silver-tongued Hale, gleefully playing puppet master. Gladstone is the film’s quiet centre, often inscrutable yet exuding a subtle power while the white men chatter away endlessly in this dialogue-heavy movie — “blackbird talk” as the Osage call it.
Leonardo DiCaprio and Lily Gladstone © Courtesy of Apple
It is Mollie who eventually travels to Washington DC — ailing with disease though she is — to ask for federal intervention. Belatedly a white saviour figure arrives in the form of Tom White (Jesse Plemons), agent of the still-young Bureau of Investigation, but he is too late to rescue the dozens of Osage natives already slaughtered. For the film, however, it’s a boon, the inquiries ratcheting up the tension and putting the heat on Hale and Burkhart. While it has longueurs, the film doesn’t feel like three and a half hours.
By Scorsese standards, Killers of the Flower Moon is curiously short of memorable images, but the devastation etched into Gladstone’s stony face as the final revelations come is haunting. A pity that it ends not with this but with light-hearted pastiche: a true-crime radio drama (brought to you by J Edgar Hoover and Lucky Strike). This, with a white actor doing a cod Native American accent, is an odd tonal lurch after the gravity of what has come just before. It gets a laugh but — even after 100 years — it still might be too soon.
★★★★☆
In US cinemas from October 6 and on Apple TV Plus thereafter
