Killers of the Flower Moon review: Scorsese's handsome Western is ...
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Martin Scorsese's Osage Indian murders Western brings together Robert De Niro and Leonardo DiCaprio, but the film promotes "mixed feelings" and is "slow and meandering", writes Nicholas Barber.
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Martin Scorsese's Killers of The Flower Moon boasts the double act that the legendary director's fans have been waiting for: his two favourite leading men, Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro, are together at last. And it's a thrill to see them sharing scenes. Perhaps it wasn't wise of DiCaprio to jut out his jaw and yank up his lower lip, like a comedian doing a De Niro impression, but De Niro himself is the most compelling he has been in years, and the pair's last dialogue scene is one to file alongside the diner confrontation in Heat. By this point, however, you might well feel that the two great actors shouldn't have had so much screen time, after all.
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Co-written by Scorsese and Eric Roth, Killers of The Flower Moon tells the horrific true story of the so-called Osage Indian murders that took place in Oklahoma in the 1920s. The Osage Native Americans were the richest people per capita in the world at the time, because they had been shunted to a reservation that turned out, ironically, to be brimming with oil: there is a sparkling early sequence in which the Osage people stroll around the town of Fairfax, in the finest suits and dresses, while the white newcomers literally beg them for work. But as many as 60 people died in mysterious circumstances, and their oil fortunes flowed towards the white men who married their way into their families. The man responsible was a rancher named William Hale.
De Niro plays Hale as a manipulative, diabolical patrician who presents himself as a pious, soft-spoken benefactor. He just wants to help his friends, he shrugs - and if they choose to nickname him "King", well, where's the harm in that? The latest piece of bait in his trap is his nephew Ernest, played by DiCaprio, a brainless waster who arrives in Fairfax having served as an army cook in World War One. He loves money, he says proudly, especially if he can spend it on whiskey and lose it in card games, but he hates to work for a living. When he chauffeurs an Osage woman named Mollie (Lily Gladstone), she is tickled by his honesty - and by his blue-eyed good looks. Hale is only too pleased to hurry along their marriage. Ernest and Mollie seem to be a genuinely happy couple, but her sisters soon start dying, and her own diabetes keeps getting worse.
Killers of The Flower Moon is a handsome, painstakingly researched Western drama with seemingly no expense spared on its costumes, vintage cars and reconstructed frontier towns. It's punctuated with funny exchanges, sudden murders, and the kind of directorial flourishes you only get from Scorsese. But it is slow, meandering and episodic - more like a mini-series than an epic film - and that is partly down to the decision to focus on De Niro and DiCaprio's characters. Ernest is the protagonist, and yet he is essentially a stooge who kills whomever he is ordered to kill, and often makes a mess of it. The story isn't really about his moral dilemmas, because he doesn't see the contradiction in loving his wife while arranging for her sisters to be bumped off. And it doesn't work as a dark saga of dehumanising capitalist corruption, because Ernest is already an unrepentant crook when he comes to Fairfax. After a while, it feels as if there is no reason to watch this sponging lackey except that this was the role that DiCaprio chose to play.
Director: Martin Scorsese
Cast: Robert De Niro, Leonardo DiCaprio, Lily Gladstone, Jesse Plemons, Brendan Fraser
Run-time: 3hr 26m
Other alternative protagonists keep drifting into view. The film is adapted from David Grann's book, which is subtitled "The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI", and yet the main agent responsible for cracking the case, played by Jesse Plemons, isn't introduced for two hours. Incidentally, the lawyers in the subsequent court case, played by John Lithgow and Brendan Fraser, don't turn up for another half-hour after that. Or what about Mollie, who trusts Ernest, but is also a proud, cool-headed, perceptive woman who is determined that justice be served? Might the film have had more purpose if it had concentrated on her? There are fascinating revelations about how the Osage people are infantilised, and how they conduct their business, but these should have accounted for a bigger chunk of the three-and-a-half hour running time.
The last half-hour in particular prompts mixed feelings because, despite some touching, sober scenes, it becomes a Coen Brothersesque farce about just how stupid criminals can be. It's the most enjoyable part of the film, but also the most questionable. If Scorsese was set on making a blackly comic romp featuring a patronising gangster and his numbskulled nephew, maybe he shouldn't have used the real massacre of Native Americans as its subject.
★★★☆☆
Killers of the Flower Moon is on general release from 20 October.
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