REVIEW: Killers of the Flower Moon [2023]

Rating: R | Runtime: 206 minutes
Release Date: October 20th, 2023 (USA)
Studio: Paramount Pictures / Apple Studios
Director(s): Martin Scorsese
Writer(s): Eric Roth and Martin Scorsese / David Grann (book Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI)

Did you see the owl?

I read someone who said Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon felt like a five-hour movie cut down to its most potent three-and-a-half hours. They really hit the nail on the head. This account of the Osage tribe murders during the 1920s is riveting from start to finish without a single lull to even think to check your watch. I would even argue that it was rushed at times considering just how many bodies fall and how quickly the domino effect speeds up once the noose begins to tighten around the necks of those responsible (even if it could never be tight enough).

The non-fiction book by David Grann that Scorsese and Eric Roth adapted is nine-and-a-half hours long in audiobook format, so you can imagine the context and history that had to be left out to center everything on the actions of the naively simple yet voluntarily complicit man chosen as the film’s center: Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio). So, after a prologue showing the lamentation of Osage elders about the inevitable loss of their culture and decision to sell the oil under their land to the white man—resulting in the conditional wealth won by the next generation, the rest unfolds with a knowing air of betrayal.

Because the Osage are shown as loving King Bill Hale (Robert De Niro). He’s a friend they can trust. A man of means who didn’t try to take any of their lucrative land, but instead bought a cattle ranch nearby before using his clout to modernize the town. He spoke their language. Was an honored guest of their elders. And yet his scowl and judgmental eyes always calculating an angle or provoking a reaction tell a different story. All the silent, penetrating looks by white men on the periphery do too. And Scorsese makes sure to show them. Jovial smiles one second. Horror movie-esque stares the next. Everyone biding his time.

That isn’t Ernest, though. At least not on his own. Just returned from the war where he served as a cook, his decision to come to Osage stemmed from the larger-then-life persona his Uncle Bill possessed there. With his brother Byron (Scott Shepherd) already entrenched in the inner circle, Ernest saw an opportunity to get on his feet, make money, drink whiskey, and meet women. And Bill was only too accommodating knowing he could exploit that greed and those vices to his own benefit without fully giving up the game. He could use his nephew as another patsy in a malicious long con safely hidden from prying governmental eyes.

As such, despite the heartfelt love story that does commence between Ernest and his “full-blooded” bride Mollie (Lily Gladstone), its presence truly only renders the whole more tragic. Because Ernest does love his wife. More than anything. Even money—although he admits he almost loves it as much. It doesn’t stop him from listening to his uncle’s whispers or from absorbing them to the point of thinking they were his thoughts all along. I don’t say that to absolve him of his crimes, but to call attention to the complexity of his character and the mix of gullibility and shame that pushes him to do whatever is asked, regardless of the pain it will cause, to prove he belonged.

That aspect is why the film fits more in line with Scorsese’s gangster movies than his quieter dramas. Hale squeezes Ernest and Ernest squeezes Blackie Thompson (Tommy Schultz) and John Ramsey (Ty Mitchell) and Acie Kirby (Pete Yorn—yes, that Pete Yorn, joining a bunch of musicians from Jack White to Sturgill Simpson to Jason Isbell). And they’re all idiots doing the bidding of their leader in pursuit of money. Hale is the puppet master pulling everyone’s strings inside an elaborate plan with coordination from local lawmen, doctors, and the growing white population of men seeking Native brides. He plays matchmaker, pairing oil magnates with full-blooded families to steal it all.

And Scorsese doesn’t try to hide any of it. There’s no big reveal here. Just the sad truth of what happened and the sadder truth that the victims were helpless from fully recognizing its insidious strings. If there’s any surprise, it’s J. Edgar Hoover actually sending the Bureau to investigate (led by Jesse Plemons’ Tom White). Details like that are where you find yourself wanting to pick up Grann’s book to learn more about the politics and pressures resulting from a visit to DC by the Osage and the growing racial unrest sparked by the KKK. And yet it’s still a story too few know—much like the Tulsa Race Massacre, mentioned on-screen, which has also been brought to the forefronts of our consciousness by film/television.

I do hope Gladstone earns a nomination as the heart of the film. By marrying Ernest, her Mollie unwittingly puts herself into Hale’s crosshairs as family members die one by one around her. She provides the collective scream of an entire people more than once as tragedies continue to strike while their access to the fortunes that could do something about it weakens. And as every scene progresses, the curtain raises a little bit more to reveal the monsters lurking in plain sight. The actors don’t even have to change their deliveries or performances to sell it either. The script and editing shift the tone in such a way that Scorsese could have recycled footage and still sold the clarity of that thematic pivot.

That’s why this isn’t her film. Or even that of the Osage people regardless of whether that was Grann’s intent with his book. It can’t be. Scorsese understands he can’t hope to truly tell their story as a white man in a way that gives them the voice they deserve. So, he tells the tale of their oppressors instead. And he does so with zero sympathy for even their most sympathetic members. He adapts the source material in a way that depicts the nightmarish (and all too familiar) truth of white supremacy without leaving any room for “both sides” rhetoric. These are callous monsters doing anything and everything to maintain power by fostering genocide, sacrificing their own, and justifying it all in “God’s” name.

Mollie and the Osage are victims—souls left to die systematically and without remorse within a world that tricked them into thinking they were equals. The camera focuses on Ernest and Hale as those cheats, personifying their evil as a reminder of what was done and is still being done as laws are passed to sustain the erasure of this particular bit of American history from our curriculum. Whether malicious (De Niro may give us the year’s best villain thanks to that confident, duplicitous grin) or opportunistic (DiCaprio is very good as a conflicted man too shortsighted to see he’s conjuring his own demise), these are the faces of pure malevolence. Your neighbors. Your friends. Your so-called saviors. Smiling.