Killers of the Flower Moon – first-look review

In Mar­tin Scorsese’s 2002 film Gangs of New York, Amer­i­ca was born on the streets. In his new one, Killers of the Flower Moon, it dies a slow death out there on the prairie. With brac­ing echoes to con­tem­po­rary polit­i­cal malaise, it’s a chron­i­cle of ear­ly 20^th cen­tu­ry mid­west­ern his­to­ry that draws on Han­nah Arendt’s con­cept of the ​“banal­i­ty of evil”, in that it depicts the every­day geno­ci­dal ten­den­cies behold­en of Pro­hi­bi­tion-era white prospec­tors of all eco­nom­ic stripes. In this film the cru­cible of mod­ern civil­i­sa­tion is framed as lit­tle more than a gam­i­fied kill floor for the afflict­ed and rapacious.

It is, in a strange way, a rue­ful, ele­giac sis­ter film to 2010’s lude-pow­ered bac­cha­nal, The Wolf of Wall Street, in that it offers a sting­ing cri­tique of cap­i­tal­ist exploita­tion that’s oper­at­ing at a socio­path­ic lev­el, where the expen­di­ture of human suf­fer­ing most cer­tain­ly jus­ti­fies any long-game div­i­dends, and the pre­scrip­tion meds are swapped out for moonshine.

And in this case, the per­pe­tra­tors are hap­py to look their vic­tims in the eye and tell them they love them before pulling the trig­ger or admin­is­ter­ing the poi­son. Leonar­do DiCaprio even plays a pro­to-Jor­dan Belfort type who con­stant­ly exclaims how much he ​“loves mon­ey”. In terms of tone, how­ev­er, it’s more of a piece with Kun­dun or Silence.

It is drawn from the pages of the dis­qui­et­ing non-fic­tion best sell­er by New York­er stringer David Gran by Scors­ese and screen­writ­ing vet­er­an Eric Roth, and the sto­ry takes place in Osage Coun­ty, Okla­homa – a place where you’re more like­ly to be arrest­ed for ​“kick­ing a dog than you are shoot­ing an Indian.”

Land ced­ed to and con­se­crat­ed by the Osage nation is revealed in a some­what hokey open­ing scene as being lit­er­al­ly burst­ing with oil. The mem­bers of the Osage then sud­den­ly became some of the rich­est peo­ple on the plan­et, and it wan’t long before a com­plex appa­ra­tus of mali­cious white prof­i­teer­ing was con­struct­ed along­side the waltz­ing oil der­ricks that lit­tered the horizon.

Bespec­ta­cled tyrant ​“King” William Hale (Robert De Niro) employed phil­an­thropy and super­fi­cial civic benev­o­lence as a smoke­screen for a reign of ter­ror in which he engi­neered the mur­der of scads of Osage with the aim of even­tu­al­ly inher­it­ing the ​“head rights” for their oil wealth. He brings his greasy, mal­leable nephew Ernest Buck­hart (DiCaprio) into the fold, send­ing him for­ward as a vital pawn in his com­plex game.

Lily Gladstone’s Mol­lie Kyle becomes the locus for Osage dis­en­chant­ment, accept­ing Ernest’s semi-sin­cere hand in mar­riage while the corpses of kith and kin are being dis­cov­ered with alarm­ing reg­u­lar­i­ty, and not rous­ing so much as a raised eye­brow from bought-and-paid-for local law enforce­ment. The grad­ual diminu­tion of the strength and con­fi­dence she exudes in the film’s open­ing stretch trans­forms her from aveng­ing angel to pas­sive vic­tim, and her psy­cho­log­i­cal non-pres­ence in the story’s sec­ond half does the film few dra­mat­ic favours.

While Killers of the Flower Moon is obvi­ous­ly the prod­uct of America’s fore­most cin­e­mat­ic arti­san, the film itself nev­er quite dove­tails with its maker’s vault­ing and urgent moral ambi­tions. Unlike in the director’s deli­cious crime epics of yore, we are not being asked to bask in the eroti­cised immoral­i­ty of the bad dudes. Instead, the deci­sion has been made – a com­plete­ly laud­able one – to shift the fram­ing to a more objec­tive van­tage, one that cen­tres the strug­gles of the Osage, while slight­ly down­play­ing the nefar­i­ous­ness of the antag­o­nists, and almost entire­ly omits the per­spec­tive of the even­tu­al FBI investigation.

Indeed, with sto­ries of the film’s pro­tract­ed edit­ing peri­od, one imag­ines a floor piled up with excised footage of Jesse Ple­mons’ soft­ly spo­ken G‑man, Tom White, who is arguably the main focus in Gran’s book, and who doesn’t enter stage right until well beyond the film’s two-hour mark. Nev­er­the­less, much like John Ford 1964 epic, Cheyenne Autumn, a sweep­ing and cin­e­mat­ic cor­rec­tive to for­ma­tive depic­tions of America’s Native com­mu­ni­ties, Killer’s of the Flower Moon is Scorsese’s way of giv­ing own­er­ship of this trag­ic nar­ra­tive – as much as he is able to – back to the victims.

Scors­ese is also deeply invest­ed in the notion of lost his­to­ry, of the pre­car­i­ous­ness of col­lec­tive mem­o­ry and the malign manip­u­la­tion of pub­lic record. He emu­lates news­reels and pho­tographs through­out the film, con­stant­ly remind­ing how offi­cial his­to­ries are struck by the com­mer­cial image-mak­ers, and the nov­el­ty of the medi­um at that time meant that it was rare not to see peo­ple smil­ing and appar­ent­ly hap­py with their lot.

It’s a wist­ful epic that down­plays friv­o­lous dra­mat­ic beats and guts the sto­ry of any­thing that might sul­ly the high seri­ous­ness of the sub­ject mat­ter. We know who all the char­ac­ters are and are cer­tain of their moti­va­tions with­in the film’s open­ing min­utes. It means that the film plays more like vignette-dri­ven his­to­ry than a rich, pow­er­ful­ly-struc­tured dra­ma. Emp­ty-calo­rie spec­ta­cle, in this instance, is very low on the agenda.

Of course, every actor gives the direc­tor their all, with DiCaprio mak­ing for a charm­ing­ly trag­ic pres­ence as squirm­ing Né’er-do-well, Ernest Burkhart. Glad­stone, mean­while radi­ates sto­ic indi­gence, while De Niro deliv­ers some of his most com­mit­ted and detailed screen work in years, chan­nel­ing (and even direct­ly ref­er­enc­ing) his Al Capone from The Untouch­ables – albeit with a pad­dle rather than a base­ball bat.

Things end on a high in the form of an extra­or­di­nary coda which is pure Scors­ese. It both laments and prais­es the fact that his­to­ry is often just grist to the mill of mass enter­tain­ment, fram­ing the sto­ries that we have just seen as mere­ly dust in the wind. This is on first impres­sion per­haps a very good, uneven film rather than an unequiv­o­cal­ly great one.