(4.5 / 5)
Now into his ninth decade and perhaps the most beloved filmmaker still working today, Martin Scorsese certainly isn’t resting on his laurels.
With Killers of the Flower Moon, he returns to the historical epic with a grand and dismal account of a murderous conspiracy to acquire Native American land rights.
Newly returned from the First World War, Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio) has travelled to Osage County, Oklahoma. His uncle, William King Hale (Robert De Niro), is an influential landowner and, though Ernest isn’t the brightest, manages to find him a place in his organisation.
The Osage tribe, who own much of the land in the county having been forcibly relocated there, are the beneficiaries of unprecedented wealth now that oil has been discovered. As enlightened and integrated as Osage County society seems to be, there’s an undercurrent of greed and resentment among the white population. As such, when wealthy natives start dying, by apparent suicide, murder, or “wasting sickness”, nobody asks too many questions; especially not regarding land rights.
Based on the book by David Grann, Killers of the Flower Moon is a hideous depiction of complicity. Hale, who seems to respect and admire the Osage Indians, even to the extent of speaking their language, and is esteemed in return, holds sway over Ernest, who seems to sincerely love his native wife, Mollie (Lily Gladstone), even as he’s complicit in destroying everything she holds dear. And for the better part of three-and-a-half hours, they are facilitated in this destruction.
Stoop-shouldered, jutting of jaw and mouth downturned, DiCaprio’s Ernest would border on caricature were it not for the sense of uncomprehending, invertebrate dissolution he brings to the role. As Hale, De Niro seems so quietly genteel and affable, he makes talk about the biblically-ordained end of the Native Americans sound considered – the devil citing scripture. In her breakout role, Gladstone brings dignity and wry humour to Lily, even as Eric Roth’s script threatens to reduce her to a passive metaphor for the long-suffering, disabused Osage people.
The film is an ugly depiction of the grossest betrayals humans can commit against another when they allow prejudice to excuse their worst instincts for the sake of financial gain. An earlier version of the script followed Bureau Agent Tom White (initially to be portrayed by DiCaprio, here by Jesse Plemons) as he investigated the killings. That we are privy to the behind-the-scenes wrangling, the greed and inequity, makes it all the more compromising for us.
Rodrigo Prieto’s impeccably balanced, textured cinematography contrasts the beauty and grandeur of the natural world with the sordidness of man’s dealings. Robbie Roberston’s score recreates the rhythms we’d imagine of tribal drums in concert with a traditional blues soundtrack, including the likes of Robert Johnson and Ma Rainey creating an inexorable musical tattoo that drives us inexorably onwards.
Killers of the Flower Moon is as uncompromising as its leads are compromised, with the exception of Lily. Inexorable and implacable, it treats these events not as the distant past, but as a warning about the forces that still exist. The past, as they say, is never dead. Those of us inheriting the future would do well to remember that.
