Killers of the Flower Moon
Martin Scorsese (2023)
Martin Scorsese’s introduction to Powell and Pressburger’s I Know Where I’m Going! (1945) at BFI the other day served as a reminder of his deserved reputation as a grand old man of cinema. As well as directing his own movies, Scorsese, who turned eighty last year, has championed, often as a producer, the work of plenty of more film-makers. The foundation that he set up and leads has managed the preservation and restoration of numerous pictures; it was easy to tell from his intro that restoring I Know Where I’m Going! was for Scorsese a labour of love – as it no doubt is in other cases, too. Watching Killers of the Flower Moon brings you back to earth. It leaves you wondering, not for the first time, if he’s ever going to make a decent film again.
The screenplay, which Scorsese wrote with Eric Roth, is inspired by David Grann’s non-fiction book of the same name, about a series of murders, in the early 1920s, of wealthy Native Americans in Osage County, Oklahoma. In a prologue to the main action, members of the Osage tribe discover oil gushing from the ground of their reservation (a kind of double spring since the landscape is in bloom – it’s the time of the annual ‘flower moon’). Striking oil turns the Osage community into the wealthiest people on earth per capita. Scorsese inserts some black-and-white film illustrations of their affluence: we see Native American women dressed up to the nines, not in traditional tribal costume but in fur coats. Although they retain mineral rights and share oil-lease revenues, the tribe is legally required to have its finances managed by court-appointed white ‘guardians’ (the law deems the Osage ‘incompetent’ to look after their wealth independently). One such guardian is local cattle rancher William Hale (Robert De Niro): ‘King’ Hale, as he’s known on the reservation, is reputed to be a friend to the tribe and even speaks their language. His nephew, Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio), returns from soldiering in the Great War to live on his uncle’s ranch, where Ernest’s younger brother, Byron (Scott Shepherd), also resides. Hale encourages Ernest to woo Mollie Kyle (Lily Gladstone), an Osage woman from a particularly wealthy family, and the couple duly marries. (Hale, the Burkhart brothers and Kyle were all real people.)
Despite his reputation, Hale has his nephews carry out armed robberies from wealthy Osage. He then graduates to supervising their murders, advising Ernest that the more members of Mollie’s family that die, the larger Ernest’s headrights inheritance will be. Some killings exploit the Osage’s proneness to diabetes: Mollie and her sister Minnie (Jillian Dion) are both diabetic; Minnie’s condition deteriorates fatally. Another sister, the more rebellious Anna (Cara Jade Myers), is shot dead. With the corrupt local law authorities making no investigations, let alone arrests, Mollie hires a private detective (Gary Basaraba); he’s beaten up by the Burkharts and soon leaves the reservation. Undaunted, and despite her own illness, Mollie is part of an Osage delegation that travels to Washington DC to make representations about the murders to President Calvin Coolidge. At Hale’s behest, acquiescent Ernest puts something in Mollie’s insulin to ‘slow her down’ and she sinks into a near-coma. The cavalry arrives in the form of Bureau of Investigation (BoI) agent Tom White (Jesse Plemons) and his team, who work out what’s going on. Ernest and Hale, although he murders some of his own henchmen in a bid to deflect suspicion, are arrested. Mollie’s life is saved. White persuades Ernest to testify against Hale. Ernest agrees then changes his mind. When one of his and Mollie’s daughters dies (of whooping cough), Ernest changes his mind again.
That is cutting a long story short. At 206 minutes, Killers of the Flower Moon is actually three minutes shorter than The Irishman (2019) but feels longer thanks to its greater dramatic inertia. Scorsese seems to have lost any idea of narrative subtlety or concision – two examples of this, one from each end of the film. In the supposed climax, the will-he-won’t-he ‘suspense’ around Ernest’s testifying against Hale is tediously protracted. One of Killers’ strongest images arrives quite early on: an owl that seems to be outside then inside a window in the room where Mollie’s mother, Lizzie Q (Tantoo Cardinal), lies ill in bed. The bird is seen from Lizzie’s point of view: we might guess – from the look on her face or the merest smattering of ethnographic knowledge or both – that she recognises the bird as a harbinger of death. When Mollie comes to her bedside, Lizzie tells her she has seen an owl – then tells her what an owl’s appearance to a sick person portends in the Osage culture that her daughter has grown up in. As well as diluting the power of the image, the explanation insults Scorsese’s Native American characters and audience alike. (I don’t buy it that Lizzie’s explanation is meant to be necessary, reflecting how far her children’s generation has assimilated into white society. That theme is introduced in the film’s prologue but little further explored.)
This is Scorsese’s twenty-sixth feature and the first time he has used his two favourite leading men together, although Robert De Niro and Leonard DiCaprio have starred in fifteen of the previous twenty-five films. Watching them share the screen gives renewed urgency to a long-standing question: what does Scorsese see in DiCaprio, and does he not see the gulf in acting quality between him and De Niro? Not that the latter’s work in Killers of the Flower Moon is what it was in 1970s collaborations with Scorsese. De Niro plays William Hale expertly but without the depth or range that he brought to Taxi Driver (1976) or New York, New York (1977) or Raging Bull (1980). As a senior citizen, Hale mostly gets others to carry out violence on his behalf but he has a gangster’s soul: De Niro has often played this character type before – it comes too easily to him. So does outshining Leonardo DiCaprio. Before Mollie marries Ernest, she and one of her sisters, conversing in their own language, agree that he’s good-looking though a bit dim. DiCaprio, who often gives the impression he doesn’t quite get what’s going on, might seem well cast in the role; since Ernest is supposed to look baffled much of the time, you could say this is one of DiCaprio’s most persuasive characterisations. Up to a point – but the giveaway comes soon enough. When, to signal determination, DiCaprio clamps his mouth shut, sticks out his chin and frowns, you recognise his usual weedy acting. After drugging his wife, Ernest smells a rat and self-reproachfully tries some of the soporific himself. This is the last thing that DiCaprio’s sluggish performance needs.
Scorsese has made clear in interviews that his original conception of the film shifted in the course of its development – changing ‘the point of view of the picture from the Bureau of Investigation coming in from the outside to a point of view that worked from the inside out’. (DiCaprio was at first expected to play not Ernest but Agent White.) Killers of the Flower Moon is being hyped as a project that has turned its director into a politically enlightened and historically aware film-maker as never before. It’s probably part of this strategy that Lily Gladstone is to be campaigned as Best Actress rather than Best Supporting Actress in the upcoming awards season. As Mollie, Gladstone has a gravid, melancholy dignity: the solemn tempo of her acting might work even better if she were playing against a more dynamic male lead. Still, she does register strongly in the film; in their much smaller roles, the actresses playing Mollie’s mother and sisters register, too. Like Gladstone, they do so for somewhat negative reasons: the Osage characters, Mollie included, are underwritten compared with the white men in the story – suffering victims, not much else. But these women are at least unusual in a movie by Scorsese. Too many of the men on screen here seem part of the Scorsese furniture – and, in some cases, almost interchangeable. The exceptions include Brendan Fraser, in a histrionic turn as Hale’s attorney, and, especially, Jesse Plemons – who, as Tom White (a role presumably much smaller than the one DiCaprio would have played), is exact, expressive and brings some badly needed focus to the narrative.
Those black-and-white images at the start are, if not actual newsreel, ingeniously simulated. There’s a striking mix of music – blues, ragtime, the twangy guitar theme in the late Robbie Robertson’s score – on the soundtrack throughout. It’s the last five of the 206 minutes, though, that look all set to be the best five. The scene switches to a radio show before a live studio audience: it’s a recreation of a Lucky Strikes Hour episode, one of several that, at J Edgar Hoover’s bequest, dramatised FBI (ex-BoI) investigations – in this case, the 1920s Osage killings. The sequence illustrates an important means of bringing contemporary true-crime stories, and the FBI itself, into America’s cultural mainstream. An epilogue to the dramatisation, summarising what eventually happened to each of the principals, is a refreshing alternative to on-screen text conveying that information. Ernest and Hale were both sentenced to life imprisonment but eventually paroled. Mollie, who divorced Ernest, died of diabetes in 1937, at the age of fifty, and was buried with other members of her family. Then the widely recognisable figure of Martin Scorsese appears on the studio stage – supposedly as a radio producer, essentially as himself – to announce that Mollie’s newspaper obituary made no mention of the Osage murders. Scorsese expresses in his cameo, as well as white guilt, pride in how much he has learned making this film. His vain intervention, affirming that we’re being educated too, kills an otherwise effective postscript.
At Cannes this year, where it premiered out of competition, Killers of the Flower Moon received a nine-minute standing ovation – just the latest instance of an audience applauding its own stamina. As with The Irishman, this film’s sheer length is one of the main reasons why it’s likely to be admired. Another reason is the important subject matter and unarguable point of view – a condemnation of racist murder and the cover-up of racist murder. A third reason is that the man who made the picture is a hero of modern-day cinema, which is where we came in … So what was the last decent film that Martin Scorsese made? The last one this viewer found largely satisfying was, to be honest, Bringing Out the Dead, which arrived in cinemas late in 1999 (and was relatively poorly received!) The Wolf of Wall Street (2013) contained some brilliant things but its themes and message seemed unworthy of Scorsese. The ending of his latest marathon is unworthy in a different way. At the start of the closing credits, the film’s title appears in Osage characters before it appears in English – as if to reflect Scorsese’s order of priorities from start to finish. (It really doesn’t bear thinking about how attenuated the Osage perspective might have been if Scorsese hadn’t seen the light in the process of bringing the material to the screen.) The next credits are accompanied by an overhead shot of the Osage commemorating their culture in a tribal dance. This makes for a very attractive visual composition, like the overhead shots in Busby Berkeley musicals.
26 October 2023