Killers of the Flower Moon (2023)

A wanton murder spree ravages the Osage nation in 1920s Oklahoma

Ernest (Leonardo Di Caprio) and Mollie (Lily Gladstone) are in a slowly unraveling marriage

Killers of the Flower Moon (2023)

In theaters

Many will call this long brooding poem of a movie an “epic”, and it’s easy to see why.  The story plays out against a vivid backdrop of America in the 1920s.

We know that the era saw sudden wealth and grinding poverty starkly situated next to one another, and that contrast raised knotty questions about the national character.  Which are still with us.

The movie is a fraught tale of racial betrayal.  But director Martin Scorsese, working from a script he co-wrote with Eric Roth, keeps his focus tight, with rippling family pain in the forefront.

Based on David Grann’s 2017 non-fiction book of the same name, it centers on the Osage Reign of Terror that unfolded in Oklahoma from 1921 to 1926, devastating many Native American families.

Scorsese shrewdly sticks to that specific terror and time frame.  (The book also covers the birth, and shortcomings, of the newly forming FBI, but this script homes in on the Osage.)

During those years, some three dozen members of the Osage nation were murdered by white men bent on acquiring dead tribal members’ wealth.  Scorsese, master blender of blood and sorrow, understands it can be more enlightening to show great wrongs scaled down to individual stories.

True, the injustices here feel massive, and are perpetrated against a people with a long history. The Osage nation dates back to 700 B.C.  Scorsese could have given the story a sprawling generational heft.

But he’s not interested in ennobling victims.  What he’s uncovering here isn’t so much Osage as white history.  That’s a rare perspective, and American movies need to adopt it more.

Of course, we need to keep learning about the outrages inflicted on people of color.  But whites need to spell out the nature, the source, of white duplicity.  Who knows it better than they do, from the inside?

How does the dehumanizing of others take root in the minds of whites?  If they dramatized that, their honesty could do us all a world of good.

With this movie, Scorsese could be said to make a start.  When vast reserves of oil were discovered on Osage land in 1921, the tribe got a gushing payday.

They were swiftly transformed from farmers making do with fallow land to millionaires.  Its nouveau riche families built mansions, rode in chauffeured limousines and sported the latest fashions from Paris and New York.

One such family included Mollie (Lily Gladstone).  She’s a beautiful divorcee not easily fooled by ambitious white men.  Intriguingly, the tribe bore no abiding animus toward whites.  Many marriages between Osage women and white men were happy.

Mollie (c.) and her sisters, wealthy Osage women who believed their lives were secure

But some greedy white men seized a chance to inherit great sums.  As Osage independence grew, the federal government deemed the tribe’s adult members “incompetent” to manage their own wealth.

Court-appointed guardians received Osages’ oil income, and often took a large chunk of it before passing it on to their wards.

More dastardly guardians married Osage women with the intention of slowly killing off their families.  The white husbands would eventually control their widows’ and children’s inheritances.

A master of this government-sanctioned chicanery was wealthy cattle rancher William Hale (Robert De Niro), self-described, and known to locals, as “King”.  He’s no invented screen villain.  Grann’s book reveals his real-life thievery in chilling detail.

He finds a willing tool in his nephew Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo Di Caprio), a WWI veteran who’s now a feckless drifter.

Ernest courts the beautiful, skeptical Mollie and slowly wins her trust.  They marry and have three children.  And it takes Mollie some years to realize she’s been woven into a swindle masterminded by Hale to confiscate Osage wealth.

White men married to Osage women have poisoned and gunned down Osage family members.  One of Mollie’s sisters is fatally shot, another killed when her house is bombed.

But Mollie can’t believe any of this lawlessness is connected to Ernest, and the slow revelation of his heartbreaking dissembling is the movie’s emotional heartbeat.

Which makes this, I’d argue, a chronicle of virulent betrayal, not a classic screen epic.  Rodrigo Prieto’s impeccable, sweeping cinematography gives it grandeur, but fraud and deceit are always achingly personal.  We see fortunes stolen and lives erased one by one.

Hale (Robert De Niro) leads Ernest (Leonardo Di Caprio) to commit ruthless acts of betrayal

Scorsese’s challenge is to show how race and greed can combine to corrupt and eradicate bonds that seemed built on kindness and trust.

Di Caprio’s Ernest is the most striking portrait we get here of a man’s gradual descent into viciousness.  At first Hale induces Ernest to put others up to bilking the Osage, promising him a split of the take.  As the deceit moves closer to Mollie’s family, Ernest grows more uneasy – but can’t resist the lure of money.

Before understanding how low he’s sunk, he’s coerced into a conspiracy to kill off Mollie’s family, with the promise that he’ll profit even more if he helps pull it off.

Hale, the brains behind this depravity, calls the Osage “the most beautiful people on the planet” and claims to love them.  What he actually loves is money.  And coercing others to do his cruelest bidding.  He never bloodies his own hands.

De Niro is as sneakily vicious as he’s ever been onscreen.  Hale is charmless, but demonically persuasive.  The pinched mouth coupled with the wide eyes and hot, whining voice he uses to threaten give him a quiet but terrifying prowess.

He’s even more pernicious because he wheedles more than he bullies.  His movements are rarely frantic, his commands always cool, slick and precise.

The enigmatic Mollie is the most puzzling character in this sad story.  She’s deeply touching.  Mollie is undoubtedly smarter than Ernest, but she lets his “love” set her on a path to her own destruction.

The movie’s most woeful enigma is Mollie’s good heart – she sees murder take place among other Osage but can’t admit how it’s snaked into her own marriage.

Gladstone endows Mollie with such calm, clear-eyed judgment, it’s hard to see how the oily Ernest fools her for so long.  The movie takes its time to show us her awakening, and that’s how Gladstone’s lovely, understated performance amasses its power.

When she learns of a relative’s agonizing death, the wail that rises from her trembling body is piercing.  It’s a cry of grieving women heard all over the world.  I’ll gladly call that moment epic, and Gladstone touches greatness with a keening that feels like it will never stop.

These sharply drawn moments keep this story pulsing over its nearly three-and-a-half-hour runtime. Not a minute was lost on me.  I was wholly transfixed by the flowering evil and the exquisite craft.

We see Osage both mourning and celebrating, their dignity as well as their lapses into bewildered drunkenness. And we see a white community of corrupt doctors, insurance agents and government officials quietly colluding in murderous deceit.

At the center is the increasingly cold-blooded Ernest, played with a coarse bravado and a string of maddeningly perverse tics that I didn’t know Di Caprio could master.  I haven’t seen all of his performances, but until now I’d have said his best, darkest work was his amoral, drug-addled money manager in The Wolf of Wall Street (2013).

He goes deeper here.  He captures in magnetic detail Ernest’s slow descent into malice.  What’s most fascinating is that Ernest doesn’t fully realize what he’s becoming until there’s no escape.

But Hale has quickly realized how corruptible the younger man is.  Ernest only needs steering.  And as he’s led further astray, Di Caprio’s face begins to twist into distortion.  We see the monster he can’t.  By the end we’re not watching exactly the same actor who started the movie.

That slow oozing out of humanity is Scorsese’s real subject.  It’s gradual.  It takes patience to expose, and doggedness to stop.  The feds, in the form of agent Tom White (Jesse Plemons), dispatched by J. Edgar Hoover, are the only law enforcement arm that can lop off the tentacles of evil.  Local agents have been bribed or simply turned a blind eye.

The sad truth, as we learn in Grann’s book, is that Hoover refused to investigate earnestly enough.  Literally hundreds of Osage murders were uncovered in succeeding years, most of the cases never solved.

Scorsese sticks to relentlessly exposing that stain on the national conscience.  The movie invokes the 1921 Tulsa Massacre of Black Oklahomans, which the Osage rightly saw as a grisly precursor to the assault on their own people.

Indeed, American racial hatred is in some implacable way all of a piece, a perpetual national trauma that no one has yet made a truly “epic” movie about.

I’m not sure that’s what we need.  Or are yet enlightened enough to comprehend.  Scorsese deserves credit for doing the painstaking work of looking at evil up close, tracking it being etched into individual lives, with families and communities terrorized.  And justice denied.

That disclosure is this movie’s mission. Grand gestures, and jumbo screen sagas, won’t redeem the national soul.

David slew Goliath with five smooth stones.  I think we’d benefit enormously from seeing one historical atrocity at a time dramatized and thereby, hopefully, cut off from engendering future harm.

Let the great work begin.