Killers of the Flower Moon (2023)

 ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆

Killers of the Flower Moon (2023) – M. Scorsese

I was going to write that the idea of this film is superior to its execution but waking up this morning, I find that it has stuck with me more than expected.  Focusing a fiction film on the murders of the Osage people (women, especially) in 1920s Oklahoma as a way of calling attention to colonialism’s effects on Indigenous people and culture more broadly is laudable indeed. Lily Gladstone (a Blackfoot woman) plays the central Osage heiress to an oil fortune, Molly, with powerful resignation, never giving in spiritually to the white usurpers but also not overtly speaking out, perhaps playing a long game or perhaps accepting her culture’s fate.  We are told early on that hers is a culture that speaks little but knows all.  Clearly, her situation is one of supreme powerlessness – and the plot echoes other “women in distress” pictures, such as Gaslight (1944), which director Martin Scorsese would be well aware of.  But the film focuses less on Molly and her family (her three sisters and her mother all die) and instead, perhaps for commercial reasons or from loyalty to his stable of actors, the narrative spends most of its time with the white characters (i.e., the villains in this story). In particular, we follow Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio), a WWI vet who has moved to Oklahoma to live with his rich uncle Bill “King” Hale (Robert De Niro).  Hale has a plan that involves his family members marrying Osage women in order to secure the “headrights” to their oil money (as oil was found on tribal lands). Not coincidentally, these same Osage women soon die, either from the “wasting illness” or from murder.  About two hours into the movie, the FBI (led by Jesse Plemons) investigates.  I was also going to write that I’m not a big fan of Leo’s but I’m willing to reconsider that statement as well.  Here, he seems to be playing just a dumb guy – or an unreflective one, driven to this lack of reflection by the way it suits his own self-interest.  Again, this seems a metaphor for much of white America’s foreign and domestic policies:  do what lines the pockets of the powerful while somehow maintaining a complete lack of self-awareness about any ill effects on the poor and people of colour. So, I have to hand it to Leo for suppressing his natural instinct to be charismatic to play this evil man (if evil can be represented by bad faith; see Sartre).  De Niro, playing old rather than morphing young, also disappears into his character, the much more crafty and overtly evil boss.  Scorsese takes his time allowing the plot and characters to develop (running time = 3 hours and 17 minutes) but I really did not feel that things dragged (even if I believe undoubtedly there must have been ways to cut this down).  He pulls out a few directorial flourishes that delight the eye and, in a moment of real panache, uses an unusual coda to tell us the ultimate fates of the remaining characters, as these events are based on a true story (from David Grann’s book).  The coda seems to serve a number of functions – homage to the days of storytelling of yore but also perhaps an acknowledgment of the need to use artifice to present the tale.  Naysayers may question whether the implementation of the idea for the film has transgressed on the real lives and real issues of the Indigenous people portrayed (or not portrayed) but I reckon Scorsese was right to use his starpower (and that of DiCaprio and De Niro) and his bully pulpit to focus our attention here.