Killers of the Flower Moon (2023)
Shut everything down, because Killers of the Flower Moon deserves all the Oscars. And Golden Globes. And BAFTAs. All the awards. This movie is extremely long, exhausting, and can be hard to watch, but its most common descriptor is “important” with excellent reason.
The film tells the real-life story of the Osage Murders, and follows Ernest Burkhart, a First World War veteran who goes to the town of Fairfax, Oklahoma to work for his uncle, William Hale. Fairfax is a rollicking place where Osage tribespeople and white Americans live side by side seemingly in harmony, with the Osage making major bucks from the abundant oil that they found in the region. Uncle William, who is a cattle rancher, speaks the Osage language and ingratiates himself to everyone in town, establishing schools, building roads, and bringing culture to Fairfax.
Ernest, who starts out driving a cab, meets Mollie, an Osage who lives with her mother and sisters, and as they’re full-blooded Osage they’re labeled “incompetent” by the federal agents managing the oil money they receive each month. Mollie is a little suspicious of Ernest at first, but he makes her laugh and they fall in love and marry.
In the midst of all of this, various Osage tribespeople die under mysterious circumstances and the police do nothing. Soon Mollie is the only one of her sisters still living, and she, along with her fellow tribespeople, is sick and tired of the corruption she knows exists in Fairfax. One way or another, they’re going to get to the bottom of it, and they’re going to have to call in outside help, which arrives in the form of the then-new FBI.
Honestly, I don’t know where to begin, and I don’t want to give out too many spoilers because this movie needs to be discovered. It doesn’t need me to give away all of its secrets.
There are so many elements in this movie that just exist but aren’t explained, such as the apples placed on coffins at funerals, or the twinkle lights blazing in everyone’s front yard all night long. Everything is important but some bits are more important than others, only we don’t always know which is which in the moment. It’s impossible to look away, not like the proverbial train wreck but because the movie gives us time to care about the characters and we don’t want to miss anything.
At my screening, a few of us had to run to the restroom at some point or other, myself included, but we all came back in two minutes or less. It might seem a little funny that I was paying attention to total strangers answering the call of nature, but I couldn’t help thinking of what happened at Shazam! earlier this year. Killers is a whole new ball of wax.
While Robert De Niro and Leonardo DiCaprio gave gutsy, raw performances, Lily Gladstone was the highlight in my opinion. Where the guys raise the roof, she is coolly detached. Her character, Mollie, is no dummy. She has seen too much. She’s been lied to too many times. She has to feel Ernest out before she’ll let him in, and when certain realities become clear to her, she walks away without flinching, her pain barely noticeable under her seeming stoicism. She’s so calm, in fact, that when certain people betray her, we have to wonder how much she knows and how long she’s known it.
Yet Mollie isn’t always completely collected. After one of her sisters dies of a gunshot wound, Mollie and Ernest sit in the forest while what seems to be the autopsy is performed right in front of them. We see the weariness and grief in Mollie’s face while the sound of the hacksaw grinding into her sister’s body is clearly heard. It’s an unimaginably cruel moment and I have to wonder if it was really necessary, but on the other hand, I wouldn’t be surprised if such things actually happened.
There’s so much intelligence and precision in the execution of Killers, because Scorsese is a master storyteller who knows when to let out just enough info to keep us interested and when to shock us. His and the other filmmakers’ decision to tell the story from the point of view of the Osage was a sound one, because if they had gone with the original angle of the FBI agents telling the story, the Osage culture would have naturally held us at arms’ length and it wouldn’t have been as personal as it was.
The only part that seemed a little hokey was the ending, when the film’s somber tone suddenly shifts to the lightly ironic, with everything wound up on a true crime radio show. It didn’t seem terribly accurate to me, because, for one thing, radio narratives didn’t generally stop completely so the audience could listen to the sound effects; a lot of times the sound effects were heard at the same time as the dialogue.
Why Scorsese chose to present the radio show sequence this awkwardly is a little baffling, because he’s old enough to have heard radio dramas. Maybe it was to show how stories such as the Osage Murders have been trivialized or ignored over the years and therefore obscured by history. Or maybe it was a way of relieving the seriousness of the story a little bit before the ending credits.
Either way, it was an honor and a privilege to see Killers of the Flower Moon. There aren’t many filmmakers like Scorsese left, and if this film happens to be his swan song, not that it will be, but if it is, he’s going out on a high note. That Scorsese also honors the Osage in the way he does is a huge bonus.
Killers of the Flower Moon is currently in theaters. Rated R.
My grade: A+
Principal Cast: Leonardo DiCaprio, Robert De Niro, Lily Gladstone, Jesse Plemons, Brendan Fraser, John Lithgow, Cara Jade Myers, Janae Collins, Jillian Dion, Jason Isbell, William Belleau, Louis Cancelmi, Scott Shepherd, Everett Waller, Talee Redcorn, Yancey Red Corn, Tatanka Means.
Directed by Martin Scorsese.
Written by Eric Roth, Martin Scorsese, and David Grann (book).