It turns out that one of the many uses of Killers of the Flower Moon is as a film for baby-friendly screenings. My daughter-in-law takes her new son to these on Tuesday mornings and recently reported back that the great thing about Martin Scorsese’s latest is that she could take the baby out of the auditorium to be changed or fed and then go back into the screening some time later and not really have missed much.
There’s quite a lot of redundancy, in other words. It may be stylish redundancy delivered by a director fully confident of what he’s doing but you could easily cut half an hour from this film and it wouldn’t hurt the story at all. Whether it would hurt the feel of the thing is something else entirely.
Over three hours and 26 minutes, Scorsese and co-adaptor Eric Roth rework David Grann’s non-fiction bestseller, turning it from a true-crime story about the deaths of many Osage Indians and the subsequent investigation by a nascent FBI into an almost biblical odyssey of the moral corruption of one man.
Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio) returns from the First World War and is gathered up into the welcoming arms of his uncle William Hale (Robert De Niro). Hale is the big man around Osage County, Oklahoma, and a self-declared friend of the Osage Indians, whose vast wealth comes from the headrights they have to the lakes of oil lying beneath the the supposedly worthless land their predecessors were dumped on.
Though they never say it within earshot of any of the Osage, the name of the game for white folk like Hale is getting the money, or the rights to the oil, off the Osage and into their own hands.
This is done by fair means, such as marrying into an Osage family, which Ernest has soon done, at his uncle’s prompting. And when fair means have been tried and failed, then foul it is. There are so many deaths among the Osage – by bullet or the strange wasting illness that plagues them – that eventually an Osage delegation goes to Washington DC to petition President Calvin Coolidge to help them.
It is not long after this that the Bureau of Investigation, in the shape of Tom White (Jesse Plemons) comes to town, and what’s really going on there is exposed to the light of day.
It’s a true story. The Osages were per capita the richest people in the world in the 1920s. The deaths, the wasting illness, the existence of William Hale and his nephew Ernest, Ernest’s wife, Mollie (Lily Gladstone), and Mollie’s extended family, who are being picked off one by one as the movie progresses. All of it really happened.
And it is, quite simply, a great story, and all the more eye-widening because it’s been lost in the mists of time.
Scorsese’s re-emphasising of it – from systemic swindle to a tale of personal downfall – allows him to shoot the movie in a noirish 1940s style, with lashings of twisted psychology, full of character actors with venal faces and with key performances verging on the scenery-chewing.
DiCaprio borrows a few of De Niro’s facial tics and De Niro reaches just occasionally for the verbal style of Donald Trump, a politician he has no regard for (to say the least), but not so often that he’ll upset any ardent fans.
Lily Gladstone – who grew up on a Blackfeet reservation – plays the wife Ernest loves, in his own complicated way, and underplays a touch, making scenes she shares with DiCaprio particularly powerful. You might remember her in a couple of Kelly Reichardt films – Certain Women and First Cow.
Scorsese sprinkles moments of magical realism to reflect Osage beliefs, indulges himself with a homespun finale that’s in the style of Garrison Keillor’s A Prairie Home Companion, and drops in plenty of those Scorsese thumbnails every time an interesting new character is introduced (cuts to man blowing door off a safe, kind of thing).
It’s a film very much with Scorsese’s fingerprints on it – editing by Thelma Schoonmaker, soundtrack by Robbie Robertson (his last), cinematography by Rodrigo Prieto (Scorsese’s go-to DP since The Wolf of Wall Street) – and yet also a film unlike anything else he’s ever done.
It’s great. I loved it. Grudgingly. I am not sure why that is. Maybe it was just too long.
Killers of the Flower Moon – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2024
