Martin Scorsese’s epic historical saga Killers of the Flower Moon chronicles a chilling actual conspiracy of murder and dispossession targeting the oil-wealthy Osage Nation in 1920s Oklahoma. When oil is discovered beneath the windswept plains where the U.S. government had forcibly relocated the tribe, a series of brutal murders aimed at securing drilling rights and land trusts begin to devastate the community.
Through a propulsive score laden with ominous dread and Western motifs, along with the muted palette of Rodrigo Prieto’s gorgeous cinematography, Scorsese quickly establishes a tragic aura reflecting the deadly outcome of unchecked white capitalist greed upon Native American lives. At over 3 1⁄2 hours, the dense and layered yet tightly-paced film exposes with unsettling intimacy the banality of evil festering in plain sight, shielded by corrupt systems from facing any consequence.
The sprawling narrative opens with the ritual commemoration of how the Osage tribe was violently pushed from their fertile homelands to the rocky soil of Oklahoma, only for them to strike unprecedented quantities of oil later, making tribal members “the richest people per capita on Earth.” This seismic influx of wealth among the Osage fosters resentment and hostility from jealous white capitalists in the region who scheme to usurp the lucrative oil headlights by systematically targeting and eliminating Osage heirs.
As the death toll mounts from bombings, shootings, and poisonings, Scorsese introduces Ernest Burkhart, played with familiar boyish corruption by Leonardo DiCaprio. A weak-willed war veteran, Ernest arrives in the booming frontier town of Fairfax to work under the wing of his domineering uncle William Hale, a prominent area cattleman and power broker chillingly portrayed by Robert De Niro who strongarms local politicians and people in business with mafioso flair.
“The King of the Osage Hills,” Hale masterminds the underlying conspiracy to grab Osage’s oil rights by any means necessary while manipulating his nephew Ernest to infiltrate the tightly-knit community by driving for prominent families. When Ernest marries Mollie Kyle, a shrewd and astute Osage heiress played with tremendous emotional authenticity by newcomer Lily Gladstone, their precarious union becomes the symbolic core of the film.
As Mollie bears chilling witness to her family dying around her one by one, Gladstone radiates a luminous aura contrasting DiCaprio’s increasingly petulant corruption, her anguished doubts simmering beneath surface poise. Their domestic turmoil embodies the insidious destruction of Native identity as Mollie navigates escalating misgivings about her husband’s true motives and connections to the ongoing terror against her people.
DiCaprio is almost unrecognizable as Ernest. He is not a leading man here- more of a stooge for King Hale, who nevertheless ends up loving his wife, even as he ends up almost causing her death. While speaking to GamesRadar+ on the film’s recent premiere at the BFI London Film Festival, Thelma Schoonmaker, film editor and Martin Scorsese’s longtime collaborator praised DiCaprio’s performance.
“Leo – I think he’s done his best work this time, given his best performance. Marty called me from the set on take one of him being on the stand – he told me we are just going to run it like that with no cuts to anybody else, except for one to the prosecutor.”
In the role of King Hale, De Niro embodies a truly despicable yet all too recognizable character. Every faux kindness he offers is layered with a sickening insincerity that seeps into every scene. It’s a masterful portrayal by De Niro that serves as a stark reminder of the evils lurking just beneath the surface of society. As the film delves deeper into his character, some may argue that it spends too much time on him at the expense of others. Still, there’s no denying the impact of De Niro’s performance in showcasing how this type of corrupt individual can thrive within the fabric of society itself. Much like their previous films, which highlighted the presence of gangsters and hitmen in everyday life, this one shines a spotlight on how even those at the top of the social hierarchy are stained with blood and corruption.
Through the intimate lens of the Burkhart’s strained marriage, Scorsese and screenwriter Eric Roth refract the sanitized period account of city law enforcement officers investigating crimes in Indian Country into a wrenching human tragedy underpinned by weaknesses of character and deadly sins of greed and prejudice. While codified racism empowers Hale’s ruthless orchestration of the conspiracy, the perpetrators are not framed simplistically as conspicuous villains in black hats. Instead, Killers of the Flower Moon chillingly depicts the banality of evil, of ordinary men driven to unthinkable violence and deceit while staunchly viewing themselves as upstanding community pillars.
This intense focus on the Burkharts risks severely unbalancing the Killers of the Flower Moon’s perspective, as other pivotal Osage characters remain less fully rendered, including Mollie’s mother and sisters targeted by the conspirators. However, Scorsese has been criticized across his career for marginalizing Native American voices and narratives. Here, he responds by explicitly implicating himself in the film’s narrative frame through a meta-textual cameo discussing those who exploit Indigenous stories without interest in truth or justice.
While centering the troubled white marriage poses an uneasy tightrope, Scorsese does grant deeper dimensionality to numerous Osage characters beyond mere victims for white salvation. Tantoo Cardinal brings stoic, steel-eyed grace to matriarchal roles as both Mollie and Ernest’s grandmothers, projecting the aura of women who have survived repeated betrayals yet emerge with their spines intact. Cara Jade Myers burns with fierce integrity as Anna, Mollie’s beloved sister, is murdered early on, her ghost a catalyst in Mollie’s deteriorating trust. Through scenes of Osage rituals, gossip sessions, and day-to-day banality, Scorsese thoroughly envisions the vibrant dignity and humanity lingering beneath the threat that slowly extinguishes their flame.
This investment in avoiding the reduction of Osages to props for the paranoid noir pays off most powerfully at the film’s conclusion when Lily Gladstone rises to virtuosic heights playing Mollie, bedridden and dying from illness amid questions about whether conspirators also poisoned her. Ernest waveringly tends her deathbed, both mutually tormented by truths percolating beneath their broken bond, seen in the film’s narrow framing almost as one fused, corrupted soul.
Rather than closure or redemption, Mollie’s anguished expiry makes clear this tragedy stems from the rot at America’s origin – the genocide and displacement of natives justified as a divine right.
This concluding act of human sacrifice lays bare the intimate, innermost core of the colonizer mindset, its impulse to dominate and destroy seen reflected most sharply in Ernest’s glassy grimace.
While stalwart FBI agent Tom White (brought to life by Jesse Plemons with a kind yet keen focus) conducts a dutiful investigation to elicit long-gestating confessions, justice itself remains beyond reach. As Lizzie Q. ominously remarks early on, foreboding the painful outcome: “This is not our conquering story.” The casualties continue to mount even through the trial; the murderers escape the death penalty, their deeds robbed of reconciliation as the wounds of cultural devastation persist. Yet ribbons of Osage identity continue to shine, memories woven into the land they still inhabit. Interwoven between bank ledgers of oil rights and disemboweled cadavers dumped to ravines lies America’s halves – one built by layers of pain, the other still fighting for survival.
In capturing this push and pull between cultures in collision, Scorsese’s cinematic prowess invests cadaverous potency into each frame. Prieto’s cinematography situates Mollie and her community as visual equals even as their lives remain constrained under the vise-grip of racist bureaucracy, an inverted hierarchy echoed in horses stampeding uncontrolled through oil derricks dotting the landscape. The Western veneer evokes America’s mythologized frontier conquest, which Scorsese slyly subverts by framing white capitalists as the hostile outsiders circling and closing in on Indigenous families struggling to maintain their foothold.
Meanwhile, the score’s sinister undertones unravel with the pull of an Ennio Morricone guitar lynching, shattering romantic frontier nostalgia. Scorsese has crafted career-long explorations of violence and corruption pulsing under societal veneers, but never with such sweepingly cinematic dimensions. Cinematographer Prieto deserves special recognition, as his work strongly merits Academy attention.
Despite its sprawling scope across decades, propulsive editing by Scorsese’s longtime collaborator, Thelma Schoonmaker, maintains a tight thematic focus on the emotional core amidst byzantine criminal machinations. Schoonmaker crafts layered juxtapositions – a smiling church congregation underscored by Ernest admitting murderous conspiracy; the methodic daily routine of Mollie’s white guardian counterpointed by Osage elders despairing the unsolved deaths – which embed Symbolic meaning deeper than words within images. Scorsese continues his tradition since Goodfellas of stocking supporting roles with eclectic musicians turned actors, including memorable bit parts for Sturgill Simpson and especially Jason Isbell, portraying Ernest’s troubled brother-in-law.
This precision layering across each craft element bespeaks a filmmaker still operating at a virtuosic peak despite his advanced years. But it also scaffolds the meticulous solemnity conjuring this elegy more than a pulp thriller or a strict historical chronicle. It unfolds less as a mystery than a ballad, its outcome preordained. By training the lens directly on both murderers and their victims, Scorsese implicates viewers within our shared lineage of violence metastasizing in unchecked environments, Hopper-like in its normalization through repetition. We witness unflinchingly the cost of lives deliberately destroyed and discarded for ledger margins, connecting kill shots in a distant time to our present suspension of morality for profit and power.
Ultimately, this spares no audience, refusing panoramas of poetic justice. Instead, we sit with the discomfort of recognizable human failure, knowing culprits who absconded with millions while never admitting nor atoning for sin. Beyond rebuke, they live on like phantoms reminding us who we were and still can be, ghosts inside machines of civilization. As credits roll, the songs play on, but specters on the screen peer out knowingly through veils of blood. They linger in conscience, waiting.
