Everyone has their favorite Martin Scorsese movie – I’m sure some motherfucker out there thinks The Aviator or Shine a Light is the bee’s knees – but it’s become clear the major fulcrum point of his career isn’t one of his early masterpieces or his late-career descents into postmodernism: It’s Goodfellas. Outside of his collaborations with Paul Schrader (and those films do, in fact, fit into the matrix that I’m trying to establish here, but less so), that classic made it unambiguously clear that what previously was identified as “alienation” as his modus operandi was buffeted by the infiltration required to alleviate it. A fucked-up protagonist tries to ingratiate himself with his betters and finds himself trying to bridge two identities until he’s forced to make a choice. Henry Hill, Frank Sheeran, Newland Archer, Jordan Belfort, Howard Hughes, et al: Their various unraveling come from the psychic conflict between these two worlds, with their ambition as a complicating factor. If one wanted to get fully basic, they could bring up the concept of Catholic guilt here — the sin of the world versus the light of salvation – but it’s less theological than that, a metaphysical expansion of the first feelings a stray Homo Erectus had when he first was brought into a scavenging band of his peers, and their fears of him. Is he who he says he is? Are they going to kill me? Do we trust him? Whatever the outcome, we’ve been iterating that story for hundreds of thousands of years and telling it to ever-increasing crowds for just as long, so much so that there’s now an entire industry devoted to its documentation and reenactment, acting as a sin-eating publicity machine for atrocities. Yet what has changed in recent years is the amount of attention paid to the stories of those considered worthless by the powers-that-be, as well as a willingness for us to interrogate forgotten national sins. Killers of the Flower Moon, Scorsese’s latest, is one of those stories and slots nicely into one of the final slots in the filmmaker’s oeuvre, but unlike so many of its kin in the true crime-adjacent genre, it’s willing to immerse you in the murky ethics of perspective and storytelling.
If you’re familiar with the nonfiction book by David Grann that Scorsese adapted for the screen, you’ll probably be surprised by the story that Scorsese chose to follow for his film adaptation. Instead of selecting one of the two obvious point-of-view characters as a protagonist or alternating between the two of them – those, of course, being Mollie Burkhart (Lily Gladstone), the Osage woman whose advocacy for her community and prolonged illness exacerbated by the wrongdoings of those around her both play a pivotal role in uncovering the film’s central conspiracy or Tom Wilson (Jesse Plemons) the Bureau of Investigation agent who leads a team of crackerjack undercover G-Men to stop the criminal enterprise – he focuses on Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio), Mollie’s husband, a white man intimately involved with the wrongdoing, whose morality is as grey-colored as his head is empty.
Ernest has a lot in common with Frank Sheeran, Scorsese’s protagonist in I Heard You Paint Houses, in that they’re dimwitted, trusting men who are loyal to a fault: Ideal and easily disposable pawns to be shuffled across the board by players who greet them with warmth, dole out meager praise, offer them a glimpse at a potential good life and belonging at the cost of their very souls. That person for him is William Hale (Robert De Niro), an elder statesman of the white community and “friend” to the Osage, dubbed “The King of Osage Hills” by the folks around him. He happens to be Ernest’s uncle, as well, and King’s the first person he visits upon his return to his hometown, fresh off the boat from doling doughboys plates of slop on the Western Front. His uncle breaks out the good whiskey (hard to come by in Prohibition days), listens patiently to his meager war stories, cajoles him about his potential conquests, and offers to fix him up with a job as a cabbie, driving the wealthy citizens of the Nation around to and fro.
A brief summary of the context: At this point in history, the Osage Nation contains the richest zip codes in the pre-depression U.S., which is astounding in the context of the Roaring Twenties. Years earlier, after the U.S. attempted some skullduggery by refusing to acknowledge the prior deals they’d made with the tribe, the Osage fought hard to keep what was theirs. They wanted the rights to their land (which they owned outright even before Uncle Sam attempted to seize it), even holding up Oklahoma’s statehood process to secure it, and negotiated fiercely for what the U.S. Government believed was totally worthless. And, in the late nineteenth century, it was: they had little arable land in comparison to the other tribes and were mostly subsistence farmers, but had the foresight to lay claim to the mineral rights. They owned the land and all things underneath it and, for a while, the U.S. thought they’d gotten the better end of the deal. Then someone just so happened to strike the right vein, and a bunch of oil shot up into the sky. Even better, it was crude oil, and there was a ton of it. Overnight, every person in the Tribe became the modern-day equivalent of multi-millionaires. They could afford fashionable finery that even the landed gentry around them grew envious of, to say nothing of the poorer whites, who deeply resented that these folks were wealthy and, worse, showed it. The government did what they could – on behalf of the whites, that is, ensuring that each member had, in essence, financial “supervision” for their funds, many of whom gladly skimmed off the top and used it for their own ends – but that could not stop the oil from flowing nor the money coming in. The Osage were fabulously wealthy, having hit the mineral lottery at the beginning of our addiction to crude oil, and with that wealth came envy.
Like an NBA draft pick being hit up by every two-bit con artist cousin of theirs for seed money for their latest and greatest restaurant franchise idea, their prominence made them a target, which men like William Hale saw and, being established as community benefactors and ones who could be trusted, used their status as an opportunity to become fabulously wealthy in the most despicable fashion. And so they plotted their deeds behind closed doors and acted in near-secret, with King’s masterful skills at deceit and manipulation masking his involvement in what would ultimately become one of the Southwest’s darkest murder plots. King favored a subtle approach: He liked poison and suggestions that the victim might have been suicidal. Some of his crimes were out-and-out violent murders committed by subordinates like Burkhart’s brother, but the lighter touch was the one he delighted in: marrying off associates to wealthy Osage women and then slowly rotting their homes from the inside, sharing a bed with a man who seems to be caring even though he’s dosing their liquor with arsenic and plotting how to spend those greenbacks in Joplin. But the King always gets a cut after the rights to the money flowed back to him, of course, and if one of his men grew a conscience, well, it would be a problem.
Hale’s entire plot hinges on one perception: No one cared about these people other than their fellow tribesmen, especially not the powerful, and it will become painfully true how accurate that assessment is when the body count hits the double-digits. So when Ernest gives a lift to Mollie one afternoon, as the sounds of old jalopies racing down the dirt roads of Main Street buzz about them, he flirts lightly with her. We don’t see when Ernest is truly informed of the plot his uncle is starting to cook up, and his entire character is rendered with an ambiguity that, again, a reader of Grann’s book might not assume he deserves. He gets involved with other aspects of it, sure: Dumb run-and-gun robberies for poker money, a beating or two, even a few outsourced contract wooings-and-killings of troubled community elements that King thinks will make for easy insurance paydays. His soul is already stained, both by what he saw in France and by the very nature of his marriage. But he may actually love his wife, even as King comes a’-callin’, and it’s in that tinge of conscience and Ernest’s slowly dividing loyalties that Scorsese finds his film.
What’s particularly interesting about his approach is what it lacks: All of the known and beloved creature comforts that have captured the perception of Scorsese’s filmography in the popular imagination. There is no rambling narration, nor are there Clapton needle drops. For the most part, his camera remains patient and steady rather than free and floating. And for the first hour, it feels dull, slowly making its way through the set-up, taking in the scenery, allowing the characters to amble their way into darkness. This is partially due to the setting: outside of the local tavern, there’s not too much going on around the town. Everyone lives in their multigenerational households on patches of land far away from one another, with drives taking agonizingly long times given the lack of paved roads and interstate highways. It is pure banality compared to the Copacabana, being fundamentally, functionally uncool. But this serves to only deepen the impact of King’s betrayals of the Osage: These aren’t anonymous members of rival families; they are people who live and work beside the conspirators, often their friends or romantic partners, marked for death because of their wealth – which would buy the murderers unglamorous things, at least by the cinematic standards that Scorsese has set for himself – and their race. They have what I deserve, so I’m going to take it, which could be our national motto if someone would bother to translate it into Latin.
The conspiracy is almost as muted as the empty landscapes and sparse streets are themselves: It unfolds at a creeping pace, though the audience is given enough details to quickly pick up on what’s going on, much as Ernest himself begins to figure out his role in it. DiCaprio has played morons, villains, and pathetic losers, but this role gives him the chance to synthesize the three, with each attribute supplying an aspect of Ernest’s psychology that would have been otherwise lost to stereotype. It’s a fiercely complex and often subtle performance, and it has the great benefit of implicating us along with him in his crimes and the subsequent ferocity of his guilt.
But after that initial 90 minutes, the creature comforts begin to return: Mollie’s health begins to decline because of her diabetes (and the “treatments” King buys for her), and her family members start slowly dying off through poisoning, illness, and even outright violent murder until she’s the last leaf on the family tree between King and his money. This is when, after a last-ditch attempt to get someone in the Federal Government’s attention, Wilson is sent out to conduct his investigation. He’s the archetypal “good” G-Man, a personification of attempted justice even if his superiors’ motivations have more to do with press coverage than the business of enforcing the law, and he, along with his team of informants and undercover operatives, begins to uncover the truth. But it’s not exactly difficult: uncovering this conspiracy is less a shallow grave that has to be unearthed than a layer of dust just waiting to be blown off due to the dueling combination of implied immunity/invincibility and the sheer stupidity underwriting their actions.
Scorsese makes it plain that the cold cruelty of these men arose not from composed and emotionless psychopathy but from bumbling basic impulses emerging in the ideal conditions for evil. There’s no grand consolidation of power at the end of King’s road or even the maintenance of it: he just does it because it is there. It’s the same with Ernest, who falls into the conspiracy simply because it’s the first option presented to him. Streaks of black comedy run rampant when it all falls apart, and they all begin to turn on each other to the Feds, but there’s no assurance, like with a mob movie, that anyone will ever see a jail cell for even a vaguely related crime. It is, after all, an uphill battle to get Hoover to send an agent out there in the first place.
Scorsese’s mob movies have always been virulently anti-mob, even folks tend to forget that his depictions aren’t endorsements of his subject matter, but Killers of the Flower Moon acts as a perfect companion piece to I Heard You Paint Houses in its thematics. They’re both patient deconstructions of the appeal of criminal enterprises, with Sheeran’s old-age isolation and utter meaninglessness – nobody knows who Jimmy Hoffa is anymore in the nursing home – serving to counteract the importance of his actions and his “loyalties” when he’s actually lost everything that he actually valued in the process. But Flower Moon doesn’t hold its revelations until its conclusion: It immediately immerses you in the ugly realities of a “conspiracy brotherhood” and the emptiness of those transactional relationships. There’s little entertainment in a shallow conspiracy being uncovered and the attempts of the powerful to prevent it from winding up in a criminal record, and there’s even less to be had in the deeds to ensure that this money flows King’s way. This critique is made plain in the film’s conclusion, which is audaciously metatextual and is the factor that pushes Flower Moon into “outright masterpiece” territory, acknowledging how, to paraphrase The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence, when truth becomes narrative, the narrative will be printed and publicized, made easily digestible for the audiences at home so as to not scare off the advertisers.
Scorsese doesn’t present this as a kind of moralizing judgment but rather as a thought for reflection, even as this insight is rendered in a way that implicates every single person in front of and behind the camera, as well as those occupying the recliner seats at the local AMC. Our translations of these stories will, as a matter of course, reduce their complexity — by clarifying dicey morality with clear motivations or, intentionally or not, enhancing it with the wonders of the cinematic art form itself or any number of things – so that we can infiltrate and inhabit, just for a few hours, relatable manifestations of the bleakness we’re battling within our hearts without suffering from its poison. If Killers of the Flower Moon is anything, it is an attempt to bridge that gap: To present to us an epic about an atrocity full of vivid detail while leaving us deliberately unfulfilled by the tidiness of its coda. Anything else would be more comforting, but it’d be less honest.