In "Killers of the Flower Moon", Martin Scorsese Reckons with Evil, Love, Forgiveness—and Himself

Scorsese's latest, set amid the early-twentieth-century Osage Indian murders, is a virtuosic late-career work that investigates the essence of American evil.

Lily Gladstone and Leonardo DiCaprio in Killers of the Flower Moon | Image via Apple and Paramount Pictures

Note: Killers of the Flower Moon traces real events that took place in Osage County, OK over a century ago. It’s hard not to spoil these already well-known historical events, so please note that this review contains “spoilers” for Killers of the Flower Moon. If you are unfamiliar with this tragic period of American history and wish to go into the movie completely blind, don’t read this review just yet. Watch the movie first!

For over fifty years now, Martin Scorsese’s filmography has followed the same obsessions: death, violence, sin and repentance, forgiveness under the cruelest of circumstances. You can see it in the moral disillusionment of Taxi Driver, the “I always wanted to be a gangster” romanticism of Goodfellas, the bacchanalia of The Wolf of Wall Street. Scorsese interrogates man’s worst impulses in all his films, but behind all of the sex, drugs, and Rolling Stones that he throws onscreen, there is always the sense of a young Scorsese—bedridden from asthma, guilt-stricken from Catholicism—looking for answers to the questions that the priest could not. How can one be forgiven in a world of so much sin?

Killers of the Flower Moon, his newest film (out now in theaters and on Apple TV+ at an undisclosed date), is about that same question. Based on the 2017 book of the same name by David Grann, the film follows the series of 1920s murders committed against the Osage Nation, an indigenous American tribe living in Osage County, Oklahoma. The murders, perpetrated by a semi-organized group of white landowners, came about from a racist greed for the wealth of the Osage people at this time. During this brief period of American history, they were the wealthiest per-capita people on Earth, having stumbled upon oil land after their forcible displacement from Kansas by the US government. Lucky (or perhaps unlucky) for the Osage, they retained mineral rights during their displacement. That land was expected to be filled with nothing but empty pasture. It was bubbling with black gold.

This golden age didn’t last long. White ranchers, led primarily by William King Hale (Robert De Niro, exceptional), organized a loose conspiracy of murders that were tied into deceitful interracial marriages. Hale, knowing that the oil headrights of an Osage woman would be transferred to her husband after her death, organized some of the the worst, most interpersonal crimes in American history: the white men married these Osage women—having children, establishing trust, building families—before murdering them.

You could accuse the last paragraph of spoiling the key beats of Killers’ narrative, and you wouldn’t be entirely wrong. David Grann’s book—a nonfiction potboiler with literary flair—keeps the perpetrators of the Osage murders secret until its final pages, then revealing, in an M. Night Shyamalan-style plot twist, who the villains were all along.

Still from Killers of the Flower Moon | Image via Apple and Paramount Pictures

Scorsese’s approach is altogether different. We are made at least vaguely aware of Hale’s pernicious intentions within the film’s first twenty minutes. The first moment that he encourages his nephew Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio) to find himself a nice Osage woman to marry, he does so with the added insinuation that he should find one with to a “full-blood estate”—oil money. Ernest, a dim-witted World War I veteran whose interest in money and women are his key character traits, doesn’t question his uncle’s encouragements, and it makes sense. Hale is a popular figure in Osage county: he is warm and welcoming; he is referred to affectionately as “King”; he speaks the Osage language and admires their ways (“The most beautiful people on God’s Earth,” he says). That veneer barely masks his avarice, however, and from here the scope and scale of his murderous schemes are drip-fed to us slowly, implicatively. Ernest’s weak-willed stupidity—his willingness to follow his own desires unquestioningly, wherever they will take him—comes to emblemize American greed, in all its gormless, venereal horror.

Ernest’s first step towards violence comes when offers him a job driving a cab around town for the wealthier Osage—a brief instance in American history where white supremacist hierarchies were occasionally (and only delicately) reversed. Here Ernest begins driving Mollie Kyle (Lily Gladstone), a landowning Osage woman with whom he becomes quickly smitten. His interest in her comes—at least in part—from Mollie’s rights to oil land, and Mollie herself never has any illusions about this. “Of course he wants money,” she notes to her sisters (at one point in the film. “But he wants to be settled.” Her money attracts him like a moth to a flame, yes. But crucially—and unlike his uncle—his love for her is genuine.

The push-pull ambiguity of Ernest and Mollie’s romance is the film’s moral and spiritual spinal cord, the centripetal force of a story that slowly unveils a morass of Indigenous corpses. DiCaprio and Gladstone possess a once-in-a-lifetime onscreen chemistry: their marriage feels indisputably real, even as we learn more and more of Ernest’s growing participation in his uncle’s schemes to murder Mollie’s family. That we believe in their love alongside their evil is nothing short of miraculous, and it works because of the slow pace (reminder: this is a three-and-a-half hour movie) at which it is unveiled. Early on, we see Ernest and his brother Byron (Scott Shepherd) rob an Osage family at gunpoint; this segues into beatings, then killings, then finally spearheading of the conspiracy itself. All the while, Ernest and Mollie care for each other, share their home, and raise children with what seems to be complete trust in each other. This is the philosophical question by which Scorsese appears genuinely puzzled: Can true love coexist against the backdrop of such murder and deceit?

Robert De Niro and Leonardo DiCaprio in Killers of the Flower Moon | Image via Apple and Paramount Pictures

DiCaprio and Gladstone have received innumerable plaudits for their performances. They deserve them. They convert each and every ounce of the film’s weighty drama into something not just believable, but enveloping. As Ernest, DiCaprio delivers a career-best performance, wearing a droopy, lunkheaded frown throughout the bulk of the film that renders him an imbecile without control over his own destiny. Ernest’s catchphrase, “I love money!”, is as stupid as it sounds, and is perfectly suited to a character who would convince himself that his involvement in the Osage murders could reconcile itself with his Osage marriage. Gladstone, for her part, delivers the film’s best performance. Hers is in an impossible role: the character of Mollie does not work unless we believe that she both loves for her husband and is simultaneously aware—or at least suspicious—of his evils. But Gladstone somehow makes the impossible possible, rendering Mollie with a stoicism that collapses slowly throughout the course of film: her eyes sink ever inward as more and more of her family meet their ends. When Bureau of Investigation agent Tom White (Jesse Plemmons, effortlessly excellent) shows up midway through the film—an act that markedly and unexpectedly ushers the film into its shattering third act—Mollie’s calm awareness of her people’s unstoppable extinction becomes tragically paramount. Gladstone she deserves to sweep every win at this coming awards season.

None of last 1,000 words of plot summary don’t do justice to the actual experience of watching Killers of the Flower Moon, which is itself an absorbing, expressionistic cinematic symphony whose power is difficult describe. Scorsese has certainly taken clear-eyed views of the horrors of humankind in his previous works; the masculine despondency of Raging Bull to the everyone-dies-at-the-end nihilism of The Departed are just two examples. But Scorsese has never partaken in such cinematic abstraction, in such otherworldly visuals that immerse us in a beautiful world that has been unforgivably poisoned. Cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto shoots the Oklahoma prairie in its all-encompassing sprawl; his images interact with the more expressionistic sequences: oil geysers pouring over a cabal of celebratory Osage, prairie fires decimating everything to the horizon line. One sequence, of Mollie’s mother Lizzie Q (Tantoo Cardinal) silently entering the afterlife, is transcendently spiritual in a noticeably non-Scorsesian manner. It is one of the most beautiful 30-second sequences ever put on film in a series of astounding setpieces from this late-career American master.

It is hard to describe the amount of craftsmanship excellence at play in Killers. Brendan Fraser and John Lithgow are both excellent as the booming early-twentieth-century lawyers W.S. Hamilton and Peter Leaward, who appear in the final act of the film to give political voice to both sides of the crimes that we have witnessed for the past three hours. JaNae Collins, playing Mollie’s sister Rita, all but takes over the film in a fleeting, barnstorming twenty-minute sequence that leads up to her murder. The late Robbie Robertson’s mournful, guitar-based score hardly raises above a murmur for most of the film’s runtime, accentuating the quiet devastation of the Osage people. The editing by Scorsese’s longtime collaborator Thelma Schoonmaker is immersive and expansive: scenes cut across locations and time periods without warning. The result is a tapestry of a film, an entrancing exemplar of onscreen storytelling.

Promotional image for Killers of the Flower Moon, with Lily Gladstone and Martin Scorsese | Image via Apple and Paramount Pictures

In a recent Deadline interview, Scorsese found himself taking a more particularized interest in the nature of death, reflecting on the feeling that his age was finally catching up to him:

[Akira] Kurosawa, when he got his Oscar, when George [Lucas] and Steven [Spielberg] gave it to him, he said, “I’m only now beginning to see the possibility of what cinema could be, and it’s too late.” He was 83. At the time, I said, “What does he mean?” Now I know what he means.

Scorsese’s invocation of Kurosawa, the Japanese master filmmaker, is a resonant one: both made masterpieces over a period spanning five decades, and both found themselves making films of a kind that they had never made before as they entered their twilight years. In the same way that Ran collapsed all of Kurosawa’s craftsmanship into a late-career masterpiece, so too does Killers of the Flower Moon achieve an unparalleled elegiac power.

The same is true of Scorsese’s previous masterpiece, 2019’s The Irishman. The protagonist of that film, Frank Sheeran, was a man beholden to the whims of those above him, executing the most vile acts imaginable without consideration to the weight it would have on his family, his society, his own conscience. Meanwhile, Ernest Burkhart, the weak-willed embodiment of American greed, finds himself indebted to a supremacist conspiracy that represents America’s colonial relationship between white settlers and its original peoples: a seemingly real love between the two that curdles into something truly horrific.

All of which is to say that with Killers of the Flower Moon, Scorsese is still puzzling after the subjects that have beguiled him for the better part of fifty years, but with a new level of awareness. In the film’s final sequence—a virtuosic, fourth-wall-breaking masterwork that shouldn’t be spoiled here—Scorsese reckons with his own participation in American evils. Nearing the end of his life, Scorsese has found some new understanding of his place in the world, and of his place in cinematic history. Where his previous films might have found romanticism in self-indulgence, Killers of the Flower Moon is altogether different. It has a poignancy that is uncharacteristically bleak and self-reflective—a revelatory piece in the Scorsese canon. In Killers of the Flower Moon, Scorsese looks into the heart of darkness itself.