Killers of the Flower Moon

Release Date: October 20, 2023

Director: Martin Scorsese | MPAA Rating: R | LeavittLens Rating: 9/10

“You like women?” William Hale (Robert De Niro) inquires of Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo Dicaprio), his nephew newly returned from fighting overseas in WWI. Following a resounding yes–with a caveat that the women he had met overseas were all white women–Hale follows up with a second question to Ernest.

“What about red [women]?”

After a not-so-brief pause, Ernest replies: “Red women, white women, blue women – I love ’em all.”

Red, white, and blue – this piercing proclamation of patriotic misogyny perfectly crystalizes the central lament of Martin Scorsese’s true crime tale Killers of the Flower Moon, capturing in a phrase the colonizing instincts both of an entire nation and of the violent men who so often populate it. There’s a grandiosity and intimacy working together throughout the film’s three and a half hour run time – it’s a masterclass both as a sprawling, clear-eyed American epic uncovering the systemic abuse so endemic of our nation’s distant and recent past, and as a heartbreakingly personal story of love and betrayal.

In many ways the film is a summation of the themes and ideas that have consumed Scorsese throughout his illustrious, decades-long career. Killers serves up an unflinching expose of the corrupt, not-so-organized crime of prideful and brutalizing American men, calling to mind his work in Goodfellas, Casino, and The Departed; it introduces the audience to the tensions of spirituality, identity, grief, and politics of non-Anglo communities, reminiscent of his work in Silence and Kundun; it even prophetically holds the bitter reality of capitalistic greed right in front of the eyes of those whose society runs on it, a nod to his bombastic work in The Wolf of Wall Street and The Color of Money. During a time in his life where he seems intent on self-reflection, his latest work serves as a remarkable rumination without ever feeling borrowed, nostalgic, or derivative.

Set in 1920’s Oklahoma, Killers is an adaptation of David Grann’s book of the same name. Both tell the story of the Reign of Terror, a series of grisly murders of the Osage Native American tribe at the hands of white men and women consumed by racism and greed. There’s hardly one way to tell this story, evidenced in how the film departs from the book: while Grann’s writing takes a more traditional crime procedural approach, ultimately spending considerable time on the FBI and their eventual convicting of those who played prominent roles in the murders, Scorsese reframes the story, dealing primarily with the central characters, both white and Osage, perpetrators and victims. While this story certainly deserves a uniquely Osage telling, Scorsese deftly navigates the tale as someone outside of the victimized community, regularly placing the Osage at center stage. Christopher Cote, a language consultant on the film, captured this well, commending Scorsese for his work while also reminding viewers that “this film isn’t made for an Osage audience.” It seems Scorsese is most interested in tossing this true story right in the face of those who otherwise have neglected or ignored it, unpacking the dynamics that underpinned such violence while also maintaining a central dignity for the oppressed and marginalized along the way.

The movie opens with an introduction to the Osage nation, forcibly displaced to a new land, a tale all too tragically common in American history. Yet they quickly find this new land is gushing with oil, and suddenly exorbitant wealth springs forth to the Osage like black gold from the Oklahoma ground – before long they become the richest people per capita in the entire world. Scorsese cleverly opts for a black and white, 4:3 aspect ratio during this early introduction, an immersive callback to the silent films of the 20’s that woos the audience into the world of this oft-forgotten–or altogether untaught–piece of American history. A dissolve of these black and white shots into a color frame of passengers on a train to Fairfax, a central home of the Osage, indicates we are entering into this history, and introduces us to Ernest Burkhart, a veteran arriving to live and work with his uncle after the war. It’s through Ernest that we are introduced to the buzz and noise of the town, something Scorsese and his team expertly navigate. Sweeping shots of business transactions and fights, enveloping production design, and pulsating music work together to create a mesmeric feel as Ernest steps off the train and into this new world.

Given his war injuries, Ernest is unable to do much in the way of manual labor for work, so he opts to become a chauffeur to his wealthy Native American neighbors (this was a common gig for white men who lived in Fairfax at the time). In his work he soon meets Mollie Kyle (Lily Gladstone), an Osage woman whose quiet fortitude and dignified posture carry a watchful wisdom in every moment she is on screen. After becoming her driver, Ernest shares a meal with his uncle, William Hale, and his brother, Byron (Scott Shepherd). He discusses how he has been driving Mollie Kyle around town, which prompts a pregnant glance from Hale to Byron. Hale shrewdly informs Ernest of the oil-fueled wealth that runs through the blood of Mollie’s family, and suggests–with a devilish combination of subtlety and strength–that Ernest’s pursuit of Mollie could easily lead to that wealth flowing in their direction. This prompts a season of flirtation and courtship between Ernest and Mollie, and eventually they wed.

Leo turns in a terrific performance here as Ernest, acting against type as a somewhat dim and naive young man whose charm and seemingly good intentions still manage to win Mollie over, but the clear star of the film is Gladstone in her role as Mollie. While often sharing the screen with one of the most recognizable and magnetic actors in the world, she steals every scene, constantly capturing with poise the passion, love, grief, sadness, and heartbreak of Mollie. The two ultimately work well together. Ernest regularly wears his heart on his sleeve or in his frown, a staple expression that displays outwardly the internal reckoning of a man whose longing for love is constantly clashing with his obsessive greed, while Mollie maintains a level of reserved dignity.

This romance serves as the emotional center for the film while also catalyzing a much larger plot: the organized dismantling of Mollie’s family and at least dozens of other Osage in an attempt to get their money into white hands. It’s in the middle third of the film, where De Niro’s Hale takes a central role, that we are forced into silent despair and grief alongside Mollie as native lives are systematically devalued and discarded at every level of society. Doctors, lawyers, bankers, law enforcement – all of them are complicit in this remorseless effort. Indeed, a scene in a Masonic lodge near the middle of the film shows us Hale standing with his two nephews on a chessboard shaped floor, not-so-subtly hinting at the methodical and ordered game he is playing, using everyone around him as pawns. At one point early in the film Ernest reads a children’s book on the history of the Osage which, ironically, is only ever read by white characters in the film, a testament to the reality that history often belongs to those in power. In the book he cites a caption underneath one of the primary illustrations: “Can you find the wolves in this picture?” While this line seems delivered directly to the audience as they watch the film, the wolves aren’t really hidden throughout – shot after shot, line after line, glance after glance reveal that wolves aren’t really hard to find, so long as you are willing to look in the right places.

As the plot and murders continue with increasing intensity and menace, Mollie eventually braves a trip to Washington D.C. to plead with the federal government to intervene. Enter a newly formed group referred to as the Bureau of Investigation, an invention of J. Edgar Hoover designed to expand his own power and pull in D.C. Mollie’s pleading leads to the sending of a team of investigators, led by the good-hearted Tom White (in a terrific turn from Jesse Plemons), to “see about these murders.” While ordinarily the entrance of detectives in film storytelling means the uncovering of evidence and details previously unknown to the audience, the wolves have made their tracks quite obvious from the outset. This is actually a clever narrative choice that Scorsese and his co-writer, Eric Roth, make in the film. By never making the evil much of a mystery, they underscore how tragically obvious and heartbreakingly avoidable many of these massacres were. Everyone in Fairfax knew, and yet no one did anything, either for fear of Hale or for their own benefit in the elimination of their native neighbors. It’s this obviousness that ultimately carries the movie’s central refrain: for as much as we might want to pretend to be surprised by evil in our midst, the truth is that it doesn’t have to do much hiding in a society already built on greed, already founded on colonialism, already structured around racism. The oil and soil under our feet have been fuel and fertile ground for the hells of our history and for the hells of our present, if we would have eyes to see their plainness before us.

In one later scene in Killers, Hale looks from his porch over the blurred images of what appears to be hellfire raging in his fields, a self-inflicted burn fueled by his desire for an insurance payout. As the fire burns in the background, we cut to Mollie, wasting away under the watchful eye of her betraying husband, himself sweating under the heat of his own miserable choices. We’ve come face to face with the devil and his hell, as he’s profited at the expense of the most vulnerable. He’s hiding in plain sight, but he’ll only be seen if we listen the stories of those on the margins. And so we’re left with that central question, as accurate in our own time as it was in the 1920’s: can you find the wolves in this picture?