Killers of the Flower Moon

★★★★½

After sixty years, Martin Scorsese is still fascinated with the evil at the heart of America. In his latest picture “Killers of the Flower Moon,” evil permeates with both wicked duplicity and sinister nonchalance. Atrocities don’t happen in the cover of shadow, but in broad daylight. Greedy compulsions are a way of life. Predator and prey mingle harmoniously before the claws come out. “Can you find the wolves in this picture?”

Set in 1920s Oklahoma, an Indigenous tribe known as the Osage Nation become plagued by an epidemic of murder and violence. The tribe’s vast oil wealth make them a target for shifty white men who, at the orchestration of a powerful community figure, implant themselves in the tribe and begin picking them off one by one. As the death toll reaches its peak, the newly formed FBI sends a group of agents to weed out the source of all these deaths. Presented not from the perspective of the moral government agents or the tragic Indigenous victims, but instead from the perpetrator’s viewpoint, Scorsese masterfully implicates us, the audience, in his condemnation of complicity. We’re let in behind closed doors. Forced to conspire and collude with vicious men and their vicious plans. The source of evil shows its face plainly in this manner, and it’s not full-bodied hatred. It is basic entitlement. A perceived entitlement to what’s not theirs, and a perceived right to pursue it, by any means necessary.

There is, of course, a level of cluelessness to this notion, and Scorsese reflects this in the film’s central figure, Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio). A pathetic, bumbling excuse of a man, Burkhart meets and marries Osage woman Mollie Kyle (Lily Gladstone) out of genuine love. He is also, of course, entirely aware of his own key involvement in the conspiracy to murder her entire family and steal their wealth. Somehow, these contradictory motivations run on parallel tracks in Burkhart’s mind, and DiCaprio brilliantly mines every ounce of internal drama from a character continually shocked and befuddled by the consequences of his own deliberate actions. Meanwhile, Lily Gladstone captivates with a haunting portrait of a woman drained by grief and encumbered by hope. Hope that the worst has passed, that help is coming, that the white men who call themselves family and friends have her best interests at heart. It’s a steadfast trait that Gladstone plays with a heartbreaking dramatic irony, and the film’s entire emotional core rests on the nuanced complexities that she brings to the performance.

And this is the true agony of the story of the Osage murders. The continued, almost naïve belief the Osage Nation held in their community’s white intruders. Scorsese highlights this as frequently as possible. Not as a critique of the Osage’s judgement or self-preservation instincts, but as a reinforcement of the gentle nature of the Osage Nation so ruthlessly exploited by the film’s own central characters. As the ringleader of the operation, William King Hale, Robert De Niro delivers one of the best performances of his career. His warm kindheartedness doesn’t disguise his malicious intent as much as it is the very face of it. This is a man who would casually order a person killed in the same tone one might request an ice cream sundae. De Niro plays him like the devil incarnate.

One of the most remarkable things about Scorsese’s latest, however, is its pace. After four watches (yes, four) it is still astounding how little fat is on this bone. Every scene pushes forward character, narrative or atmosphere, and the film’s rhythm and flow is pitch-perfect. At a hefty three and a half hours, it is an undeniably long film, but every frame is essential. Every single shot. Thelma Schoonmaker, the legendary film editor whose longtime collaboration with Martin Scorsese has brought her eight Academy Award nominations, has perhaps crafted her greatest achievement with “Flower Moon,” which flies by briskly and efficiently. It’s a structural marvel. Then there’s the oppressive yellows and beiges of Rodrigo Prieto’s masterful cinematography, coating the landscapes in glimmering, golden sunlight. His visuals are memorable and, at times, deeply chilling. A notable sequence in the film’s second half warps and contorts through shimmering heat waves, and is unease itself distilled to cinematic form. And then there is, of course, the score from the late Robbie Robertson, which sounds more like a celebration of the era and the Osage community than a harrowing accompaniment to genocide. In its acoustic twangs and contemporary, upbeat rhythms, Robertson evokes setting and tone, rather than hijacking the film’s emotional journey like a guided tour. In this manner, he elevates the film in a specific, restrained way.

But perhaps the film’s most examined aspect is its ending, which serves as among the most self-reflective scenes in Scorsese’s filmography. Adding an entirely new layer of thematic complexity at the eleventh hour, Scorsese questions his own right as a white filmmaker in telling a story of Indigenous suffering, interrogates the way tragedies are neatly repackaged as entertainment for the eager masses, and implicates us as an audience benefitting from a hollow flattening of real-world horror into palatable media to consume. He does this all in a short two or three minutes, with a radical change of tone and wonderful creativity. It nudges the film that extra little bit beyond a masterful retelling of true events, and into the realm of truly complex, lingering works that bridge the gap between the past and the present.

With a story so fragile, so easy to damage — Scorsese and co-writer Eric Roth nearly adapted David Grann’s book too faithfully, relegating Mollie and the Osage to the backdrop of a story centred around the formation of the FBI — it is miraculous that “Killers of the Flower Moon” came out this astonishingly nuanced. The film examines the nature of evil and its roots in the American south through the intimate lens of a romance built on deception, and Scorsese takes a steady, methodical approach in examining themes common in his work — greed, violence, corruption — with an unfamiliar solemnity and gravity. The horror is not as identifiable as unruly gangsters and slimy finance crooks. Here, the villains are predators living among the prey. Wolves hiding among the sheep. It is Scorsese, who asks us through the words Ernest Burkhart reads aloud in a book about Osage life: “Can you find the wolves in this picture?”