Dead little Indians
Ticket Stubs #3: ‘Killers of the Flower Moon’ is Martin Scorsese’s great anti-Western epic.
Ticket Stubs is a movie column reviewing new and not-so-new releases, Hollywood classics, nostalgic trash, and more obscure cinematic fare. This is Ticket Stubs #3.
Killers of the Flower Moon
Martin Scorsese, 2023
Is Killers of the Flower Moon too long at three and a half hours? Yes. Could I identify a single frame to trim? I could not.
Martin Scorsese’s twenty-sixth feature is concerned, as are many of the other twenty five, with crime, its half life, and the pervasiveness of corruption. Scorsese has made his great moral epic, a 216-minute via dolorosa through greed, venality, hatred, deceit, murder and betrayal. It’s as though the seven deadly sins got together and decided to make a movie on an Indian reservation.
Driven off their land in Missouri and Kansas along the Trail of Tears, the Osage Nation settle in Indian Territory and grieve their people’s assimilation with the white man and the cultural dilution it has brought. The land they’ve been moved onto is no good for anything until one day a geyser of black gold erupts from the soil, bringing the Osage mineral headrights and piles of cash.
This attracts the interest of whites keen to exploit the Indians and rob them of their fortunes, even and perhaps especially those who come in the guise of friendship, which is where William Hale enters the frame. Robert DeNiro’s obituary-opening roles are already settled: definitely Travis Bickle, Jake LaMotta, Johnny Boy Civello, and the younger Vito Corleone; maybe Mike Vronsky, Noodles, Rupert Pupkin or Neil McCauley. Had his Bill Hale come along earlier in his career, it would be a candidate for that first paragraph for it is so total and vivid and yet delicate and subtle.
We know what Hale is the minute we clock him but DeNiro pulls us in with affability, charm, and outward displays of respect and even humility. There is something predatory about the performance; you feel Hale is doing a number on you as much as on the Osage. Such is the deftness and moral shade with which DeNiro plays the conniver that you can never be certain whether it’s all just an act or whether, somewhere in his sentimental Texan soul, he feels an affinity for these proud, hardy people.
Hale is a cattle rancher and Democrat boss who is the Osage’s most prominent and powerful white friend, developing the local town and funding dance schools and ponies for the children. He calls himself ‘the King of the Osage Hills’ and rules with a threatening smile and palpable menace underneath his avuncular demeanour. (Hale bore a passing resemblance to FDR and DeNiro captures the similarity; it makes me want to see him as the 32nd president.)
Hale is a crook after Osage headrights, specifically those of Mollie Kyle (Lily Gladstone) whose sisters die one after another from poisoning, shooting and bombing, leaving Mollie with all of the family’s headrights, including those of her late mother. Hale convinces his well-meaning but dim nephew Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio), just invalided out of the Great War, to woo and marry Mollie so that the mineral money will eventually go to their children and thus into Hale’s clutches. Ernest falls in love but this doesn’t stop him carrying out his uncle’s plot, arranging the deaths of one member of Mollie’s family after another, and even poisoning the insulin shots he administers to his diabetic wife.
It is to DiCaprio’s credit that he makes this puffy man-boy simpleton — by the third act, he begins to resemble a whinier Marlon Brando — a character for whom we can feel empathy and even, at points, sympathy. He really does love Mollie and their children but, by his own admission, he loves money almost as much. Ernest is a character we want to embrace with one hand and thump with the other. (His uncle deals with the thumping in an unexpected scene with masonic undertones.)
Mollie is the moral centre of the movie and Lily Gladstone its star. She is granite, the great immovable of the picture. Her countenance is mesmerising; a body could lose himself in her softly severe face, in its wisdom and world-weariness, in its aching love for her doomed sisters and her no-good, half-good husband. Mollie marries Ernest with eyes open, referring to him as ‘coyote’ and telling her sisters that ‘of course he wants money’. In Osage and southwest Indian folklore, the coyote is a trickster, a man driven by avarice and lust, not an evil character necessarily but three miles of bad road and then some. Mollie stands by Ernest until she can’t anymore and at no point in the movie, not even in her sickbed writhing at death’s door, does she appear as vulnerable as the scene in which she silently walks away.
Gladstone has such presence, such command of the frame, that it’s hard to believe this is her first major movie role — her ten feature appearances prior to this have mostly been in minor parts — and your mind keeps trying to place her elsewhere. I briefly convinced myself that she had played Ada McGrath in The Piano (Jane Campion, 1993), even though I know that was Holly Hunter and that Gladstone would have been a child back then. You might say it’s just that Gladstone’s turn as a vulnerable but steely spouse recalls Hunter’s filling of similar shoes, but I say that it takes an actress of uncommon ability to make you want to rewrite movie history to accommodate her gift.
Killers of the Flower Moon is a true-crime anti-Western that achieves a deeper emotional resonance than most true-crime movies and is more tonally rounded than the average attempt at Western revisionism. On some odd, cosmic level, Scorsese has righted the wrongs of Heaven’s Gate, both by making the definitive demystifying epic of the American West that eluded Michael Cimino and by making the critics swoon for a three-hours-plus passion project where they razzed, more than was warranted, at Cimino’s career-imploding windmill tilt.
That he managed this is all the more impressive when we read that, halfway through production, he tore up the plans he had and rewrote the screenplay. Scorsese had set out to make a movie about Tom White, played here by Jesse Plemons, the federal agent who cracked the Osage murders case and brought Bill Hale to justice. Eventually, the director decided he didn’t want to make another white saviour movie and reoriented the script around the doomed relationship between Mollie and Ernest.
Cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto, who DPed The Wolf of Wall Street, Silence and The Irishman for Scorsese and, earlier this year, Barbie for Greta Gerwig, evokes the era with mournful, washed out greys and browns, contrasting them with bursts of colour to mark fleeting joys for the Osage. Greys are not to be trusted in Killers of the Flower Moon; they shade the photographs in which Osage Indians appear outwardly wealthy and content but which withhold the truth about the exploitation that has become their daily lives.
Later in the movie, Ernest turns state’s evidence against his uncle under interrogation by the Bureau of Investigation, the forerunner to the FBI. In these scenes Prieto bathes DiCaprio in a heavenly halo, which may symbolise his redemption but which I took more cynically as an ironic commentary on his plentiful self-pity.
Killers of the Flower Moon wears its politics a mite heavy at times. There is also that implication, common to anti-Westerns, that Osage life was a noble idyll of native virtue until the white man came along and polluted everything. Behind bars awaiting trial, confronted with his nephew’s betrayal, Hale insists the Osage will stand by him. After all, who brought them the roads and the electricity? Scorsese is taking aim at enduring justifications for the dispossession, by which white America even now consoles its conscience, but a less morally absolutist moviemaker might have been prepared to entertain the possibility that Hale-as-America was bad but not wrong.
If the director indulges himself, it is not in the editing booth but in slivers of self-reference, such as a court appearance by Ernest that is straight out of Goodfellas and a scene in which an Osage gets Tommy DeVitoed in an oilfield. He also ought to have talked Brendan Fraser into dialling down his performance as a scuzzball defence attorney; he plays it at fourteen when a seven would have been enough.
In perhaps the most charming scene in the movie, it is revealed that we have been picturing the events while listening to an old-timey true-crime radio show, complete with sound effects dashed out on stage. (The rattling of silverware to mimic the ratchety closing of a jail cell, etc.) We cut to the condenser mic and there he is: Scorsese as the radio producer and our narrator. I defy you to watch this and not want to hug him in that moment. He is Hollywood’s finest living moviemaker. May he live forever and then some.
The title comes from David Grann’s 2017 book, which inspired Scorsese to make the picture. Grann explains in his opening chapter:
In April, millions of tiny flowers spread over the blackjack hills and vast prairies in the Osage territory of Oklahoma. There are Johnny-jump-ups and spring beauties and little bluets. The Osage writer John Joseph Mathews observed that the galaxy of petals makes it look as if the “gods had left confetti.” In May, when coyotes howl beneath an unnervingly large moon, taller plants, such as spiderworts and black-eyed Susans, begin to creep over the tinier blooms, stealing their light and water. The necks of the smaller flowers break and their petals flutter away, and before long they are buried underground. This is why the Osage Indians refer to May as the time of the flower-killing moon.
The picture closes on an aerial shot of modern-day Osage dancing in a vivid floral formation in a verdant field. A century on from the events depicted, the Osage endure still, surviving flowers of the killer moon.
In cinemas now.