‘Flower’ Power
Martin Scorsese reminds us all you can make impactful, stylish films without laser beams to the sky and frantic editing.
Killers of the Flower Moon
Director: Martin Scoresese • Writers: Eric Roth, Martin Scorsese, based on the book by David Grann
Starring: Leonardo DiCaprio, Lily Gladstone, Robert De Niro, Jesse Plemons, Cara Jade Myers, Scott Shepherd, William Belleau
USA • 3hr 26mins
Opens Hong Kong October 19 • IIB
Grade: A
A couple of years back, director Martin Scorsese found himself facing off against butthurt fanboys after opining that Marvel movies were like amusement parks: shiny, glossy, diversions full of bright lights and noise. He was not wrong, and of course it was taken to mean “Martin Scorsese hates superhero movies.” He was a curmudgeonly grandpa shaking his fist at the kids on his lawn. Well, in case any of us forgot Scorsese directed stone classics like Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, Goodfellas and the prescient The King of Comedy, directed Paul Newman to his only Oscar in The Color of Money, won 15 major awards, the Silver Lion, and the Palme d’Or (as a start) and he’s earned the right to shit on Marvel, welcome to Killers of the Flower Moon.
He’s also one of the few filmmakers who could wrangle Killers of the Flower Moon into a coherent, gripping pseudo-western thriller with a few things to say about power, corruption, the legacy of colonialism, and America’s ugly relationship with its indigenous people. Based on a true story and journalist David Grann’s book – notably subtitled An American Crime and the Birth of the FBI – Scorsese and co-writer Eric Roth (Munich, The Insider) have backburnered the FBI part in favour of an infuriating, heartbreaking story about an Osage woman, Molly Burkhart (Lily Gladstone), who loses her entire family and witnesses the cash-driven near genocide of her people, because there’s nothing white men hate more than being beaten at their own game (see: Dumb Money). Shot on location in Oklahoma, Flower Moon is pure Scorsese – but not. The turn of the century frontier is outside his urban comfort zone, and the subject matter is more overtly political than he’s ever been. But he’s grafted an epic crime thriller about corruption onto a historical drama about existential threat and white power – or maybe the other way around. Either way, it proves why Scorsese is called an artist and Marvel is… not.
Future star Lily Gladstone?
There is a metric ton of stuff going on in Killers of the Flower Moon; a sprawling drama teased out from Grann’s relatively lean book. In the early 1920s the First World War has just ended and the Osage Nation is among the wealthiest in the world. Forced off their land and relocated to Oklahoma by the federal government, the Osage were wise enough to negotiate oil rights that favoured them and made them the envy of people like Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio in one of his more mannered performances), just back from Europe, and his uncle, William Hale (Robert De Niro), the so-called King of the Osage Hills, friend and ally. Around the time Molly meets and marries Ernest in Fairfax, one tragedy after another begins to hit her and the Osage in general. In short succession she loses her sister Minnie (Jillian Dion) to “wasting sickness”, Anna (Cara Jade Myers) and Reta (JaNae Collins) to murder, and her mother Lizzie Q (Tantoo Cardinal) to age. Eventually her own diabetes gets the better of her.
While all this is going on, Hale and his buddies in the sheriff’s office, the coroner’s office, the bank, the medical clinic and the criminal underworld are working behind the scenes to ensure that whenever misfortune strikes an Osage with headrights – oil money – somehow, some way those headrights are willed to him or someone in his family. Like Ernest. If it takes a push for those misfortunes to strike, so be it. After the tribal council hires a lawyer, a private investigator and sends Mollie to Washington DC to demand some kind of justice, ambitious bureaucrat J Edgar Hoover finally sends former Texas Ranger Tom White (Jesse Plemons) to Fairfax to investigate the murders and uncover a conspiracy. The third act is essentially Goodfellas.
The realities that birth that conspiracy lurk in every scene: when Hale’s friend Henry Roan (William Belleau) demands to know why the bank won’t give him his own money; when Mollie has to justify what her mother spends to her government appointed financial “guardian”; when Hale watches a newsreel about the Tulsa Race Massacre stone-faced; when Ernest cheerfully greets a Klansman at a parade. They’re little details that paint a vivid picture (show, don’t tell), one we can see because of DOP Rodrigo Prieto’s lush widescreen photography and long-time Scorsese collaborator Thelma Schoonmaker’s graceful editing. In over three hours (!) there’s not a single wasted frame or gratuitous scene in Flower Moon; every shot feels necessary compared to the bloat of The Irishman (I never said Scorsese was perfect). The whole thing is outfitted in impeccable period details and production design by Jack Fisk (There Will Be Blood), set to Robbie Robertson’s thrumming heartbeat of a score, his last, that slows – but persists – as the deaths pile up. And the most creative true story epilogue ever – a radio play – puts a final exclamation point on a heinous passage in American history.
The cast is as strong as you’d expect, with De Niro clearly channelling his nemesis Donald Trump’s inner circle. But centring a lot of the action on Mollie rather than White was the right thing to do; it’s her story despite DiCaprio’s giant melon on the poster art. It’s Osage history. As our entry into this time and place, Gladstone lays down what should be star-making turn as Mollie. She’s wounded and weary for having her agency stripped from her, angry, and utterly unwilling to admit Ernest’s betrayal until she must. Gladstone is as quiet and controlled in her simmering devastation as Myers – another standout – is deafening at a rolling boil. Anna likes her booze, her men, and she’s well aware of how precarious her position as a rich Osage is. It’s something that slowly dawns on White during his unassuming, “Aw shucks” investigation, and Plemons again demonstrates how much he can express in stillness. White learns the hard way Hoover didn’t send him to Oklahoma because it was right, or fair. He sent him to justify the creation of the FBI to congress. The tiny bit of justice the Osage got was more luck than intent. — DEK
*Killers of the Flower Moon was reviewed during the 2023 SAG-AFTRA strike. Without the labour of the actors it wouldn't exist.