‘Killers Of The Flower Moon’: Cannes Review

Dir. Martin Scorsese. US. 2023. 206mins

Over an almost 60-year career – half the history of cinema itself – Martin Scorsese has made many of the great American movies. Killers Of The Flower Moon is a Great American Film too, in the old-fashioned sense of that term; an attempt to capture the soul of the nation, and the length and breadth of its original sin. Lifting his camera to survey the wide open plains of the past, Scorsese extracts an epic Western from horrible real-life crimes committed against the Native American Osage tribe of, latterly, Oklahoma, delivering something biblical, human, yet deeply inhumane. Set in the 1920s, Killers Of The Flower Moon is of John Huston scope, with some of the edge of a Chinatown. This is terrific cinema, full to its 206-minute brim. 

To be savoured as elevated cinema, each frame a picture moving towards a goal

The irony is that Scorsese made Killers for Apple, although there are apparently plans for Paramount to release theatrically in a 45-day window. There has been a wariness about the increasingly extended nature of Scorsese’s work and its viability in the marketplace, even with Robert DeNiro and Leonardo DiCaprio co-starring. (Heaven’s Gate allegedly brought down a studio, after all.) Yet such hesitation is unwarranted, as Scorsese, working with Eric Roth, remasters the crimes of David Grann’s 2017 non-fiction book ‘Killers Of The Flower Moon: The Osage Murders And The Birth Of The FBI’. They place the focus on the Osage tribe and the people who swindled and murdered them, dialling down the parallel story of J Edgar Hoover’s brand-new FBI, which investigated.

It’s a masterful choice, corralling the story of ‘pureblood’ Osage Mollie (Lily Gladstone) and the men who profess to care for her but cause her family nothing but pain. Greed motivates them, corruption mires them. Sound familiar? The director also confidently eliminates the ‘whodunnit’ element of the source material – if we don’t know exactly who is wearing which hat from almost the get-go, we always suspect it. Instead, the audience is invited to look violence and stupidity and racism in its ugly, dirty, confused face as unconscionable crimes take place and, although it is only barely expressed (mostly through references to the contemporaneous Tulsa massacre of rehoused former slaves), given to understand that this is, and has always been, the Janus face of settler America. With Scorsese, though, there’s always a chance offered for redemption….

The locusts have arrived in in the town of Fairfax, Osage County in the newly-formed Oklahoma. Driven off their ancestral lands, the much-diminished Osage tribe has struck a deal with the US Government for its final resting place. Oil has been found, however, in this barren area which was originally thought to be worthless, and the Osage tribe has retained the mineral rights. They are rich beyond belief for the era, with white servants and fleets of the newest motor cars. Yet they are not deemed competent to look after their affairs – their white guardians dole out money only on request. They are swindled wherever they spend their earnings and, as their ‘headrights’ are hereditary, wooed by unscrupulous young men and women who have flooded into the boozy frontier town looking to marry their way into money. Leonardo DiCaprio’s Ernest Burkhart, nephew to ‘King’ Bill Hale (DeNiro), the so-called best friend of the Osage, is one of these.

Scorsese spends a lot of time figuring out DiCaprio’s character. As King’s dominance over Ernest increases, this lazy ‘dumb boy’ who only loves money ends up betraying everything that is good in his life. He sets his sights on Mollie, a serene, wise, family-centred Osage. But Ernest does actually love Mollie: and she places her trust in him, although she knows better. Grappling with an unlikeable character, DiCaprio’s performance is strong, gurning his way into the sepia picture of a man who never had a moral to lose.

The kleptocracy of this town is so egregious, a promised ‘clean up’ of the streets by the Ku Klux Clan starts to look like a good idea. The killing of the Osage eventually comes to the attention of new federal force The FBI, which dispatches a team led by Tom White (Jesse Plemons) to investigate.

Scorsese is focused on capturing the self-justification and -pity of the greedy robber-baron against the beauty of the land they pillage and the people who own it in the middle of a crime story which is almost unbelievable in its reach and mendacity. With the film clearly grounded in Osage culture, every scene is a furtherance of themes which seem cut and dried by the end, but are so much more shaded as you watch. Some criticism is probably inevitable, given the times we live in, for portraying the Osage as victims and giving centre-stage to the white male protagonists who abuse the tribe. Such were – are – the crimes, though. It says a lot about Gladstone’s performance that she dominates every scene she is in, and is the strength that brings the film to its conclusion.

It may teem with Scorsese’s preoccupation with the base nature of humans, with snaggle-toothed criminals swigging moonshine on every dirty street-corner (they could be the Gangs of New York), but Killers Of The Flower Moon is to be savoured as elevated cinema, each frame a picture moving towards a goal. Not just in the more bravura camera sweeps (which still seem determinedly non-ostentatious), but the very construction of even the most – deceptively – simply-staged scenes. The light, the angle, the edit, by his oldest collaborator Thelma Schoonmaker, are recognisably Scorses’s work, but also a tribute to the great films of this new genre for him. (It’s fair to say, though, his camera can’t wait to get Ernest into a prison cell to work the angles.) DoP Rodrigo Prieto returns from The Irishman, and also Wolf of Wall Street. Robbie Robertson finds a calling in the music ofthat time.

We do, though, have wide-shot exteriors, marking the first time that Scorsese has worked with the famed production designer Jack Fisk (who started out on Terrence Malick’s Badlands). There’s no better person do to this work than Fisk, famed for working in nature – recreating Jamestown for The New World alongside The Revenant. It seemed as if he might have retired, but thankfully not: if you want to experience what life looked like for the Osage in 1921, you can bet that Fisk is giving it to you here in all its textured accuracy.

Scorsese signs off his text with a beautiful flourish. The last two sequences are eloquent tributes, one featuring the director himself, who frames the story within a self-mythologising America. That’s unusual. Killers Of The Flower Moon does at times feel like the completion of something. Let’s hope it’s not, and just a triumphant part of the conversation that has been Scorsese’s life’s work.