This piece was written during the 2023 SAG-AFTRA strike. Without the labor of the actors currently on strike, the film being covered here wouldn't exist.
I saw Killers of the Flower Moon on opening night, right before my birthday and amid the Philadelphia Film Festival. It’s the second film I’ve seen this year that I want to rewatch and nearly feel guilty for enjoying because of the weird way it feels to speak positively about something well made that’s about something terrible that happened in real life; it’s a vestige of childhood morality or simplified understanding of art, but I won’t say it’s not there. It’s okay to feel bad sometimes, to wrestle with the representation of violence and misery. This is engaging entertainment wrestling with its own limitations because it is representing the early 20th century continuation of white European-American genocide against Indigenous people while acknowledging how little justice can be provided in the act of just telling what happened. Of course, some artistic license was taken with adapting David Crann’s book about the beginning of the FBI, which changes its perspective. It is, nonetheless, a movie about the Osage people that the Osage people - and other Native American/Indigenous people - took part in making. So, I want to extend my gratitude to those involved for sharing this story, so that we might think deeply about how this country came about, what it’s made of, and how it continues to be.
This is, essentially, a story about a man (Leonardo DiCaprio as Ernest Burkhart) enticed by his uncle to conspire to defraud and murder his neighbors, his wife’s (Lily Gladstone as Mollie Burkhart) family and people. It is a story about a dozen things – the lies we tell ourselves and others are a core theme. This is drawn through the interpersonal, where a man convinces himself he loves a woman that he slowly helps kill, to the institutional, as Killers of the Flower Moon shows laws and organizations for the fig leaves over human monstrosity that they can be. This is a movie about the wild west, about the places where the frontier and the urban clash, where outlaws abound. It is about the way social mores can implore us to look the other way as injustice happens before us and about how civilization is built on lies. Killers of the Flower Moon is about how the U.S. government and all its constituent parts and subordinate territories rely on plausible deniability to perpetuate graft and condone murder.
The film is, thusly, a really fucked up 206-minutes; not in the sense of being a snuff film or the abrasive experimental cinema that jostles one through offensive images, but with the candor of historical drama. It is long but never drags. It does let you sit, though, in the wickedness and avarice that built this country, in the way institutional racism and misogyny create vulnerability for people and holes in security, and more than almost anything in the pettiness and stupidity of criminals.
A lot of what people believe about crime and law enforcement is drawn from fiction intended to lionize the people involved in the latter as a line of work. Therefore, professional or just frequent criminals often need to be portrayed as geniuses to explain away the ineffectiveness of policing as a route to safety and security. For whatever it’s worth, calling someone “smart” or “stupid” is meaningless without context. That said, one thing you can always appreciate about Scorsese is that his films do not rely on mythologizing criminals as brilliant. They are often about the informal networks and agreements that hasten the victimization of the average person at the hands of abusers and manipulators. And those criminals have never looked less bright than they do here. Their success relies upon brutality, layers of corruption, civic complacency and complicity, and their own knowledge of one another’s trifling weaknesses. Conspiratorial mastermind Bill Hale does have some smarts to him, though – he knows how to ingratiate himself, how to carry himself, how to insinuate and insert himself. He is among the evilest characters I’ve seen De Niro play, reminding me very much of a combination of his characters in Goodfellas (James Conway) and The Good Shepherd (Bill Sullivan, a fictionalization of real-life OSS executive/CIA founder Wild Bill Donovan). Sullivan is instrumental in the creation of one of the most powerful and dangerous institutions in the history of the world, and comports himself as a kindly and generous old man. Jimmy Conway is a sharp and greedy hoodlum and a vulture. It makes sense that Eric Roth wrote both this film and The Good Shepherd (which De Niro directed).
To the point of Goodfellas, one of Scorsese’s most cited works, I want to note that one of my only problems with Capitalist Realism was that Mark Fisher grouped Goodfellas alongside The Godfather in contrast to The Sopranos in its depiction of mafia life reflecting wider trends in society and the market showing up in movies. Goodfellas was always about the façade inherent to the glamor and sophistication which the Godfather films demonstrate, although those films are as well about the contrivances at the heart of codes of honor among murderers and thieves. Goodfellas was always about that order falling apart, bucking under the greed that enabled them in the first place. The system built on murder and betrayal is bound to eat itself. Crime movies understand this and often so do movies about the government, about history, about the vast conspiracies underpinning our lives.
Another specter of Scorsese’s filmography I can feel here is Mean Streets, his first mafia film (by which I mean it features connected figures and made guys, not that it is about robbery and murder), starring Harvey Keitel as the nephew with the connected uncle. (De Niro costars, alongside Amy Robinson). That, too, is a movie about a man put in position to succeed financially by an uncle who is pushing him toward a quiet life provided by crime, though the uncle in that case does not approve of the woman our protagonist loves [or, besides the point of parallels, the friend weighing him down]. Killers of the Flower Moon is not mirroring Mean Streets, but you might hear a faint echo.
As Bill “King” Hale, De Niro wears riding goggles when he’s being driven around that cling to his face, suitably, like a bandit’s domino mask. It’s one of the film’s subtle comic moves and an unsubtle thematic cue. There is, beyond that, a robust level of gallows humor distilled from the absurdity of the wanton violence and disregard for humanity shown by these vicious, craven idiots. De Niro will almost definitely be in the running for best supporting actor alongside Robert Downey Jr. (Oppenheimer), Ryan Gosling (Barbie), and names presently slipping my mind. I’ve never heard him do an accent like this and, much though I recognize similarity with past characters, there is a unique vileness here.
DiCaprio is very good and exemplifies in this role the film’s turn away from glamor. While you must be pretty dense to miss how often Scorsese – alongside collaborators like Roth or his more frequent writing partner Paul Schrader, cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto (who also shot Barbie), with whom Scorsese also made The Irishman and The Wolf of Wall Street, the late composer Robbie Robertson, with whom he’s been working since the 1970s, and obviously Thelma Schoonmaker, his constant companion editor who’s been with him for most of his movies since 1967 – shows off the spectacles of wealth from organized crime for the sake of pulling back the curtain on it, the glamor has never felt so fabricated as here. I suppose in Gangs of New York (which also stars DiCaprio), the gangs of Five Points don’t seem so pretty, either and, in both cases, you can see Scorsese using the depravity or scarcity of the setting relative to modern America to make a point about the nation-state’s construction. But there’s something specific to the grit and grime of these people, and Ernest Burkhart, Mollie’s “coyote,” exemplifies it. He’s got a small bit of the same bullshitter’s vibe as Jordan Belfort, but operates on a lower level, as more of an underling; maybe shades of the same ambition in the shadow of legacy as Amsterdam Vallon, but you don’t root for Ernest as you might Amsterdam. This is a terrific performance in part because it shows a humility absent in the Belfort role especially, a willingness to be almost a bit player while leading an ensemble rather than a star turn even as he gets top billing.
The star of the film is Lily Gladstone, who I haven’t seen in enough movies to feel continuity or draw comparison with other performances; I mostly know her as Daniel’s mom from Reservation Dogs, where she does a great job performing gruffness and begrudging responsibility. She will also be in discussion as one of the best acting performances of the year; she has such a knowing face and plays stoniness and vulnerability with uncanny aptitude. She does marvelous work; she pulls such sympathetic anger from the audience in this film and is probably the biggest reason I want to go back and rewatch it. Gladstone as Mollie delivers such an apt and enticing representation of physical and emotional suffering, dignity while suffering indignities, of choosing love and losing trust, and feeling betrayal and knowing you’ve been lied to and you’re stuck and the walls are closing in because the person you’re supposed to be able to depend on most in life you can only depend on to hurt you.
Killers of the Flower Moon, you no doubt can ascertain, is a movie about white supremacy and Manifest Destiny and the combination of happy lies, uneasy truces, and flagrant acts of harm and wrongdoing which made it happen. The movie uses archival footage of the aftermath of the Greenwood Massacre/Tulsa Race Riot to relay that point, the newsreel a transparent and foreboding message for the viewers in the town cinema, fearing loss or indulging in their ill-gaining. The Ku Klux Klan makes an appearance, and we see the jockeying for power between racists of different stripes and organizations, as well as the gradients and spectra of race relations translated through false friendliness.
It's also a movie about disability, ableism, and medical ethics, as the vague label of “incompetent” is grafted to people so they can’t control their own wealth. The collective wealth distributed to people in trusts, which these boundlessly evil white men are trying to take as mercilessly as ever, is something that can be wrestled away via guardianship, portending the contemporary use of conservatorships. At the same time, we see how racial animus and greed – separately or together – can entice a physician to neglect their responsibility of care.
Killers of the Flower Moon is a lot of things, a well-made, pretty-to-look-at picture that succeeds in all technical aspects can also inspire cringe and grimace for what it represents. It’s a mirror for our souls and a reminder that the U.S. is built on lies and greed by thieves and murderers. People have despoiled the land, have betrayed the trust of its stewards, have taken what they could and suffered little in the way of consequence. The Indigenous people – Osage and otherwise – live on, though; they have not given up. Their resilience should inspire strength and bravery just as their mistreatment should inspire shame and calls for recompense. Killers of the Flower Moon can inspire that, can make me think in disjointed but connected ways about the bare sin underpinning every facet of our worlds, but after all it’s just a movie, and can’t fix anything on its own. Still, I’m grateful for another Scorsese masterpiece, and for real movies appearing in the cinema. We may yet get the prominent return of the courtroom drama and we need, no matter what, to remember all the time and deviousness it took to steal this land.