Separating the art from the ideologist in Killers of the Flower Moon
Graham Hillard
Given enough time, cinematic ideology ceases to matter. Who today, watching Marlon Brando seethe through On the Waterfront (1954), would ding the film’s callous portrayal of union officials? One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975) is affecting even in eras that practice institutionalization without apology. That the passing years sand the edges from political movies bodes well for Killers of the Flower Moon, a 3 1/2-hour land acknowledgment that is also a masterpiece of epic filmmaking. In 50 years, even conservatives will likely concede that it is among director Martin Scorsese’s greatest works.
That such an admission is not yet forthcoming is unsurprising given the film’s insipid racial handwringing. A dramatization of the “Indian murders” that roiled 1920s Oklahoma, Scorsese’s latest sees white Sooners as beasts deserving of judgment and Native Americans as their hapless prey. Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Kyle Smith duly condemns the movie’s “lambs vs. wolves characters” and “dirge-like” plot. National Review’s Armond White is no kinder, writing that the 80-year-old director can “no longer properly gauge any moral conflict.”
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Though not inaccurate, this fault-finding is beside the point, like complaining about the dearth of Canadians in the films of Andrei Tarkovsky. Of course Scorsese’s period drama is an exercise in “wokeness,” extorting weary agreement from an audience already primed to concur. The question is whether, on its own terms, Killers of the Flower Moon succeeds. It does, marvelously. Call it propaganda if you must. But don’t ignore this beautifully framed and acted saga of avarice unleashed.
Killers of the Flower Moon tells the story of Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio), a Great War veteran who settles in Oklahoma’s Osage Nation at the urging of his uncle, William K. Hale. Played by Robert De Niro in what is easily the actor’s best performance in decades, Hale is a figure of grinning malevolence, feigning friendship with the Natives even as he plots to bleed them dry. When, 20 years earlier, the tribe struck oil and became overnight “the richest people per capita on Earth,” a foul economy arose, with profiteers scrambling to upcharge the newly well-off. For Hale, however, a grander opportunity awaits than selling daguerreotypes at $40 a pop. A student of inheritance law, he understands that so-called headrights are transferable upon the holder’s death. Bundle enough shares, and the royalties will rain down like crude from a gusher.
Though the film’s marketing has been strangely silent on the point, Killers of the Flower Moon represents the first feature-length pairing of Scorsese’s longtime leading men. The result, while rarely electric, has the smoldering efficiency of a coal fire, with both actors settling in for the slow burn that the movie’s run time demands. As Burkhart, the lost soul at the story’s heart, DiCaprio captures both the pliancy of weak men and the capacity of even monsters to love. Menacingly serene, De Niro’s Hale seems to have comparatively little in the way of an inner life. Yet so technically masterful is the octogenarian’s work that I was reminded of his long-ago turn as Vito Corleone in The Godfather Part II — in my opinion, the finest acting ever captured on film.
Joining these Scorsese veterans is journeyman actress Lily Gladstone, who first impressed in Kelly Reichardt’s underwatched 2016 drama Certain Women. As Burkhart’s Native wife, Mollie, Gladstone is as warily watchful as a hawk, aware of her husband’s ill intentions but devoted to him all the same. Given Hollywood’s ideological priorities, Gladstone would have won plaudits for her performance regardless of its merit. Happily, her work is superb. A film that could have been a tale of two deadly men is instead a troika. The plot against Mollie and her kin is brutal, clever, and darkly fascinating. Her reaction to it gives the movie the moral complexity that its politics lack.
That conspiracy, designed by Hale and carried out by his obedient nephew, is as follows. New in town and possessed of a certain rough charm, Burkhart will choose from among the Osage girls for a wife. If she has siblings, all the better, as, one by one, they can be dispatched and their headrights transferred to her. The result of this scheme is a run of violence as cruelly intimate as anything in Goodfellas (1990) or Gangs of New York (2002), two Scorsese features in which bloodshed and betrayal rarely stray far from home. With every death in her immediate family, Mollie is at once richer and more exposed. If she is killed as well, then Burkhart will inherit everything, with a share presumably going to the rapacious Hale. But husband and wife clearly love each other. Not since The Last Temptation of Christ (1988) wed Mary Magdalene to Jesus has Scorsese conceived a marriage quite this peculiar.
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Among the director’s gifts has always been an utter mastery of pacing, perhaps the least celebrated of the cinematic virtues. Though Killers of the Flower Moon lacks the brio of, say, The Departed (2006), it is nevertheless exemplary in its movement, steadily tightening its grip as the minutes glide by. Helping immensely is the photography of Rodrigo Prieto (Brokeback Mountain, Argo), who may well be incapable of producing a bad shot. Yet this, too, is a Scorsese signature. Though the new film is far less flashy than the auteur’s mid-career work, its images have an unpolished authenticity that provides a cumulative power. The effect is mesmerizing rather than startling. Surely, this is what it must really have been like.
Or is it? Hanging over the director’s latest is the same grievance-mongering that has lately degraded not only America’s politics but our very sense of ourselves as a people. For viewers who are so inclined, a look at the violent crime rates on today’s reservations might be a useful corrective to the idea that white people are uniquely wicked. For others, the answer may be to absorb Scorsese’s narrative while paying no heed to his protagonists’ color. The film is, after all, a story of greed: inevitable, unquenchable, and soul-destroying when allowed to fester. What happened in Osage could have happened anywhere.
Graham Hillard is a Washington Examiner magazine contributing writer and editor at the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal.