Killers of the Flower Moon (Martin Scorsese, 2023)

Once upon a time in America

(Warning: story and finale discussed in explicit detail)

Martin Scorsese's Killers of the Flower Moon is three and a half hours long-- deal with it. Folks complain when a film's runtime ticks past the hundred minute mark or its pacing slows to a deliberate crawl; they seem to want more of the standard-issue Disney/Marvel fare either sequel or prequel or reboot with regular helpings of superpowered action, the usual cast of likable characters, the ironclad promise of state-of-the-art digitals. Amusement park rides, Scorsese once called them as opposed to cinema, and he isn't far wrong: even the twists and turns of plot are comfortingly familiar, recycled ad nauseam. Scorsese likes to challenge the status quo: his films, to paraphrase Harlan Ellison, are steak to be chewed thoroughly and digested-- not tapioca pudding that can be gummed without effort. 

"O you mean like Oppenheimer"-- bite your tongue. Oppenheimer was a slog because it was two different films rammed together-- a chronicle of the making of the atom bomb and a legal thriller investigating Oppenheimer's life-- which Nolan failed to integrate in any coherent way. If on occasion you get lost among the characters and incidents in Scorsese's massive production you at least have a clear emotional throughline to help draw you along while you orient yourself. 

Maybe the most surprising thing about the film is that for all its supposed seriousness-- Osage tribals are dying or being murdered for their 'head rights,' their share of profits from oil pumped out of their land-- there's a thread of black comedy running through the film. The eponymous 'killers' aren't faceless all-powerful conspirators but recognizably fallible thugs who put their heads together, talk through a plan, screw it up mightily, scramble to make things right. What's miraculous isn't that their plot is found out, what's miraculous is that they managed to make it work so long without anyone the wiser. 

Which raises the question: what is the film, anyway? Folks have compared it to everything from a Western to the latest iteration of Alfred Hitchcock's own slow-burning Notorious; I like to think it's the latest to deal with a theme found in much of Scorsese's filmography, from Mean Streets to Raging Bull to Goodfellas to Casino to The Wolf of Wall Street to The Irishman: a gang of toxic males gathered together to either raise hell or make profit-- preferably both-- while headed their heedless way to damnation.  

It's also a horror story. David Grann's nonfiction novel (haven't read it) reportedly followed the murders and the later investigation into the murders by the newly minted FBI. Scorsese (with a screenplay by Eric Roth) shifts focus to a central couple in the story: one Mollie Burkhart (Lily Gladstone) and her husband Ernest (Leonardo DiCaprio). Their marriage at first glance looks like a straightforward case of husband gaslighting and poisoning his wife only the kicker is that Ernest seems to really love Mollie; holds genuine affection for her. Mollie-- in an extraordinary performance by Lily Gladstone-- doesn't come off as stupid; she can see right away that Ernest is a gold-digger, and is mostly entertaining him because he 'looks nice.' She's sharp, she's aware, and still she's drawn into the literally toxic relationship eyes wide open and you want to ask: why? Why would this smart young woman who could have literally anyone around pick him for a husband?

Part of the answer lies I think in DiCaprio's aptly named Ernest: because he's so obvious. Because he's so transparently unintelligent. Because at some level and at some point in their relationship Mollie realizes that Ernest has fallen for her and comes to trust his feelings for her, not realizing the truly perverse nature of that love. Scorsese I submit has remarkable powers of empathy or if not is capable of making films that suggest remarkable empathy for the opposite sex and for other cultures (The Age of Innocence; Kundun; Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore) and his handling of Mollie seems preternaturally precise. You're with Mollie every step of her way, even up to the moment when she begins to realize she's been deceived-- and she's actively collaborated in her own deception.

Helps that said marriage and relationship is a deftly danced two-hander: DiCaprio (like that other Hollywood star Brad Pitt) isn't the most sophisticated of actors but (like Pitt) he shows some skill for comedy. Critics cite his literally mugging for the camera, with a bulldog set to his chin; pretty much the same expression I saw when he starred in Tarantino's Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (with Brad Pitt!) but where there I found him tedious here he's endlessly funny. Scorsese has assembled a rogues' gallery of dim bulbs over the course of his gangster-riddled filmmaking career but Ernest's seems of an especially low wattage; he even ends up being paddled by his boss Willie 'King' Hale (Robert De Niro), in a scene Scorsese and Roth added (it was not in Grann's book) that may or may not be an elaborate tribute to This Boy's Life, where a much younger DiCaprio submitted to corporal punishment from a similarly brutal De Niro. 

Speaking of De Niro's Hale... if Mollie couldn't be fooled if there wasn't an element of truth to Ernest's love for her, the Osage couldn't be misled if Hale merely looked upon them as marks and victims. Hale really loved the Osage, I submit; he loved them the same time he was killing them, and it was this love that allowed him to get close enough to do it (the deft little epilogue Scorsese stages suggests as much, as when all is said and done Hale insisted he was still a friend of the tribe). Don't know if Scorsese really understands women, or people of other races, but like Dostoevsky I believe he knows his monsters, knows that the most horrifying thing about these monsters is how human they are, perfectly capable of deceiving themselves as they are of deceiving others. 

I'll call it, even if I'm being disappointingly uncontrary: one of the best of the year, and one of Scorsese's better films.