Photo © Paramount Pictures
De Niro and DiCaprio in 'Killers of the Flower Moon'
Robert De Niro and Leonardo DiCaprio in ‘Killers of the Flower Moon’
For a few years in the 1920s, members of Oklahoma’s Osage Nation were wealthy. Like citizens of a Persian Gulf oil emirate, tribal members received proceeds from the wealth discovered beneath their feet, albeit the Osage were given “guardians” to oversee their bank accounts. Nonetheless, as Martin Scorsese’s new film asserts, many Osage drove expensive cars, when they weren’t chauffeured, at least until their good fortune brought them death.
Scorsese based Killers of the Flower Moon on the book of that name, an investigation by the New Yorker’s David Grann. Flower Moon concerns an overlooked chapter of American history, not the old storybook version but a chain of events that unfolded alongside the rise of the Ku Klux Klan and white urban race riots. Scorsese references the 1921 Tulsa Massacre in a newsreel viewed impassively by the story’s criminal kingpin, William King Hale (Robert De Niro), a rancher-tycoon whose influence extends across the white and indigenous communities in and around Osage Nation.
Hale poses as a friend to the Native Americans; he speaks Osage and knows something of their ways. Perhaps on some level he respects their past but like most Americans of the era, he believes they have no future. Hale greets his nephew Ernest (Leonardo DiCaprio) with avuncular affability as he shows him the ropes in “Indian country.” “Most fellows out here are crooked,” he tells Ernest. “If you’re going to make trouble, make it big—get a good payoff!”
Insidious Scheme
The outlines of Hale’s insidious scheme become visible soon enough. He directs a vast conspiracy to murder Native Americans, sometimes to collect insurance, often through complicated pots to gain control of oil rights. Hale encourages Ernest to marry one of the reservation’s wealthiest women, Mollie (Lily Gladstone). As Mollie’s sisters die under mysterious circumstances, leaving her their oil assets, Ernest stands to inherit an increasingly large fortune—especially if Mollie, a diabetic, doesn’t survive.
Ernest’s character development is abrupt and unclear—an argument against Scorsese’s decision to condense a complex story into a three-hour-plus feature film and in favor of producing Flower Moon as (an even lengthier) series for streaming. Ernest needs more screen time. He arrives in Oklahoma after service in World War I, damaged physically and perhaps psychologically, but seems entirely fit in the next scene. It’s not clear if he was slowly drawn into his Mephistophelian uncle’s web of murder and exploitation, or if he was ready to kill from the get-go. Despite this, both DiCaprio and De Niro give memorable performances as fully lived characters, dangerous men who calculate the value of human life in dollars and cents.
Milk-faced Jesse Plemons, best known as the mild-mannered killer in “Breaking Bad” and spin-offs, plays a supporting role in Flower Moon—as a good guy! He’s a federal agent leading a task force investigating the raft of suspicious deaths on the reservation. In Flower Moon, Mollie journeys to Washington for a brief audience with Pres. Calvin Coolidge. Coolidge liked to be photographed with Native American chiefs and liked to think of himself as the Great White Father. He put novice crime buster J. Edgar Hoover on the case.
Scorsese’s bravura direction istands out in several scenes, including a long tracking shot through the rambling interior of a family home, the eyes of children peering through the slats of a hogan, the erupting geyser of oil covering bystanders in a sticky black shower. The historical settings appear physical, not virtual; Scorsese recreates black and white newsreel footage and photo studio portraits of Osage families.
The screenplay is metaphysically rich with the warnings of omens unheeded by the Osage and the misappropriated biblical poetry of Hale’s pronouncements. One anachronism: the Osage’s principal chief speaks of his people’s plight as “genocide”—true enough, yet the word genocide wasn’t coined until 20 years after the events depicted. As always, Scorsese is attentive to ritual—the Osage practice their traditional ceremonies alongside the Latin mass performed by a Roman Catholic priest. Robbie Robertson, descended from the Canadian First Nations, finished the original score months only before his death.
