Martin Scorsese’s Killers Of The Flower Moonwhich could very well have been titled ‘Once Upon A Time In America’, is many movies rolled into one: a Western, a true-crime thriller, a character study, all of which segue into a sprawling origin story of how a nation was born. And it is pure, pulsating cinema.
At 3.5 hours, it is quite properly an epic, drawing back to give us unending vistas of the Oklahoma of the 20s, a time and place when Native American settlers of the Osage County have become wealthy beyond imagination, with oil having been struck on their land. The film takes its time to recount the doings of the white conquerors—bounty-hunters streaming in to make their fortunes—whose boundless greed and mendacity finds fertile ground in this corner of America.
Based on David Grann’s book of the same name, Killers Of The Flower Moon, Scorsese teams two of his favourite leading men for the first time, and when you see Robert De Niro and Leonardo DiCaprio in the same frame, it’s hard to believe that they’ve never worked together. Both are terrific: the former as the rich landowner William Hale, whose kindly appearance hides his rancid ambition to seize more and more, and the latter as his money-grubbing nephew Ernest Burkhart, whose slow brain you can practically hear whirring every time he furrows his brow.
It’s hard to switch attention from these two, especially De Niro who hasn’t been as sprightly in a while now (the last time he appeared to be enjoying himself as much was in Scorsese’s own 2019 The Irishman), but this film belongs as much to the lovely Lily Gladstone who plays Mollie, an Osage woman of intelligence and beauty, who falls for the blue-eyed charm of Ernest even when she suspects him of being up to no good. It is a powerful, beguiling performance, which brings alive a good woman resigned to loving a man who is not all bad, but whose baser instincts will always win over his feeble noble impulses.
There is a definite cause to be suspicious, as a series of mysterious Osage deaths, some by violence and others by a strange ‘wasting illness’ come closer and closer home: Mollie’s mother and sisters pass away, and she is the one left with the ‘headrights’ ( the rights to the oil on her land). The ministrations of the overly-attentive Ernest, always at the ready with a bespoke injection for her diabetes (only a handful of Americans can afford the medicine), and Mollie’s descent into deathly sickliness make us wonder if she will come out alive.
Tensions rise with the arrival of the men from the Bureau of Investigation (later called the FBI), as they get down to serious investigation, and the noose starts to get tighter on the culprits. It’s not just the biddable Ernest, whom Hale schools painfully with a paddle in a stand-out scene, who is under his thumb. Several others sell their souls for a couple of measly bucks. As a character says with chilling cynicism that there is no punishment for killing an Osage, you are forced to remember the atrocities forced upon the Native Americans, but also the Blacks who helped build America.
The FBI, led by the sturdy Tom White (Jesse Plemmons), arrives only when the number of the deaths cannot be ignored. And even with all the evidence stacked against him, ‘King’ Hale is confident that he will go scot-free, even as his corrupt lawyer (Brendan Fraser) and the prosecuting attorney (John Lithgow) lock horns.
Scorsese shows up for a brief moment in the film’s craftily-executed climax, and you are aware that he has let you in not just on his mastery of the craft, but also his continuing engagement with the human condition in all its complex, many-splendored glory. Killers Of The Flower Moon is, quite simply, magnificent, well deserving of its 9 minute ovation which wrapped the premiere.