Killers of the Flower Moon, adapted from David Grann’s book of the same name by Scorsese and Eric Roth, started life with DiCaprio in White’s role and took on the shape of a detective story before DiCaprio posed to Scorsese whether or not this was the best way to tell this story. The thrust was subsequently moved into the house that Burkhart and Kyle shared, with him actively involved in murdering her family and she struggling to put the pieces together. This poses integral problems that the film has to solve, especially coming from Scorsese. He cannot make these racist murderers into the kind of carefree charmers who are funny in spite of their misdeeds, as so many Scorsese characters are. This is remedied by making Burkhart and Hale into bumbling lunkheads who only want what the Osage have because, as Burkhart says multiple times, he likes money. It’s just greed and resentment that someone other than them, meaning white men in general or they themselves, has something that they don’t. Everyone, including DiCaprio, is sallow or gaunt or jowly or otherwise unattractive, afflicted with cauliflower ears or milky eyes or some other carefully considered disfigurement. The rubes who failed film criticism 101 have long nagged at Scorsese with their confusing of depiction for endorsement, but here, it’s never been more clear how repugnant he finds these characters.
However, the complementary problem to how Scorsese depicts the murderers and plotters is in direct opposition to how they are viewed by their prey. By making Burkhart and Hale and everyone else so transparently venal and malicious, it becomes difficult to view the Kyles and all the Osage as anything other than fools who’ve taken these obviously venomous snakes into their community. In the period of the film, the Osage are some of the wealthiest people in the country, but their very recent history is plagued with broken treaties and double dealing in the same way as other, poorer tribes. They surely would have understood this as happening because they had something, land, that white people wanted. Now, the Osage have this vast oil income, so of course white people would want that to. There are feints towards the community’s growing paranoia, especially after the Tulsa Massacre in 1921 when a wealthy Black community, not unlike the Osage, were driven out and killed by mobs with the backing of the military. In those same tribal meetings to address this paranoia, there’s Hale to assert his loyalty and be applauded rather than viewed with suspicion.
The biggest test comes in the Burkhart house. Gladstone brings a lot to her character, from poise and dignity to grief and desperation. What she doesn’t bring is a convincing attraction to this man. Of all the men this woman might marry, white or Osage or whoever, it’s never apparent that she would pick him for any other reason than history requiring it. This again is the poles of the film at war with themselves, as any depiction of the Osage clashes with the inclusion of the murderers as primary characters. One cannot watch Burkhart get spanked with a Mason paddle by Hale and have anything but disdain towards this pathetic weakling. The film fails to overpower that vision of the character with how Mollie sees him. There is a thread in the film about how the Osage have turned away from their ancestral ways, providing a potential out in their relationship where perhaps marrying a white man is a source of cultural cachet. Drive the expensive car, have the expensive jewelry, pay a white husband’s allowance. However, one leaves Killers of the Flower Moon unclear how or why that gradual process ever happened. Did every Osage adopt white customs with all their money, or are there Osage with full bank accounts who live in the traditional way. What kind of conflict is there within the tribe about this, and is there a formalized process to reclaim the old ways and resist the new? There should be few unanswered questions in a 206 minute movie.
If the film left me frustrated, it does also awe on multiple occasions. These lengthy Scorsese epics are packed with material, such that some pieces are bound to land and land hard. No stranger to violence, this film contains some of the most disconcerting aftermath scenes that Scorsese’s ever filmed. Gladstone looks like she’s leaving her body in a few scenes of her having to bear witness to what befalls her family. Far away from the blood and gore, the most chilling frame of the film is the one that ends the masterful first trailer, where all of the conspirators are gathered in a dimly lit room, turning to face the camera as one. When the film does briefly turn into the crime procedural that was originally intended, the film moves and sings with the long-delayed satisfaction that comes with any kind of comeuppance or at least admittance of what happened here. Even if the film isn’t successful in all its aims, it ends on exactly the right note, recontextualizing much of its runtime and leaving the viewer feeling mournful and shattered. Killers of the Flower Moon cannot be the best-told version of this story, but if that version ever gets made, it’ll have a hard time topping that finale. B