New Frontiers — Killers of the Flower Moon review

A version of this appeared in The Scotsman.

It’s been 50 years since Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro’s breakthrough film Mean Streets, 21 since Scorsese’s first film with latter-day collaborator Leonardo DiCaprio (Gangs of New York), and 30 since DiCaprio’s own cinematic breakthrough, opposite De Niro, in This Boy’s Life. Flowers of the Killer Moon, though, marks the first time all three have worked together on the same feature and their shared history is palpable: not only does it tie together many of the thematic concerns Scorsese has explored with each actor — violence, loyalty, betrayal, avarice — it also riffs in subtle and intriguing ways on the evolving relationship between De Niro and DiCaprio as the premiere actors of their respective generations.

Set in the 1920s and based on David Grann’s non-fiction best-seller of the same name, Killers of the Flower Moon is also the 80-year-old Scorsese’s first western, though it’s not really a western in a traditional sense. Taking place 30 years after the frontier officially closed, it’s set at a time when all the fortune-seeking energy inherent in white America’s westward expansion had nowhere left to go, a time when the explicit genocidal impulses of the wild west became more insidious as a result. Grann’s book, first published in 2017, was a true-crime saga about the long-unsolved serial murders of Osage Native Americans in Osage County, Oklahoma, a reservation that turned out to have vast oil supplies beneath its barren, hard-scrabble soil. But the film is less concerned with the procedural elements of the story (or the attendant rise of the nascent FBI) than it is with the brazen, murderous conspiracy to defraud the already displaced Osage people of the economic windfall that made them — per the film’s opening titles —  “the richest people per capita on earth.”

In a telling prologue, Scorsese stages the initial discovery of so-called “black gold” in ominous terms by having jets of oil shoot out of the ground and rain down on members of an Osage tribe as they participate in a funeral ritual. Wealth and death intricately linked, the film cuts to the prospector town of Fairfax, Oklahoma several years on, with Scorsese using the contemporaneous language of silent cinema to draw attention to the strangeness of a place where the Osage ride chauffeur-driven cars, wear expensive watches and jewellery, and purchase traditional garments from white manufacturers desperate to capitalise on the boom in any way they can. White hucksters abound, of course, hiding their resentment behind false smiles, but also openly expressing it in Ku Klux Klan marches and in the way the government subjects the Osage people to a demeaning system of bureaucracy that requires them to have a white guardian co-sign and monitor the withdrawals they make against their bounteous oil rights — a system that has also made inter-racial marriage commonplace and rife for exploitation.

Already Scorsese is deconstructing the way movies have traditionally represented Native American culture on screen and he goes further by zeroing in on Lily Gladstone’s Mollie, a young Osage Nation woman whose family members are among those dying in mysterious and sometimes brutal fashion. Unmarried, she falls for her hired driver, Ernest Burkhart (DiCaprio), a somewhat feckless First World War veteran, newly arrived in Oklahoma from Europe to work for his uncle, William Hale (De Niro), a local rancher who likes to be known as “King”. Hale has spent years establishing connections with the Osage, learning their language, their customs and earning their trust as a sort of self-styled emissary for their cause, all the while plotting against them to gain control of their fortunes. In Ernest he’s found the perfect patsy, someone biddable enough to marry into wealth and do what’s necessary to secure the inheritable “headrights” of Mollie’s family for his kind.

That we’re party to these machinations as Ernest is making a play for Mollie makes Gladstone’s role trickier to play, more so because Ernest isn’t exactly a catch; with a mouthful of decaying teeth and a smile bordering on gormless, DiCaprio isn’t trading on his movie-star looks here. But love and marriage are complicated and Mollie, no fool, responds to what slivers of charm Ernest possesses. She’s certainly savvy enough to understand there’s an economic component to Ernest’s interest in her. “Coyote wants money” she teases early on, yet she also wants control of her own finances and she knows marriage to Ernest is a way to attain some degree of autonomy. Gladstone, who broke through in Kelly Reichardt’s Certain Women, infuses Mollie with quiet strength and intelligence, enough that her guileless nature confuses and destabilises Ernest, who loves her in his own way, but is also too spineless to reject Hale’s malevolent plan to take control of Mollie’s family fortune, first by preying on her sister’s alcoholism and Mollie’s diabetes, then by taking more extreme action, something that nudges the film into Goodfellas territory as DeNiro’s Hale shuts down external threats to his rule with the ruthlessness of Jimmy Conway in the aftermath of Lufthansa heist.

There’s a hint of Trumpian demagoguery in De Niro’s performance too — the faux man-of-the-people posturing, the narcissism, the weird punitive measures he takes against anyone with wavering loyalty (there’s a very strange scene in which he gives Ernest a Masonic spanking). DiCaprio, meanwhile, delivers a rigorously complex performance, Ernest’s spinelessness manifesting itself in the way he contorts his body and face more and more as his soul-rotting fidelity to Hale starts having a deleterious effect on Mollie. At times he consciously resembles De Niro, and their characters’ increasingly twisted relationship puts a creepy twist on the veteran/upstart dynamic of their early collaborations. But there’s something of James Cagney in DiCaprio’s middle-aged visage that seems oddly appropriate for a film that takes place just as the gangster film is about to emerge.

It almost goes without saying that cinema history looms large. Among other things Scorsese adds thematic texture via newsreel footage of the Tulsa Race riots and, in a later scene, we’re privy to the extraordinary sight of a Native American character watching an early western, dispassionately taking in the way his peoples’ own demise is already being mythologised. Perspective matters, in other words, and Scorsese structures the film accordingly, relegating the “Bureau of Investigation” agent who solved the murders to a minor supporting role in the final hour (he’s played by Jesse Plemons) in order to better expose the venality at the heart of the story without the distraction of a “white saviour” narrative. In this way it’s like Scorsese’s own answer to The Searchers, but where John Ford famously ended that opus with the comforting myth that the brutality, horror and hate John Wayne’s Ethan Edwards represented no longer had a place in America, Killers of the Flower Moon ends with a remarkable epilogue that acknowledges how easily these traits mutate and flourish in other guises. It’s an incredible feat of virtuosic filmmaking from an artist who, at 80, is still pushing the capabilities of the form at a time when too many people are writing cinema’s obituary.