Of all the virtuosic qualities of Killers of the Flower Moon, it’s the late Robbie Robertson’s score that might be the most memorable for me. Propelled by a slippery groove, like a snake sliding through the grass, the music has a rhythm that you can’t—or at least shouldn’t—trust.
Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio), a white World War I veteran looking to start a new life amidst an oil boom in 1920s Oklahoma, is described by another character at one point as a snake. But the woman he’s fallen in love with—Mollie (Lily Gladstone), a member of the Osage tribe whose land contains the oil deposits—says he looks more like a coyote. Mollie and Ernest make an unlikely couple, though not outrageously so in this strangely blended community. The wealthy Osage have mostly welcomed the white people who have come in pursuit of commerce, even to the point of intermarrying. But then a series of mysterious murders occur, all involving Osage victims. . .
Directed by Martin Scorsese, Killers of the Flower Moon is based on the David Grann nonfiction book of the same name, which detailed the eventual FBI investigation of the crimes. Aside from DiCaprio, the film also reunites the master filmmaker with Robert De Niro, who plays William “King” Hale. A neighboring businesman and rancher who presents himself as a generous benefactor to the Osage people, helping them to move, along with their wealth, into modernity, King also happens to be Ernest’s uncle. He’s thoroughly supportive of Ernest’s marriage to Mollie, though for reasons that have little to do with love and more to do with the headrights she holds to the land.
With a screenplay by Scorsese and Eric Roth, Killers spans many years and seasons, comings and goings, loyalties and betrayals. The narrative is not nearly as seamlessly constructed as Scorsese’s Goodfellas, which strikes me as the closest counterpart in his filmography. There, we were intimately familiar with the relationships and networks governing the lives of the mobsters at the film’s center, thanks in no small part to Ray Liotta’s voiceover narration. We get something like that here—a few instances of voiceover from Mollie—but some elements of Killers remain unclear, with jumps around in time adding to the slight confusion.
Even so, Scorsese and cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto manage cinematic flourishes that tell us everything we need to know in a particular moment. I think of a wedding scene in which King speaks a kind word of encouragement to an ailing Osage woman—in her native language, no less. Yet then the camera pulls back, up, and away to reveal that they’re in the midst of white celebrants dancing gleefully to white music; the movement marks King as a snake who has led an incursion into a garden. Later, Ernest stands in his bedroom during a critical instance of moral decision, while flames from an outside fire lick against the windows. Cutaway shots to silhouetted figures trying to beat down the fire in a field are so shimmeringly mesmerizing that they rival the locust-swarm sequence in Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven.
Ernest is a tricky character. Unlike Liotta’s Henry Hill in Goodfellas, who slid into a life of crime, Ernest seems split from the start (something captured by DiCaprio’s pinched, ballooning face, which resembles a bag of microwave popcorn swelling and threatening to burst). Ernest is genuinely desirous of a quiet, settled life with Mollie, yet he’s too dim and/or weak to establish one independent of the machinations of his uncle. DiCaprio delivers a figure of impotence and simmering rage. I love the quiet conversation he has with a rival (musician Jason Isbell) who insults him and then says he meant no offense. “No offense taken,” Ernest smilingly replies, quickly followed by a protracted, violence-tinged sniff. (Equally electric is a rare confrontation between King and Ernest, in which the older man sinisterly keeps repeating to the younger: “Settle down.”)
Still, it’s Gladstone’s performance that anchors Killers of the Flower Moon. While clearly communicating Mollie’s attraction to Ernest (“those blue eyes”), she also distinguishes Mollie as his opposite: serene, smart, rooted. Often bundled in a blanket of traditional Osage design (the costuming is by Jacqueline West), Mollie seems to float rather than walk. When a raging rainstorm interrupts one of their first dates and Ernest wants to yammer on, she tells him, “We need to be quiet for a while,” and helps him appreciate the power of the storm.
Alongside this serenity, though, Mollie’s eyes also hold a deep sadness; a combination of knowledge and grief. What is the exact nature of this knowledge, however? This is where the storytelling bumps mentioned earlier become a detriment in terms of character. Perhaps it’s due to shifts in the time frame that aren’t clearly communicated, but Mollie’s understanding of what’s happening to her family and her people changes almost from scene to scene. While we in the audience recognize King’s malevolence from the first moment we meet him (“Call me King, like you used to,” he tells Ernest), Mollie seems uncharacteristically fooled at times, even naive. This is also the case with Ernest, whose Mr. Hyde side eventually begins to slip poison, at King’s instruction, into Mollie’s insulin. When Mollie insists that only Ernest can give her the injections, is it because she is utterly blind to his deviousness (never mind that everyone else in the community seems to know he’s connected in some way to the murders) or is it because she wants to make him culpable in her suffering, to test how far he’s willing to go in his betrayal?
I wish Killers of the Flower Moon was clearer on this front. But the confusion likely comes from admirable ambition. The movie wants Mollie to be both a singular woman, suffering at the hands of a specific, historical case of white malice and greed, and a symbol for the native experience in the United States ever since white people first slithered, with the sinuousness of that Robertson bass line, onto the land. When Mollie asks Ernest near the end of the film, “Have you told all the truths?” she’s asking it both of him and a nation. It’s a question—in American life, and also in American movies—that hasn’t been asked nearly enough.
(10/18/2023)
