Killers of the Flower Moon

A screenwriter associate of mine recently said that Martin Scorsese is bad at storytelling. By this, he meant that the director of Goodfellas and Casino is more interested in character and incident than he is in narrative structure. His films are often more collages than they are linear progressions, and sometimes they overstay their welcome (Shutter Island being an excellent episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents dragged out mercilessly over two hours). In epic crime film Killers of the Flower Moon, he creates possibly his most straightforward story structure since since 2011's Hugo by recounting seemingly every moment of a slow-rolling atrocity.

This accounts for the monumental runtime – but that's a determined decision, not a flaw, one intended to fill the audience with a sense of fury at a crime initially indulged and ultimately barely punished. Under a brooding score by longtime musical collaborator Robbie Robertson (one of many returning Scorsese regulars), he lays out a true crime tale of race, greed, and betrayal.

The victims were the wealthiest members of the small community of Fairfax: members of the Osage tribe, forced off of their lands in Kansas by the federal government and on to the barren scrub of Oklahoma, only to strike it rich when they found oil. In the late 1910s and early 1920s they became the target of petty criminals and stickup men, but worse and more insidiously by William King Hale, played by De Niro. In his 11th Scorsese performance, he gives fetid and villainous life to the respected cattle rancher. Publicly he was the Osage's best friend among the white men, speaking their language, respecting their ways, but he is quickly revealed as genocide reshaped in a suit and offering a handshake. His scheme was simple: Murder the Osage in the right order, and their share of the oil money – the headrights – finally pools and flows the right way, right to Hale. Core in his scheme is his nephew, Ernest Burkhart (DiCaprio), who he not-so-subtly pushes toward Mollie Kyle (Gladstone, The Unknown Country. Certain Women), part of the oil-rich Osage Kyle family.

At the center of events is Burkhart, and DiCaprio finds the limits of this greedy dullard. He's a dupe, yes, never quite seeing the inevitable destination of this path of violence: But he's also a willing co-conspirator and a stick-up man. Chin out, lips pursed like he's trying to cover up an underbite, DiCaprio gives him a little hint of De Niro in the face, but it's his inner life that is most incisive and intriguing. The methodical pacing of Killers of the Flower Moon allows more than simply a glimpse into his contradictory impulses: that he can hire someone to kill sisters-in-law while still loving his wife while also poisoning her at Hale's behest. Equally, Gladstone – in expressing Mollie's grief, rage, and powerlessness – gives insight into why this woman stays with a man who is increasingly and clearly part of a barbarous conspiracy. If anything, her performance gives credence to complaints that The Irishman turned its women characters into nothing more than character beats for the men: Mollie's story is never subsumed by Ernest but instead she is a constant counterbalance. There's no inadvertent romanticizing of the horrors here, but instead despair and fury, alleviated by a slow and doubting sigh of relief when the Feds (embodied in a subtle performance by Plemmons) arrive.

Still, in that extensive run time Killers of the Flower Moon suffers from some odd digressions. Scorsese occasionally plays fast-and-loose with facts that seem almost irrelevant, like Burkhart's military career, and leaves a few dangling threads, like a brief appearance by the Ku Klux Klan. Moreover, in a film that is so dedicated to avoiding all the pitfalls of "othering" its Osage subjects he still can't quite resist a couple of implications of the old "Magical Native American" trope.

Yet even with those minor flaws, Killers of the Flower Moon is a monumental achievement for Scorsese, who brings his peerless ability to deconstruct criminal enterprises to a topic other than the mob (a subject that, contrary to foolish criticism, he does not glamorize but with which he is definitely enamored). After the facile mysticism of Silence, the tone-deaf anti-union cant of The Irishman and the self-indulgent cutesiness of Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story By Martin Scorsese, Killers of the Flower Moon feels like the work of a filmmaker who is doing more than just ticking off boxes on a decades-old wish list.