Killers of the Flower Moon

 Killers of the Flower Moon (2023) is, when considered as individual sequences, as it were,  shot-by- pristine shot immaculately edited together, pretty much perfect.  Scorsese's mastery of the film medium is complete -- there's no daylight between his intent and what you see on the screen.  Some people claim Scorsese's Silence is a perfect film; I think this is very close to true -- but Silence with its dire imagery of martyrdom and its last couple reels rife with betrayal is also an experience that I have no desire to repeat.  I have a similar initial impression of Killers of the Flower Moon:  this massive chronicle of cruelty and greed climaxing in the villains betraying one another is perfectly realized in its parts, but the whole is less than the sum of those parts.  Catastrophically over-long and almost wholly joyless, the movie is a martyrdom -- you don't enjoy the thing, you endure it.  

As everyone knows, Scorsese's adaptation of David Grann's nonfiction bestseller depicts a complex criminal enterprise perpetrated by a White plutocrat on the hapless Osage Indians in a place called Fairfax, Oklahoma.  The Osage have become accidental millionaires -- their reservation sits astride a huge and productive oil field.  Set immediately after World War One, the movie's narrative involves a dim-witted veteran played by Leonardo di Caprio who returns home to Oklahoma and immediately becomes a pawn in the criminal scheme plotted by his uncle, William "King" Hale (Robert de Niro), a rancher who, simply  put, personifies evil.  "King" Hale purports to be a friend to the Osage native people and he speaks their language fluently; he seems respectful to their traditions and courteous to their women and elders.  But this is all an act.  Hale is a vicious manipulator whose unctuous solicitude for the Osage masks his contempt for them and hatred.  Hale is at the center of a plot to murder the Osage, primarily by poisoning them, so that he can steal their "head rights" -- that is, their legal rights to drill for oil over the vast reservoirs of the black gold under the land.  Scorsese has never been a subtle film maker -- he makes his points directly and without ambiguity and the Manichean plot of Killers of the Flower Moon is surprisingly simple, a grim morality tale expressed in stark terms of unblemished good and hellish evil. (At one point, a raging prairie fire makes scenes appear to be occurring in Hades themselves.)  It's this simplicity of concept that robs the film of any internal development:  Di Caprio's character (named Ernest) and de Niro's monstrous crime boss are totally, unreservedly evil -- within the film's first forty minutes, Ernest has been wholly corrupted by "King" Hale, a figure who has elements of Shakespeare's Iago and Richard the Third; poor Ernest has nowhere to go but down and so down he goes.  I was startled to hear dialogue within the film's first 45 minutes (and the movie has three hours to go when this dialogue is spoken) in which both the villains admit their perfidy and openly plot to murder innocent women.  By contrast, the Osage are hapless victims, variants on a theme in American films and literature that has been pernicious in its own right -- entirely lacking in agency, the Indians are noble but helpless, incapable of mounting any resistance to the predatory schemes of the White villains.  It's  only when a White FBI man begins investigating that the worm turns and the bad guys are brought to justice.  Scorsese is clearly a bit non-plussed by the turn that the film takes -- the standard White savior appears to rescue the Indians who are being systematically murdered -- and so he installs in his story a handsome and resolute Osage native cop to assist Jesse Plemons, surely the whitest of all white actors, playing the G-Man.  But the Indian part is underwritten to the point of non-existence -- the warrior looks great but doesn't really do anything.  

The film is devised in three broad acts.  In the first part of the film, Ernest arrives in Fairfax a (literally) brawling boom-town.  His evil uncle encourages his to court a handsome Indian woman, Molly Kyle (Lily Gladstone).  Molly's mother is alive and Molly has an ex-husband, said to be a "melancholiac" and two sisters, Rita (married to White man) and Minnie, a rebellious heavy-drinking party-girl.  Many members of the tribe are dying from a mysterious "wasting disease", apparently the effects of systematic poisoning by the greedy White ranchers and townspeople.  Ernest, who is dimwitted and barely literate (we see him puzzling out words in a book about the Osage Indians) woos Molly and, for reasons that are inscrutable, wins her hand in marriage.  (The impression that the viewer has is that Molly is interested in the dismally unattractive and ignorant Ernest because the role is played by Leonardo di Caprio, an actor who ordinarily is shown to be attractive -- in this film, Ernest is fat and belligerent and scowls all the time screwing up his face into a frown that makes him look like Edward G. Robinson.  The audience is aligned with Molly's two sisters who can't figure out what she sees in the wretched schlemihl -- they say he looks like a snake; Molly thinks he's a more attractive critter, a coyote.)  The best parts of the movie are the vigorous scene-setting in the Oklahoma boom town and its adjacent prairies and the courtship scenes between Ernest and Molly -- there's one particularly imposing sequence in which Molly and Ernest drink whiskey while a storm advances on Molly's very nice home (the Indians have White servants and live in respectable frame houses with very expensive automobiles).  Molly, who respects the spirits in the tempest, tells Ernest to just shut-up and, for a few moments, a serene calm descends on the picture.  The film's second act involves Hale and Ernest commissioning various henchmen to murder the Indians in the line of succession to the oil "head rights" owned by Molly's family.  A number of people are assassinated in brief, brutal sequences that would not be out of place in Scorsese's various gangster pictures, most notably Goodfellas and Casino and The Irishman.  There are many killings shown in the movie, so many, in fact, that one assassination in this part of the film, confused me -- two hoodlums stick a sack over someone's head and knife the guy to death.  At first, I thought this was the detective hired by Molly to investigate the murders, but this guy turns up dead much later with his head bashed in and, so, I never figured out who this victim was or why he was killed.  Molly's alcoholic sister is shot in the head; there's a gruesome sequence in which her rotting body is found (Molly has to identify the decomposing corpse) and, then, there's a strange and hideous plein-air autopsy conducted at the murder site.  Molly's ex-husband, Roan, who has tried to kill himself in the past, is murdered on a country lane -- the moronic assassin shoots him the back of the head and runs off with the gun; he's been expressly told to shoot the guy in the face and leave the gun to make the death look like a suicide.  There are a few moments of humor when "King" Hale berates the murderer for not knowing the front of a man's head  from the back -- this is just about the only humorous touch in the three-hours and forty minutes comprising the movie.  Rita and her husband are blown to bits with dynamite planted under their home.  A little later, Hale steps on the severed hand of the couple's Irish maid who was also blown up in the murderous attack.  And, as this parade of horrors is graphically depicted, poor Molly is slowly and laboriously dying from poison that is injected into her belly with the insulin used to treat her diabetes; Ernest, who professes to love her, taints the insulin himself with some kind of morphine and, then, administers the injections himself.  The last act of the film involves the Indians petitioning the Federal government for assistance with respect to the spate of killings -- there's an interesting council scene in which the tribal leaders observe that in the good old days they would have gone on the warpath to avenge all the killings, but now they're reduced to asking for help from the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the president, Calvin Coolidge, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation.  An industrious G-man is sent to solve the murders on the reservation and, here, the movie swerves into a commentary, it seems, on Trump's legal problems. By this point, Hale has over-played his hand; like the protagonist of Goodfellas, "King" Hale is so reflexively crooked that he tries to collect life insurance money on one of his victims and is rebuked.  By this time, the Feds are investigating. The G-man's strategy is to persuade the various low-life assassins and henchmen to rat out their bosses.  Various attempts are made at witness-tampering and the minions are threatened with murder themselves but, one by one, they turn State's evidence resulting in successful prosecutions of the villains.  This part of the movie resembles the last section of Goodfellas -- the logic of the criminal enterprise requires the mobsters to turn on one another and start assassinating snitches; by the end of the movie, the bad guys are assiduously killing one another.  Molly's poisoning has been discovered and she is restored to some semblance of health.  Implausibly, she seems to believe that Ernest wasn't really culpable for all the mayhem around here and implausibly attempt a reconciliation with him.  But, when their child, a little girl, dies of the whooping cough (seemingly a natural death), she realizes that Ernest is beyond redemption.  In his jail cell next to the fearsome "King" Hale, Ernest says that, at least, he courted Molly and won her by his own efforts -- that is, he claims to have exercised free will in choosing the woman and marrying her.  But the viewers know this isn't true.  At all times, Ernest was merely a cat's paw for the vicious "King" Hale and we have seen that he encouraged Ernest's interest in the Osage woman.  The film ends with a sort of coda.  Some time in the late forties, it seems, a radio show is broadcasting an account of the Osage murders, once, apparently, a well-known subject in pop culture.  This last sequence allows Scorsese to explain what happened the characters after their trials and imprisonment.  (Scorsese appears in a cameo reading the obituary for Molly who has died of diabetes.  The obituary doesn't mention her role in the killings on the Osage reservation and this elision stands for the country moving on from the story and, in effect, erasing it until David Grann's 2017 book.  A final shot shows an Osage drum circle, apparently in the present day, with the camera soaring overhead to reveal colorful native dancers rotating around the big drum -- the image is of a giant, animated flower with its petals open to the sun.  The ending is quite moving, although I think this is in large part due to the grandiose ambition and dimensions of this movie and the viewer's mixture of awe and relief at the film finally ending.  

The movie is way too long and filled with gratuitous episodes.  For instance, during the extended trial scenes (rendered laughable by cameo appearances by Brendan Frasier and John Lithgow), Scorsese inserts a brutal murder scene, a flashback to the killing the drunken Minnie.  This is effective but totally unnecessary -- just another gangland slaying committed by two inept assassins.  There's a very brutal B film noir from 1955. The Phenix City Story, about a corrupt Alabama town and a bunch of killings committed by greedy crime-lords in that town -- the movie in general structure and emotional effect runs parallel to Killers of the Flower Moon and has some similar racial components:  some of the killings are engineered by the Ku Klux Klan who also make a brief appearance in the Scorsese movie; however The Phenix City Story is about 80 minutes long, very effective, and makes pretty much all the points contained within Killers of the Flower Moon's almost four-hour running time.  The camera work in Killers of the Flower Moon is impeccable; but Scorsese has to just keep repeating his set-ups and typical shots.  Generally, he films colloquies between conspirators with a telephoto lens with foreground action intermittently passing before the figures who are talking.  (He does this about six times in the movie).  His standard dialogue sequence is cut into a large talking head occupying one half of the wide-screen with the other participant in the dialogue at the other side of the screen but filmed out of focus.  There are impressive wide-screen landscapes of the prairie, spectacularly mounted crime scenes, and, in the film's last act, groups of solemn men conferring in darkness, Rembrandt lighting with figures faces appearing pale as "petals on wet black bough."  With only a few exceptions, the acting is brilliant although completely one-dimensional -- the villains are really villainous; the good guys seem impeccably good.  The late, great Robbie Robertson designed the soundtrack and its mostly marvelous -- although in the film's long mid-section and last act, Robertson, who was dying, seems to run out of steam; the score reverts to a single pulsing drumbeat..  As in Spike Lee's movies, there's an insistent undertone of music that generally cuts against the grain of the on-screen action -- Lee uses Terence Blanchard's jazz, inflected with accents of Aaron Copland to give his movies an expansive sense of continuous flowing melody; Robertson's counterpoint to the sinister activity on screen is mostly spooky sounding Delta Blues and hillbilly gospel music, a soundtrack that ironically comments on the murderous imagery on screen. The film's design and period details are brilliantly imagined; for instance, there is a reference to the Tulsa race riots and the natives in Fairfax hang strings of lights in front of their modest houses to ward off attack; in one scene, there's a parade in which the Indian mothers of World War One veterans march in a procession that includes the local Ku Klux Klan.  The scenes are tangible, crisply imagined and staged in physically palpable space, and there's nothing out of place -- and, equally, nothing that seems startling or unpredictable once the film's premises are established.  The natives have visions -- a scary owl haunts the dying and Molly's mother dies in a scene in which her ancestors escort her from her deathbed into a luminous glowing landscape where a small stream glistens in the autumnal light.  

Scorsese is 80 years old and a very serious man.  He bears the entire history of motion pictures as the art of painting with light on his slender and elderly shoulders.  He doesn't seem to have had too much fun making Killers of the Flower Moon.  Most of the film is material that he's done before to better effect in earlier movies -- interminable sequences of Robert De Niro in close conversation with Leonardo di Caprio are reminiscent of the director's earlier and more entertaining movies.  In earlier pictures, Scorsese's criminals were energetic rogues who seemed to enjoy the mayhem they inflicted on each o ther and the law-abiding public -- the gangsters in Goodfellas, for instance, seem to be having a dandy good time as they blithely murder and terrorize one another.  There's a troubling geriatric aspect to Killers of the Flower Moon, something also apparent in the equally cumbersome The Irishman.  Moviemaking is hard work and Scorsese makes you feel the labor and tedious effort that goes into making an epic like this.  I have no doubt that episodes of Killers of the Flower Moon are brilliantly designed and directed and, even, powerfully gripping.  But, after watching this movie, and arguing with it, for almost four hours, I felt physically drained and exhausted.  A half day after watching the film, I was dispirited -- the exercise in depravity and "preversion" as King calls it was so intense and immersive that I had become depressed, "melancholic" as the film would have it, myself.