After half a century as America’s most universally revered director, it was perhaps inevitable that Martin Scorsese would eventually get around to that most foundational genre in American cinema, the western. Set in early 1920s Oklahoma, Killers of the Flower Moon is not quite a cowboy film, but it does tick most of the relevant boxes with its frontier oil-town setting, cattle ranchers, ten-gallon hats and guns for hire. Most importantly, it is also firmly rooted in homicidal land battles between white settlers and Native Americans. There will be blood.
Backed by Apple studios, Killers of the Flower Moon is Scorsese’s first feature since his Netflix gangster epic The Irishman (2019). Sprawling beyond three-and-a-half hours, it is built on a similarly monumental scale, and features many of the same cast members. But where that nostalgic true-crime saga had moral complexity, historic sweep and stylistic brio, this leaden long-haul plodder seems to get bogged down early in lumbering plot, windy dialogue and scenery-chewing performances.
If your idea of a fun movie is watching Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro competing to out-grimace each other like constipated toads for almost four hours, mostly while wearing over-sized stetson hats, then boy are you in luck. For the rest of us, Killing of the Flower Moon feels like a clunky late-career disappointment from a generally reliable master film-maker. A hot-ticket world premiere at the Cannes film festival this week, it is heading for a Paramount theatrical release in October, with an Apple streaming date to follow.
Based on the 2017 non-fiction best-seller by New Yorker writer David Grann, Killers of the Flower Moon revisits a series of real murders that took place in Osage County, Oklahoma, in the early 1920s. The victims were newly wealthy Osage Nation tribe members who had recently won the legal rights to profit from oil deposits found on their land, which inevitably made them powerful and cunning enemies. Leonardo DiCaprio plays Ernest Burkhart, a slow-witted World War I veteran who returns to Oklahoma to work for his uncle, cattle rancher William “King” Hall (De Niro). A local business tycoon and community champion, Hall is well-loved by his Osage neighbours, and even speaks their language fluently.
At Hall’s encouragement, Ernest courts and marries a sickly but smart Osage woman, Mollie (Lily Gladstone). But he is quickly caught up in murky plots and twisted loyalties. This corner of Oklahoma, it transpires, is full of predators and grifters scheming to exploit the tribe’s newfound prosperity. At their most harmless, these racist scams involve massively overcharging Native American customers for goods and services. At their worst, white men are marrying Osage Nation women purely to kill them and inherit their oil rights. As the body count mounts up, local law enforcement seem unable or unwilling to investigate. Eventually, an exasperated group of Osage elders take matters into their own hands, heading to Washington DC to summon a team of agents from the newly formed FBI led by Tom White (Jesse Plemons).
Unlike The Irishman, which famously allotted only a few lines of dialogue to a single minor female character, Killers of the Flower Moon at least features three-dimensional women protagonists with strong voices. The relatively unknown Gladstone, who has Blackfeet and Nimíipuu heritage, is a luminous screen presence here, her sardonic aura and ambivalent Mona Lisa smile effortlessly conveying emotional depths that DiCaprio’s steam-belching, face-pulling, testosterone-heavy performance cannot reach.
Besides seven-time collaborator DiCaprio and eleven-time leading man De Niro, Killers of the Flower Moon also features a reliable team of Scorsese regulars, including editing legend Thelma Schoonmaker and music supervisor Robbie Robertson. Ace Mexican lensman Rodrigo Prieto, who previously worked with the director on The Wolf of Wall Street (2013) and The Irishman, mostly paints in muted amber, sepia and earth tones here. Scorsese himself co-authored the screenplay with seasoned scribe Eric Roth, whose credits include Forrest Gump (1994) and Dune (2021), though the Roth project this film most closely resembles is The Good Shepherd (2006), De Niro’s airless and lumbering history of the CIA.
In fairness, Killers of the Flower Moon boasts impeccable period production design, respectful and fascinating depictions of Osage culture, plus a rich period-specific jukebox soundtrack of vintage blues, folk and country. The final courtroom section also picks up the pace a little, with its brief but perky appearances by Brendan Fraser and John Lithgow. A smattering of silent-era screen titles and pastiche monochrome newsreel clips are pleasing but underused stylistic devices, while a final wrap-up scene uses a retro radio broadcast format complete with winking cameos by musician Jack White and Scorsese himself. More of these playful, witty, slightly meta flourishes would have enlivened a very long film that mostly feels starchy, flabby and resondingly low on humour.
Most strikingly, for a murder thriller, Killers of the Flower Moon is fatally lacking in dread or suspense. Even with a densely detailed screenplay that carefully honours the Native American cultural elements, racial politics and female victims of these horrendous crimes, Scorsese has ultimately delivered yet another brawny, swaggering, masculinist take on American history, where permanently grimacing white men in sharply tailored suits drive shiny vintage automobiles and threaten each other with lethal violence. In other words, all is present and correct in the Scorsese Cinematic Universe. But America’s greatest living director has already told multiple versions of this story many times before, in much better films than this.
Director: Martin Scorsese
Screenwriters: Eric Roth and Martin Scorsese, based on Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI by David Grann
Cast: Leonardo DiCaprio, Robert De Niro, Lily Gladstone, Jesse Plemons, Brendan Fraser, John Lithgow, Cara Jade Myers, JaNae Collins, Jillian Dion, Jason Isbell, William Belleau, Louis Cancelmi, Scott Shepherd
Cinematography: Rodrigo Prieto
Editing: Thelma Schoonmaker
Music: Robbie Robertson
Producers: Dan Friedkin, Emma Tillinger Koskoff, Martin Scorsese, Bradley Thomas
Production companies: Apple Studios (US), Imperative Entertainment (US), Sikelia Productions (US), Appian Way Productions (US)
Venue: Cannes Film Festival (out of competition)
In English, Osage
206 minutes
