Killers Of The Flower Moon: An Inoffensive Document Of A Race Massacre
When it’s all over, the story of America will be that we were both the cops and the robbers. The terrorists and the resistance. The perpetrators of mass atrocities and the clean-up crew. The drug dealers and the detoxifiers.
These are the types of stories Martin Scorsese has been interested in telling for his whole career and are the central ideas at the heart of his newest opus, Killers Of The Flower Moon, based on the best-selling book of the same name by David Grann. The film, which has been in various stages of production for the past seven years, stars Leonardo DiCaprio in his sixth Scorsese-directed feature. He plays Ernest Burkhart, who, upon returning to the U.S. after fighting in WW1, seeks employment under his uncle, William King Hale, played by Robert DeNiro.
Burkhart is the physical manifestation of the modern-day neo-liberal American; he likes money, he doesn’t see race, and he can see both sides of any issue. And, most importantly, he’s extremely amenable, ready to lie down and obey any direction given, even if it’s to poison his own wife.
Oh, but make sure the audience knows he’s conflicted about doing it.
His uncle, William, owns an oil field, which has become the source of massive wealth for the Osage Native Americans, who were corralled into living on that black-gold-soaked land. Soon after settling in, Earnest meets Mollie Burkhart, played exquisitely by Lily Gladstone, a Native American of Blackfeet heritage, in her first major leading acting role. Soon after wooing each other, Mollie’s family members begin dying off; some of what’s referred to at the time as a ‘wasting disease’, some of gunshot wounds to the back of the head, colloquially known as a ‘suicide’, some of more natural causes such as a house being blown to smithereens.
The source of these deaths is obvious to anyone with an ounce of understanding of white supremacy; someone with a skin tone a shade darker than an Italian is generating what could potentially be generational wealth. Not on our watch. Didn’t you know? Wealth, power, and exploitative labor practices aren’t for you. The phrase “You didn’t earn this, you didn’t work for any of the things you have” is repeated over and over to many of the members of the Osage community by the white residents.
Yes. They. Fucking. Did.
They ‘earned’ it when they’re entire fucking race was almost wiped out by murderous, rapist colonizers. Call it reparations, call it luck, call it whatever you want but they were more than owed what they were given.
The film itself is very, very long. Coming in at almost 3 and a half hours this is Scorsese’s second longest movie, only 3 minutes shorter than his last film, 2019’s The Irishman. That film, financed and distributed by Netflix, cost upwards of somewhere between $159–$250 million. What’s a couple million dollars between friends?
By contrast, Killers Of The Flower Moon comes in at a reportedly flat $200 million. Evidently, the costs of the de-aging of DeNiro and others in The Irishmen was what pushed the budget into the quarter of a billion-dollar range. God only knows what the reason was for the similar price point of Killers. For the most part, the film looks grand, the sweeping and circling camera flourishes certainly denote a large Hollywood budget.
But $200 million dollars big? Not so much.
The pacing and editing style, brought to us again by legendary editor and frequent Scorsese collaborator Thelma Schoonmaker, is just as finely tuned, relaxed, and unassuming as we’ve expected from the director’s most recent work. Almost every scene has moments where the length of the cut allows for the viewer’s eye to roam around the screen, taking in every meticulously crafted nook and cranny.
Here, we have another reason to heap praise upon Gladstone’s performance, as long takes can sometimes be intimidating for inexperienced actors. The ability to fall back on shorter takes means that mistakes can more easily be glossed over, while a longer take will lay bare any weaknesses in one’s arsenal. As of now, it appears that Gladstone has none.
On a scene-to-scene basis the editing of Killers works most of the time, while on the whole, the movie does feel quite shaggy. In an alternate dimension where runtimes were not known, it might not have been noticeable. But, going into the film knowing full well we’d be in a theater chair, no matter how comfortable, for 206 minutes every scene that felt even the slightest bit drawn out was much more noticeable.
The script of Killers, co-written by Eric Roth and Scorsese, is mostly fine. Where it falls apart is the tone. Scorsese loves to infuse his dialogue with flourishes of humor, while dark and only briefly seen it still sticks out like a sore thumb existing alongside a deeply serious story. Some might welcome a chance to catch one’s breath while wallowing in the misery of the thing, while others would counter that that is the point.
That the people who commit unspeakable, heinous crimes deserve to be ridiculed, and making them look buffoonish removes the mystique that they may have generated. To me, breaking the tension with humor only reinforces the belief many people have that these atrocities can never be portrayed with the seriousness and accuracy they deserve when presented as entertainment. When we tell stories about acts of brutality they innately must end with some semblance of justice, lest the audience feel bad.
But it’s not justice. The Osage people have lived with the events of this story, and Tusla for what it’s worth, for almost a century. And the best we can do is to take their pain, take their suffering, take their murders, take their rapes, and their oppression and package it, smooth over the rough edges, make the whites look good, and call that justice.
It’s not justice, it’s entertainment. Maybe that’s the best we can ever expect.
