[Leonardo DiCaprio, Robert De Niro and Lily Gladstone star in this
macabre western about serial murders among the Osage tribe in 1920s
Oklahoma, which reflects the erasure of Native Americans from the US ]
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PORTSIDE CULTURE

KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON REVIEW – SCORSESE’S REMARKABLE EPIC
ABOUT THE BLOODY BIRTH OF AMERICA  
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Peter Bradshaw
May 20, 2023
The Guardian
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_ Leonardo DiCaprio, Robert De Niro and Lily Gladstone star in this
macabre western about serial murders among the Osage tribe in 1920s
Oklahoma, which reflects the erasure of Native Americans from the US _


Killers of the Flower Moon' Photos: Killers of the Flower Moon'
Photos: DiCaprio in Scorsese ..., World of Reel

 

Martin Scorsese’s western true-crime thriller is about the US’s
Osage murders of the early 1920s, based on the nonfiction bestseller
by David Grann
[[link removed]].
With co-writer Eric Roth, Scorsese crafts an epic of creeping,
existential horror about the birth of the American century, a macabre
tale of quasi-genocidal serial killings which mimic the larger erasure
of Native Americans from the US. It places in the drama’s foreground
a gaslit marriage of lies and poisoned love. It echoes Scorsese’s
earlier work about mob violence, mob loyalty and the final, inevitable
sellout to the federal authorities, whose own bad faith gradually
emerges. But in the end, this film is about what all westerns are
about, and perhaps all history: the brutal grab for land, resources
and power.

Lily Gladstone gives a performance of tragic force as Mollie Burkhart,
a Native American woman from the Osage tribe who, like all her people,
has become unexpectedly wealthy because the apparently stony and
unpromising land in Oklahoma on which the authorities allowed the
Osage to settle turned out to have huge reserves of oil. But they are
still subject to a racist and infantilising condition of
“guardianship”: to claim the income and spend it, Osage
individuals need a white co-signatory. And there is something else:
Mollie and her family are deeply disturbed by mysterious illnesses
which have been killing off Osage people, one by one. Later the bodies
of Osage murder-victims are found, including Mollie’s wayward sister
Anna (Cara Jade Myers), whose autopsy is bizarrely carried out in the
open air, at the crime scene itself.

Into this situation arrives a slippery, venal individual called
Ernest, played by Leonardo DiCaprio; an ambitious but also submissive
and fundamentally inadequate man: greedy, stupid and biddable. He has
returned to the US after service in the first world war, and comes to
the vast estate of his wealthy uncle, who has offered him a job
working alongside his hard-faced brother Bryan (pronounced
“By-ran”), played by Scott Shepherd, who has clearly been
extensively normalised in the violence and corruption over which the
uncle presides.

 
This cattleman-plutocrat is William Hale, played by Robert De Niro
[[link removed]], a man of calcified
resentment and self-importance who preens himself on his good
relations with the Osage people. Hale hires Ernest for a position as
his vague underling, courtier and dirty-work factotum, and encourages
him to date and also marry Mollie, whom Ernest has already met, which
would give him (and therefore Hale) a legal claim on Mollie’s
“headrights”, as her oil entitlements are known. And so Ernest and
Mollie’s doomed marriage commences, complicated by the terrible
fears of Mollie’s ailing mother, Lizzie Q (Tantoo Cardinal), who has
a quietly beautiful death scene. Mollie’s diabetes is also a factor;
it is made strangely worse by the medicine Hale has procured for her,
and which Ernest administers while always simpering and blubbing his
concern for her declining health.

When the situation becomes too bad for the federal authorities to
ignore, Washington DC sends an officer of its fledgling Bureau of
Investigations (later to be the FBI). This is Tom White, played by
Jesse Plemons. But Scorsese shows us the politics: the bureau’s
belated appearance appears to be, at least partly, a matter of
containing the difficult situation involving the white people and the
inescapably wealthy Osage peoples, and reinforcing federal control
over the new state of Oklahoma.

As performed by Gladstone and DiCaprio, the relationship between
Mollie and Ernest has a kind of spiritual nausea; Ernest is sincere
about his feelings for his wife, in his way, but they are part of a
context of bad faith and violence. His real relationship is of course
with his uncle, he is the beta to the older man’s alpha. Weirdly,
DiCaprio starts to look like DeNiro, like a dog resembling its master:
a younger, victim-villain version with the same gimlet-eyed fear and
hostility and the same rat-trap mouth with the corners turned down.
His uncle has inducted him into the Masons, and it is into the local
masonic hall, with all its regalia, that Hale leads the wretched
Ernest for a corporal punishment scene when the young man lets him
down – the most extraordinary corporal punishment I have seen
since Lindsay Anderson’s If…
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Hale’s rule, so avowedly caring and sensitive to the Osage, is in
fact creating a vast dysfunction of depression, alcoholism,
lawlessness, fatal illness and murder. Gladstone creates a persona for
Mollie that is flawed and self-reproachful, with some shame at having
collaborated with her persecutor. She has dignity and calm and rises
above the squalor all around her, but that calm is also the stricken
immobility of illness. And she knows that Ernest was never any good
but she was charmed and seduced by him all the same.

Scorsese presents a remarkable story, with an audacious framing device
of a briskly insensitive “true crime” radio show featuring Osage
characters crassly played by white actors. This is an utterly
absorbing film, a story that Scorsese sees as a secret history of
American power, a hidden violence epidemic polluting the water table
of humanity.

Killers of the Flower Moon screened at the Cannes film festival
[[link removed]].  Coming to
theaters in October,

 

* Film Review
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* Cannes Film Festival
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* Killers of the Flower Moon
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* Martin Scorsese
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* Leonardo DiCaprio
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* Robert De Niro
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* Native Americans
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* Period and historical films
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* Osage Tribe
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