Of all the films premiering at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, you’d be hard-pressed to find one as hotly anticipated as Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon. It's been seven years since the project was announced with the legendary director and his frequent collaborator Leonardo DiCaprio attached – enough time that for a while, it seemed like the film would never happen. In the interim, we were gifted with The Irishman and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, but on a rainy Saturday in May, Scorsese, DiCaprio, Lily Gladstone and Robert De Niro finally walked the red carpet together, announcing the arrival of a devastating western covering one of the darkest chapters in American history.
Based on David Grann’s non-fiction book of the same name, the film focuses on a series of Native American murders which took place over a period of 13 years in Oklahoma, in which members of the Osage Nation were killed by white Americans in order to seize their oil-rich land. For years the suspicious deaths were ignored by the authorities despite pleas from the Osage people for assistance, until in 1925 the Bureau of Investigation – the precursor to the FBI – sent agent Tom White to look into the killings.
This might sound like familiar ground for Scorsese, whose filmography has focussed on quintessential American true crime stories including Goodfellas, Gangs of New York, The Wolf of Wall Street and The Irishman. And yet, despite a continued fascination with tales of greed and morality that make America what it is today, Scorsese has always found a way to innovate and change the register in which he operates. Killers of the Flower Moon is no different in that regard, adopting a much more sombre pace – one that emphasises the insidiousness of the murders, and more widely the violence inflicted on indigenous communities by their colonisers.
In his seventh collaboration with Scorsese, DiCaprio plays Ernest Burkhart, a former infantry cook who returns from the First World War to Oklahoma, where his affluent cattle farming uncle William ‘King’ Hale (a magnificent, malevolent Robert De Niro) takes him under his wing. “I love money,” Ernest tells William unabashedly – a statement that soon becomes a threat, as the pair scheme to acquire the money and land rights of a local Osage family of women. After Ernest worms his way into the affections of Mollie Kyle (a luminous Lily Gladstone), it’s only a matter of eliminating everyone else who might have a claim to her fortune, and Scorsese depicts Hale and Burkhart’s cold-blooded schemes with a scalpel-sharp precision.
There is no stylised shootout or pithy narration in Killers of the Flower Moon. For his 26th dramatic feature, Scorsese opts for a style which feels reminiscent of his work on Silence but novel at the same time – he expertly captures the erosion of a community by covert white violence, all but sanctioned by an indifferent government that had already enforced strict rules on Native Americans that limited their access to their own money. Gladstone is the film’s heart, a woman slowly erased by her supposedly doting husband – she possesses a tremendous poise and quiet fury, while Cara Jade Myers, who plays her rebellious sister Anna provides a tragic foil. But among the domesticity of Killers of the Flower Moon, there are moments of brutal violence – a stark reminder that what was wrought on the Osage nation – and countless other indigenous communities across America – was mass murder. Hale and Burkhart were just the ones who got caught.
This might not be the film that most audiences might expect from Scorsese, but at this stage in his career, it’s thrilling to see the master filmmaker continue to innovate and deliver the unexpected. In an interview with Deadline, he lamented his age, and remarked that “Kurosawa, [...] said, ‘I’m only now beginning to see the possibility of what cinema could be, and it’s too late.’ He was 83. At the time, I said, ‘What does he mean?’ Now I know what he means.” Throughout his career Scorsese has depicted the beauty and the bloodshed that made America what it is today. In Killers of the Flower Moon he continues this lifelong study with crystal clarity. The film’s stunning final scene, in which Scorsese pulls in an unlikely framing device, makes the audience complicit and speaks to the sale of genocide as mass entertainment. It’s a quiet but furious film, and rightly so. This is our history, and the blood doesn’t wash off.
