Martin Scorsese never made a movie like Killers of the Flower Moon

During a career full of successes, the director Martin Scorsese he used gangsters, especially those connected to the mafia, as a medium to talk about America. In the rhythm of blows and bursts of blood of Those good guys you hate Casino there is a simulacrum of the country’s greed, its manic excess, its history of violence. Despite having made other types of films, Scorsese has repeatedly returned to the fringes of crime, seemingly unable to break free from the allure of America’s dark economy.

With The Irishman of 2019 , it felt like Scorsese was coming full circle, drawing a portrait of a gangster towards the end. But for his next act, the director has simply gone further back in time to examine yet another organized brutality. With Killers of the Flower Moon, which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, Scorsese adapts the non-fiction bestseller by David Grann, chronicling the Osage murders in 1920s Oklahoma. Over the course of three and a half hours, Scorsese maps a profound injustice, adding another piece to his great collage of a nation’s cruelty.

Leonardo Dicaprio plays Ernest Burkhart, a simple-minded World War I veteran who has arrived in Osage County to work for his uncle, William Hale, a wealthy and respected rancher played with creeping sliminess by Robert DeNiro. Hale isn’t into the oil business, but he’s surrounded by its wealth. The Osage found oil beneath their land and gained access to much of the profits. Their homeland is one of the wealthiest places in the world, with its residents cruising around in luxury cars, decked out in furs and jewels to and from well-appointed homes.

The Osage oil boom was a rare instance where Native Americans found themselves in control of the resources, which obviously was a problem for many of the whites who came to the county to work in the oil fields. Their barely clandestine efforts to steal this wealth of the natives are laid bare in Killers of the Flower Moon, perhaps Scorsese’s most tragic and condemnable film.

Ernest meets a wealthy Osage woman, Mollie Kyle, who draws his attention for her serene beauty and playfully cool demeanor. The woman is played by Lily Gladstone in a performance of quiet, yet vigorous, dignity; Mollie is, in a sense, the heroine of the film, even as she is sidelined by both natural and man-made diseases. Killers of the Flower Moon suggests genuine affection between Mollie and Ernest, tainted by his clan’s rapacious predation. The film follows the systematic dehumanization of Mollie, her family and her community, as they are killed one by one with guns, poison and bombs as their oil rights are transferred to whites, often the husbands of Osage women.

It is essentially a genocide in miniature, through which Scorsese addresses the much larger issue of the uprooting of Native Americans. Unlike his other mafia films, Killers of the Flower Moon he is never exalted by violence. Some scenes have a propulsive energy, but the film is often solemn and thoughtful like Silence, Scorsese’s whispered epic about extreme faith. However, in the end, the film speaks volumes about the long horror of colonialism, its horrific extent and downfall.

In its considerable length, Killers of the Flower Moon it’s a bit twisty. Plot points come without preamble and then float away only to be found again much later. The characters enter and leave the picture. There’s a sinister bashfulness to the film, an implication of something terrible and unseen that hangs at the edges of every scene. It’s an appropriate technique for a film about a series of murders that went largely uninvestigated for an embarrassingly long period. Sometimes, however, it is difficult to understand the film. The viewer is kept at a certain distance: there is no in-depth study of the character of Ernest, nor of William, no psychological or social explanation.

And maybe that’s the point. The insensitivity of these crimes, the moral ease with which they were committed, perhaps this is the best and most appropriate way to frame them. Killers of the Flower Moon, in the final analysis, is not about Ernest Burkhart or William Hale, but about an American model, a creepy practice innate in the country. You don’t need to know these men inside out to understand what and who they represent.

More time could be spent with Mollie and her family. Mollie is ultimately bedridden—sick with diabetes and addicted to the drugs given to her by the doctors hired by Ernest and William—and so it’s understandable that she backs away from her action. But I longed to know more about her in the opening moments of the film and about her sisters, two of whom were killed. For all the episodic rambling of Killers of the Flower Moon, not enough space is given to the restitution of a palpable personality to people so inexorably robbed.

Scorsese’s film is nonetheless effectively shocking, a grueling delineation of events that gracefully avoids the melodrama and sensationalism of many true crimes. Gladstone deftly holds up the soul of the film, while DiCaprio and De Niro damningly illustrate the nice-guy affability that masks so much prejudice and stinginess.( Also Jesse Plemons is a comforting and competent presence in the role of a fledgling FBI investigator). Those who walk into a Martin Scorsese film looking for the electric verve of many of his previous films may be initially disappointed. But when Killers of the Flower Moon it gets to the heart, shakes it, makes it resonate and haunts it.

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