‘Killers of the Flower Moon’ is another great American epic from Martin Scorsese

The film, adapted from the book by David Grann, explores an undertold story of exploitation and murder in 1920s Oklahoma.

Image: Apple Original Films

Killers of the Flower Moon is a more than three-hour movie, directed by Martin Scorsese, that is concerned largely with crime, murder, and moral complexity, with Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert DeNiro playing lead roles. 

You’ve seen all that from Scorsese before, but never quite like this. The tone is very different, and the pace is nothing like the frenetic motion of The Departed or The Wolf of Wall Street. The script, which the director co-wrote with Eric Roth, eschews the expository narration that marked Goodfellas, Casino, Wolf of Wall Street, and others of the director’s films. 

It also feels, much of the time, like a Western, having more in common, both visually and thematically, with Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood than most previous Scorsese movies.

It’s different, but it’s still great, and one of the best films of the year. 

Killers of the Flower Moon, coming to theaters this Friday and to Apple TV+ sometime later this year, is an adaptation of the book by David Grann, the New Yorker writer whose epic pieces are often turned into books, and subsequently movies. 

The movie version of Grann’s The Lost City of Z altered the book’s structure, to its detriment; I really think a movie going back and forth between the visits to the Amazon by Fawcett in the past and Grann in the present would have been better than what was made. 

In adapting Killers, Scorsese has altered the material as well, but in a better way, by shifting the emphasis. 

Grann’s book told a too-unexplored story of American outrage: In the early 20th century, the Osage tribe came upon immense oil wealth. Not long after that, a group of white people set about trying to steal it, in many cases through murder. What was once called the “Osage Indian murders” claimed more than 60 lives, mostly in the 1920s. 

The movie is about this, and while it sounds from the description like a hectoring liberal history lecture, it really isn’t that at all. The events took place around the same time as the Tulsa race massacre of 1921, and this is mentioned more than once. 

The book was subtitled “The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI,” and focused on both the murders themselves and the FBI investigation of them. The film, at one point, was going to do the same and even star DiCaprio as the main FBI agent. Instead, the FBI part is de-emphasized, and the top FBI man (played by Jesse Plemons) doesn’t even show up on screen until the two-hour mark.

The film may not really be about the “birth of the FBI,” but it’s certainly about the start of their penchant — previously seen in Goodfellas — to strongarm criminals into snitching on one another. Its third act, and that of Goodfellas, have more than one plot beat in common. 

Instead, the film keeps the action almost entirely in Osage County, where it was shot on location, with a 1920s version of the town built in astonishing detail by Scorsese and production designer Dante Ferretti. (EDIT: As has been pointed out to me by reader John Robinson, while Ferretti was listed as the film’s production designer when it was first announced, Jack Fisk is credited with that role.)

There’s also a wonderful but very nontraditional score, inspired by Native American music and supervised by the director’s old friend Robbie Robertson, prior to his death earlier this year. 

Killers of the Flower Moon sets the scene with Ernest Burkhart (DiCaprio) arriving in Osage Country, fresh off wounds from World War I, to work for his uncle “King” William Hale (De Niro), a local political boss type. The town is the Osage Nation’s territory, and members of that tribe keep winding up mysteriously dead. 

Many of those Osage were married to white men, and indeed, Mollie (Lilly Gladstone) ends up marrying Leo’s Ernest. 

The headline, as it were, is that Killers of the Flower Moon is the first time Scorsese has cast his two main actorly muses, De Niro and DiCaprio, in the same film.  De Niro was the primary actor in the first half of Scorsese’s career, and DiCaprio in the second half, but this is their first time together with the director, although the two men did appear together in the non-Scorsese film This Boy’s Life, back when Leo was a kid.

The actors are fantastic in their scenes together, but they’re also very good separately. De Niro, who like the director is 80 years old, is wonderfully fearsome as the boss character, in a part that recalls his Jimmy Conway from Goodfellas more than 30 years ago. It’s De Niro’s best turn on screen in years, and this time he’s no longer encumbered by the de-aging tech from The Irishman.

Image: Apple Original Film

As for DiCaprio, it’s a very different sort of performance. He comes across, at least at first, as dimwitted but affable, but it’s later clear that he’s capable of terrible horrors. 

But it’s Lily Gladstone who walks away with the film. It seems at first like she’s just going to suffer, in one way or another, for three hours, but the character emerges with some quiet dignity. She’s been outstanding in a lot of different projects, including Kelly Reichardt’s Certain Women and First Cow, and the TV shows Billions and Reservation Dogs. 

There are also plenty of familiar faces, playing minor criminal henchmen, many of them played by musicians like Jason Isabel and Sturgill Simpson, while others are character actors like Louis Cancelmi, Scott Shepherd, and Pat Healy. Brendan Fraser, in a small role as a lawyer, has about six lines, and he screams five of them at the top of his lungs. 

The film also takes a huge and unconventional narrative swing at the end, which not everyone is going to like, but I very much did. 

With Scorsese now 80, and taking an average of four or five years to make each of his recent movies, we don’t know how many more of these we’re going to get. (With that Jerry Garcia biopic presumably on the back burner, he’s allegedly next going to tackle another Grann book, The Wager.) But in the sixth decade of his career, Scorsese remains at the top of his game.