"Killers of the Flower Moon" is One of the Best Movies of the Decade
You ought to see it, despite its runtime, and here's why
Midway through Martin Scorsese’s new movie about American betrayal, the very-long “Killers of the Flower Moon,” we find a surprising topic injected into it.
The Osage Indians circa the 1920s, particularly women, suffer badly from Type-2 diabetes. And yet they are rich from having rights to land that has vast quantities of oil. That allows the main character, Osage-Indian Molly Burkart, to afford a new drug: insulin. “It’s made from cow pancreas,” the doctor says, wowing everyone. Molly’s just one of five people in the world to try this experimental drug.
And then her husband, the lower-IQ, white-American goober Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio) starts injecting her with it. The doctors balk! Patients shouldn’t inject themselves with insulin.
As Burkhart does this over a period of weeks, Scorsese goes right to one of the classics, the 1950s noir “The Night of the Hunter,” in which a predatory psychopath disguised as a pastor marries a woman, only to slowly make her life hell, to put it mildly. That movie is quoted in scenes between Byron and Mollie, with triangular ceiling bearing down on poor Mollie in the bed.
I’m starting this way because this movie, “Killers of the Flower Moon,” isn’t just another Goodfellas set in Oklahoma, as some have argued, although that would make it an excellent movie.
Instead, it’s a nuanced, ultra-complex entertainment that tells a gripping story that refers to dozens of other films, plus America, past and present.
And by doing so, Scorsese, at his ripe old age, has created one of his greatest works of art.
This art focuses on betrayal, which I think comes indirectly at least from Dante’s Divine Comedy, a literary well that Scorsese seems to dip into every time he makes a film-story. Often, his movies are either Inferno-like (e.g. Taxi Driver; Raging Bull), or Purgatorial (After Hours; Bringing Out the Dead).
“Killers” represents the worst sins of all, and as such it ends up in the lowest levels of hell, the circles of fraud, where seducers, liars, thieves, flatterers, and traitors enact the ultimate fragmentation of society that their horrific sins caused on Earth.
Those are the kinds of characters Scorsese fixates on in “Killers,” largely white men who are either dumb or wise snakes, all predatory. They are drawn to the richest place per-capita in the world, Osage Nation in 1920s Oklahoma, which the opening scenes liken to the most bustling, wealthiest main streets in the US. Whereever there’s wealth, Scorsese tells us, there are deadly human beings lurking.
On that street, Byron Burkhart starts to drive a car — a rather obvious Taxi-Driver reference — and chauffeurs rich Osages around in it, as if he’s the 1920s version of an Uber-driver. He’s just returned from WW1, and he’s working for his uncle, William Hale, aka the “King” (Robert DeNiro), a cattle-rancher who charitably flaunts his wealth and demands loyalty to the family.
If you’ve seen a Scorsese movie, you know what this means. Hale’s a great villain, and DeNiro’s performance is outstanding. What he does is as disgusting as any human being I can imagine could do, or as Dante imagined: he’s taking out Osage Indians strategically so that he can concentrate oil rights into the hands he wants to put them in. Which would be, as is very likely, himself — in the end.
That also means his victims, through the work of a host of dumb minions, turn out to be Osage women. Their defenses ought to be high, because of the very long history between whites and Indians, but perhaps their wealth has brought those defenses down. It’s only when the murders start happening, at least in the film, when the Osage worry over the white infiltrators on their land and in their marriage beds.
The center of all this is Mollie Burkhart, the main Osage female in the movie, who takes that last name because she marries Byron. The first 30 minutes show their courtship and marriage. Byron seems to love her, but DiCaprio’s look indicates he’s a conniving goober. We’ve also seen his uncle suggest marriage to Molly. Why? Likely, land rights. What’s he planning, though?
The stage in this movie is set for Byron to make terrible moral choices. Which he does, worse than nearly anybody you can think of in any Scorsese movie.
I haven’t seen a character quite like this, not one that carried a 210-minute movie. He’s below-average on any intelligence test, yet you can sympathize with him, yet you hate him for being disgustingly immoral and maintaining pig-headed loyalty to his uncle. Normally these kinds of heroes are smart, not stupid. Byron certainly isn’t smart enough to pull off any of his uncle’s plans without making a dumb mistake.
DiCaprio is one of the great stars today and forever: he looks here a bit like middle-aged Marlon Brando, his cheeks and upper lip protruding a bit like Brando’s in The Godfather, and he pulls off a complex performance that will be watchable forever.
And it’s the same with his co-star, Lily Gladstone, who playing Mollie Burkhart ends up with a character who suffers more horrible things than I can remember any major character in any movie suffering.
Scorsese is so good that he anticipates our emotions towards these characters, in an epilogue that wittily comments on his own movie and any True-Crime podcast you’ve ever heard. There he reads the obituary of the real Mollie Burkhart, pointing out perhaps that the entire movie is really her story.
And because it’s her story, and she represents her people, it’s their story.
Thus, Scorsese blends about thirty topics, including the odd ones: diabetes and insulin; insurance-fraud schemes; the rise and good uses of the FBI; the aftermath of WW1; greed in America; how and why wealth corrupts; the question of consanguinity for native peoples; psychopathy; family loyalty, and so on.
He does this while being as technically remarkable as he’s ever been.
The score by the late Robbie Robertson is perfect. As well, his casting directors deserve big bonuses. They find the ideal people to play all the roles, including Gladstone and all of the native and Osage actors. I can’t remember a movie that knocked it out of the park so well with actors in bit parts. Every face is fascinating and loved by the camera, for being beautiful, odd, or both.
Only Sergio Leone and the Coens have done as well in the Western genre. But, arguably, “Killers” is three genres in one, just as it blends thirty topics into a unique artistic vision of this period of time.
The story of the Osage may well be an American story. I prefer to think it’s a universal example as well: a people-group that gets rich, gets infiltrated, and gets so screwed that, in a sense, a minor genocide occurs. It all seems to take the work of a psychopath, the DeNiro character, and a host of idiot minions whose greed can be used to do anything the ringleader wants. And all for what?
Turns out, with his body of work, Scorsese is one of the great Roman-Catholic moralists, at least on the horrific and widespread effects of the worst sins.
This is not just one of the year’s best movies; it is one of the decade’s best.