Killers of the Flower Moon (REVIEW) | Projector @ LFF | A 3 1/2 hour howl of pain and betrayal
[Ad - Sponsored by Entertainment Earth] Martin Scorsese takes on a under-told American tragedy in this reteaming of his muses Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro, that left Film Brain conflicted and disturbed.
Transcript
00:00 This video is sponsored by Entertainment Earth.
00:02 Hello and welcome to Projector at the London Film Festival.
00:05 And on this episode, Martin Scorsese re-teams
00:08 with Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro
00:11 for the adaptation of "Killers of the Flower Moon."
00:14 (gentle music)
00:16 (film projector whirring)
00:25 (gentle music)
00:28 Forced to move into a reservation in Oklahoma,
00:33 the Osage nation becomes rich
00:34 when oil is discovered on their land,
00:36 attracting many to their money.
00:38 Ernest Burkhart, player Leonardo DiCaprio,
00:41 returns from World War I to the ranch
00:43 owned by his uncle, William King Hale,
00:45 player of Robert De Niro,
00:46 who strongly encouraged him to marry an Osage woman
00:49 to obtain the head rights to the oil
00:51 and maintain their wealth.
00:52 Ernest romances and marries Molly Kyle,
00:55 player Lily Gladstone,
00:56 and under his uncle's instruction,
00:58 begins a long campaign of murder and intrigue
01:01 in Molly's family to obtain more head rights,
01:04 eventually attracting the attention
01:05 of the recently formed FBI.
01:08 "Killers of the Flower Moon"
01:09 is based on David Graham's 2017 book of the same name.
01:12 And Martin Scorsese has been trying to bring it
01:14 to the screen for quite a few years now,
01:16 having previously bought the film rights to the book
01:18 back in 2016 before it was even published.
01:21 But Scorsese was struggling
01:22 with finding the right viewpoint for the material,
01:25 and he eventually realized during lockdown
01:27 that his script was from totally the wrong perspective.
01:30 The original incarnation of "Killers of the Flower Moon"
01:33 focused specifically on the FBI,
01:35 or the Bureau of Investigation,
01:36 as it was known in that point in time,
01:38 and especially the character of Thomas Bruce White Sr.,
01:42 who in the film is played by Jesse Plemons,
01:44 and is a much smaller part.
01:46 Originally, it was going to be the central protagonist,
01:48 the one played by DiCaprio.
01:51 But Scorsese eventually realized
01:53 that what he really needed to do to tell the story right
01:56 and to do it justice was actually tell it from the inside,
02:00 tell it from the perspective of the people,
02:02 and especially that of the Osage,
02:05 and thus reworked the script completely.
02:08 So the FBI are largely characters
02:10 that appear in the third act of the movie,
02:13 and instead it really focuses on the crimes
02:16 and what happened in Osage country.
02:19 However, because of this reworking,
02:20 the budget massively inflated,
02:22 and Paramount bulked at the cost of it,
02:25 similar to what happened with "The Irishman,"
02:26 where Paramount also bulked,
02:28 but Netflix swooped in and saved it.
02:31 Enter in Apple, who eventually acquired the project,
02:35 and ironically ended up forming a distribution deal
02:39 with Paramount to release it theatrically,
02:41 because Scorsese is, of course,
02:43 a proud advocate of the cinema experience.
02:46 So Paramount is releasing it theatrically,
02:49 but largely it's a window
02:51 for when it's going to be released on Apple TV+
02:54 in the future.
02:55 But the question is whether or not
02:57 that three and a half hour running time is justified,
03:01 and I would say, yes, it very much is.
03:05 And a lot has been said about the fact
03:07 that "Killers of the Flower Moon"
03:08 is a very, very long movie,
03:11 but Scorsese is taking his time,
03:13 creating a portrait of two different cultures.
03:16 On the one hand, you have the Osage,
03:19 who were moved onto the reservation in Oklahoma,
03:22 but then became rich when oil was discovered on their land,
03:27 making them wealthy overnight.
03:30 But that didn't mean that they became respected.
03:32 In fact, far from it.
03:34 It just became the latest chapter
03:35 in America's terrible treatment of its indigenous peoples,
03:39 in that they were declared legally incompetent
03:42 and required guardians over the money accrued from that oil.
03:48 But Scorsese depicts the Osage as being a proud people,
03:52 strong in their culture and traditions,
03:55 and trying to incorporate that as much as possible.
03:58 A recurring element through the film is owls,
04:01 who appear as specters of death all throughout the movie.
04:05 But also, Scorsese uses a lot of the Osage language
04:09 in the film.
04:10 Characters often switch conversations
04:12 between English and Osage, often interchangeably,
04:17 and that just shows the mixing of the cultures
04:20 that was happening in Oklahoma.
04:22 Scorsese, given his own limitations
04:24 of not being an indigenous person,
04:26 I think he has done as much as he can possibly do
04:30 in terms of representing that culture
04:33 and that particular viewpoint in the story
04:36 that he has created out of this material.
04:40 And on the other hand,
04:40 you've got the white Americans that came to Oklahoma
04:43 when oil was discovered,
04:45 knowing that there was money to be made,
04:47 just a new gold rush all over again,
04:50 just naked, unabashed greed.
04:54 And Scorsese trains an unflinching lens on all of it
04:58 and focuses upon it and makes us realize
05:02 that the community that existed in Oklahoma
05:04 largely did so to bilk the Osage community
05:08 through a variety of different means.
05:11 It was just normalized and commonplace.
05:13 A good example of this is a scene
05:15 where Ernest takes a storekeeper aside and asks him,
05:19 "You're not charging me those Indian rates, are you?"
05:22 Referring to the fact that the prices for indigenous peoples
05:25 were massively inflated
05:28 because they knew that the Osage could pay for it.
05:31 And the storekeeper tries to justify himself going,
05:34 "Well, I'm a businessman.
05:37 "I am the one that's actually working.
05:39 "I'm the one making money,"
05:41 as if his business didn't exist off the back of extortion.
05:46 And that's on the mild end of the scale
05:48 because to these people,
05:49 the lives of the Osage were far less
05:51 than the money that can be gleaned out of them,
05:54 even after death.
05:56 And so it's no surprise that when the Osage start dying
06:00 in very obviously homicidal circumstances,
06:05 a blind eye was taken to it
06:07 for an exceptionally long period of time.
06:11 The movie opens with a series of dead Osage people
06:15 in very suspicious circumstances,
06:18 culminating in a shocking moment of a mother being killed,
06:23 which is just simply assumed to be self-inflicted,
06:27 even though we've seen the evidence
06:29 that it is very blatantly not.
06:31 And it's here where we meet DiCaprio's Ernest,
06:33 having come to Oklahoma after returning from the war.
06:37 And during his earliest scenes in the movie,
06:39 Ernest serves as something of an audience surrogate
06:42 in that he's learning about the Osage people,
06:45 and we learn through him,
06:47 be it through conversations with other characters
06:50 or reading about it in books.
06:52 And over the course of the movie,
06:53 you can see Ernest become more familiar
06:56 with the culture and hierarchy
06:59 and the kind of dynamics that in this community,
07:02 he understands how to switch between the two worlds
07:06 and actually does learn the Osage language.
07:10 He starts out not understanding one word of it,
07:12 and then later in the movie,
07:14 he's having full-blown conversations with Molly
07:17 in the Osage tongue.
07:19 But by placing Ernest as the central figure,
07:21 the viewpoint from which much of the film is seen from,
07:24 Scorsese sets the audience in a slippery trap.
07:28 In the Ernest, in his earliest scenes,
07:31 invites the audience's empathy,
07:33 or at least us to relate to him to a certain degree,
07:37 and then we gradually realize that he's completely amoral.
07:41 In fact, as he admits, he just loves that money,
07:45 maybe even more than Molly herself,
07:48 as he admits in that very same scene.
07:51 He will do anything for that money.
07:54 But we also realize that he's a fool simultaneously.
07:59 He's someone who is so greedy
08:02 that he can just be very easily manipulated.
08:05 To a certain degree, he's a tool.
08:07 He's exploited by his uncle, King,
08:10 as much as he is a perpetrator in the crimes as well.
08:15 And so DiCaprio is kind of wrestling
08:17 with this complicated character,
08:20 but it also invites the audience
08:23 to maybe also assess their own complicity
08:27 and how that they would relate to someone like Ernest.
08:31 And like the aforementioned shopkeeper,
08:33 Ernest justifies his crimes to himself.
08:36 He gets in a relationship with Molly and marries her,
08:39 and he believes that he loves her.
08:42 He believes that he's protecting her
08:44 and working in her best interest,
08:47 and he convinces her of that fact.
08:50 All the while, he's involved in this conspiracy
08:54 to wipe out her entire family.
08:57 And yet, he can somehow have the moral dissonance
09:00 to do both of those things simultaneously,
09:04 because he sees that as being the extension
09:07 of his love for Molly by protecting his own wealth somehow.
09:11 It's only later does the growing burden of guilt
09:15 actually start to weigh down on Ernest.
09:19 And what held me back about the movie to a certain degree
09:22 is that I never really connected to Ernest
09:24 as the central figure of the movie.
09:27 As much as DiCaprio is really working hard in the role,
09:31 I always saw him as a snake,
09:33 as one character describes him,
09:35 because he is an opportunist, and that is the point.
09:40 But then the movie also wants to convince you
09:43 that he is actually in love with Molly,
09:46 even though he is a part of all these atrocities.
09:50 It's this horrendous, toxic relationship
09:53 that is destroying them both,
09:55 literally, by near the end of the movie.
09:58 But the thing is, I didn't really agree
10:02 with the way that that was framed,
10:04 and as such, I don't know if I was fully invested
10:08 in Ernest's side of the story.
10:10 And I think if you rebel against that,
10:11 it does become a very long three and a half hours.
10:15 But luckily, there were other characters
10:17 that I found myself being drawn towards,
10:19 specifically William King Hale,
10:21 of course, Scorsese's other frequent muse, Robert De Niro,
10:25 in their 10th collaboration.
10:27 And Hale is the great power over this land.
10:32 He's a reserve deputy sheriff,
10:34 he's built much of the town, he has great wealth,
10:38 but also connections with the Osage people.
10:41 What's so frightening about Hale,
10:44 and what's so interesting about De Niro's performance,
10:48 is that it's actually quite reserved.
10:50 I'd imagine that a lesser actor
10:52 probably would have shouted and used their physicality
10:56 to emphasize the power that Hale exerts.
11:01 And instead, De Niro uses that quietly.
11:05 Instead, there's very few moments
11:07 where he actually blows his top.
11:10 In fact, I don't think he ever truly does.
11:12 There is a moment where he gets so frustrated,
11:14 he paddles Ernest, and that's perhaps the closest
11:18 to a full-on outburst the character actually has.
11:21 When we meet Hale at the beginning of the movie,
11:23 he almost seems like he's an ally of the Osage people.
11:28 He positions himself as one,
11:30 he understands their culture and traditions,
11:32 he speaks to them in their tongue.
11:35 He is in the same meetings talking about the death
11:39 of all of these people, while at the same time,
11:43 he is the architect of the entire conspiracy.
11:47 He's talking about trying to catch whoever did this.
11:49 He's in the room with them,
11:51 and he does it all with a friendly face.
11:54 Ernest describes him as being the nicest person in the world,
11:57 apparently oblivious to the true darkness
12:00 and evil in his uncle's character,
12:03 someone that can command other people's deaths
12:05 simply to get them money from their headrights.
12:09 And what's even worse is that King has no remorse about it
12:14 in the slightest because he absolutely
12:17 and totally justified it to himself.
12:20 There are several moments where him and Ernest
12:22 are conspiring and King actually positions it
12:26 as being some sort of kindness or favor to the Osage.
12:30 He is so completely involved in his own greed
12:35 that he doesn't even have the concept of guilt.
12:39 It doesn't even register to him
12:41 because he believes that he is in the right.
12:44 He is so full of his self-righteousness,
12:48 and he believes because of his power
12:50 that he is totally and completely untouchable.
12:54 Even when the FBI are starting to circle around them,
12:58 King feels no fear about the situation.
13:01 And I think that Scorsese knows how to get
13:04 the very best out of De Niro,
13:06 as anyone who has followed their filmography
13:09 will be able to tell you,
13:10 but I genuinely think this is some of De Niro's best work
13:14 in quite a few years.
13:15 But for me, the best performance in the movie
13:17 is Lily Gladstone as Molly,
13:19 who is easily the film's heart
13:21 as one of its few sympathetic characters.
13:24 Ernest is warned very early on
13:26 that the Osage don't typically fill the air
13:29 with conversation.
13:30 They deliberately leave silence
13:31 so that people trip themselves up around them.
13:34 You can see that with Molly.
13:36 She's a very intelligent, very perceptive woman.
13:39 Even though she doesn't speak an awful lot
13:41 in her earlier scenes,
13:43 especially when Ernest is trying to court her.
13:46 But Gladstone conveys everything the character is thinking.
13:51 You can tell that she's watching and judging Ernest
13:54 the entire time, building a kind of assessment of him,
13:58 and eventually starts to become quite charmed by him.
14:02 And despite the bare judgment of others,
14:04 Molly falls completely for Ernest.
14:07 She finds something in him that connects to her,
14:11 and then trusts in him completely
14:14 over the course of the film.
14:15 She absolutely puts her faith in Ernest, unfortunately.
14:20 Of course, at the time,
14:22 she's also dealing with the fact
14:24 that there are these murders going on,
14:26 and eventually that starts hitting very close to home.
14:30 And you can see in Gladstone's performance
14:33 how much of an emotional toll
14:35 this is starting to take on Molly.
14:37 And Gladstone's performance is a howling wail of agony,
14:41 one that encapsulates the whole three and a half hour movie.
14:45 The whole film feels like a cry of anger and desperation
14:49 at this deep injustice
14:52 that we are witnessing before our eyes.
14:54 And Molly's strength and conviction
14:57 means that she keeps on fighting
14:59 for her family and for her people.
15:01 And to find justice in any kind of way
15:05 even when she's deeply sick,
15:08 Molly still tries to go out to Washington
15:12 to personally try and invite someone
15:14 to investigate the situation,
15:17 even as it starts to envelop Molly in its grasp.
15:21 And Scorsese further illustrates
15:22 how hostile the culture was to the Osage
15:25 through the fact that Molly, like many of them, is diabetic.
15:30 And this is the result of the high sugar diet
15:32 that is in the town.
15:33 She's actually told by a doctor at one point
15:36 that if she continues to, quote, "eat like a white,"
15:39 she's likely to die.
15:40 The introduction of insulin
15:42 is a major plot point in the movie.
15:44 Molly is lucky enough to be one of the first people
15:47 to be introduced to it,
15:49 but she grows extremely paranoid and suspicious
15:52 of everything around her,
15:53 including the doctors who are coming
15:56 to administer the insulin,
15:58 to the point where she actually throws them out
16:01 and trusts Ernest with her medication,
16:04 which of course proves to be a major undoing on her part.
16:08 I actually found myself wondering
16:11 if Scorsese had maybe slightly misaligned the narrative
16:15 in that I would have actually preferred
16:17 to have seen the story told from Molly's point of view
16:21 as opposed to Ernest,
16:23 especially because that's what the film teases.
16:25 In that earlier montage of the Osage deaths,
16:28 it's being narrated by Molly,
16:30 and so I thought that Molly
16:32 was actually going to be our focal point,
16:35 but deliberately over the course of the film,
16:38 Molly starts to succeed in the narrative,
16:41 especially as she succumbs to more of the effects
16:45 of what's happening.
16:46 The problem is that I felt that Molly
16:49 was the closest link the audience has
16:51 to the Osage culture.
16:53 As Molly's presence starts to recede in the narrative,
16:58 so too does the Osage viewpoint overall,
17:01 which is somewhat disappointing.
17:03 She becomes the avatar essentially for that,
17:07 and that means that as I came out of the movie,
17:10 I kind of found myself thinking
17:12 it could have done with slightly less killers
17:15 and a little bit more flower moon.
17:17 In terms of narrative,
17:19 I do think the film almost touches the limits
17:20 of what you can fully convey in a feature film,
17:23 even one as long as this one,
17:25 and what might've been better served
17:27 in an episodic television miniseries,
17:30 but having it in this form,
17:32 especially because it's continuous,
17:35 you see the scope of the death and murders
17:39 in this community.
17:40 It brings this huge, almost unfathomable weight
17:44 across the audience,
17:45 especially without any kind of interruption.
17:49 Scorsese wants you to feel uncomfortable.
17:52 He wants you to be angered and shocked.
17:55 You've got America's betrayal of its indigenous people
17:59 just writ large across the entire movie.
18:02 It is betrayal after betrayal after betrayal.
18:07 Yes, the movie is procedural,
18:09 and yes, it is to some degree episodic.
18:12 It does go into cul-de-sacs at points
18:15 because it's trying to tell this very multi-stranded story,
18:19 especially because it spans across such a lengthy period
18:24 of time, but by trying to encapsulate something
18:26 with this much scope into a feature film,
18:28 you do have to make compromises.
18:31 You have to choose what to include
18:33 and what not to focus upon,
18:35 and sometimes that does become noticeable.
18:38 The thing that I particularly noticed
18:40 was that Urza and Molly's kids
18:42 are barely even peripheral characters.
18:44 They're very briefly established,
18:46 but you don't see them a lot of the time,
18:49 and that wouldn't necessarily be an issue
18:52 aside from the fact that there is a big emotional moment
18:56 for Ernest much later in the movie
18:58 that's related to his kids,
19:00 and it's meant to be something of a turning point
19:03 for his character, but we've barely seen him
19:06 with his children throughout the entire movie,
19:09 so that rang false for me,
19:11 despite the fact that DiCaprio
19:12 is really, really acting his heart out.
19:16 There are a few moments where I thought
19:18 that the film could have been tightened up slightly,
19:22 but overall, I do think that Scorsese
19:25 avoids trying to make the film too dry,
19:27 and certainly with the great cast of actors,
19:30 that never becomes an issue,
19:32 especially later on when you've got Jesse Plemons
19:35 and the whole FBI angle.
19:37 In its final half hour,
19:39 you've also got the introduction of Brendan Fraser
19:42 and John Lithgow as the dueling lawyers
19:45 in the courtroom section of the movie,
19:47 and this has drawn some criticism
19:49 because the performances of Lithgow and Fraser,
19:52 who has especially drawn a lot of ire
19:55 for some inexplicable reason,
19:57 their performances are big
19:59 in comparison to the rest of the movie,
20:02 but it's deliberately so.
20:03 They're meant to be theatrical,
20:06 both because it serves the epilogue of the movie,
20:09 but also because their characters
20:11 are turning the trial into a circus.
20:14 It's meant to be completely out of control.
20:17 They're doing exactly what they need to do,
20:20 but also courtroom drama is very hard to do.
20:24 It's very hard to convey that
20:26 without it becoming too boring,
20:29 for lack of a better term,
20:31 and I do think the presence of these two character actors
20:35 adds a welcome injection into the movie of energy
20:38 at a point where it could have very easily buckled
20:42 at the last hurdle,
20:43 and I do think that Fraser,
20:44 even in very limited screen time,
20:47 he makes a very distinctive impression.
20:50 I actually was quite impressed with Fraser's performance,
20:53 especially in that one-on-one scene with DiCaprio.
20:57 It's a movie that requires patience.
20:59 It demands your attention.
21:01 Sometimes movies have scenes
21:03 that almost feel like instructions on how to watch them.
21:06 "Killers of the Flower Moon" has a great example of it.
21:09 There's an early dinner scene between Molly and Ernest
21:13 where a storm is going over the house
21:16 and he starts to close the window
21:18 because rain is starting to pour in,
21:20 and Molly tells him not to and sit back down.
21:24 Ernest tries to speak,
21:26 and Molly tells him to be quiet, be silent,
21:30 and just allow the storm to pass over and wash over them,
21:35 and that is precisely
21:37 how you're supposed to be watching the movie.
21:39 You're supposed to be quiet, pay attention,
21:42 and just allow this horrible black cloud
21:45 of murder and death pass over in front of you
21:50 and fully take stock of it.
21:52 That is how the movie needs to be seen.
21:55 It's taken some time for my feelings
21:57 on "Killers of the Flower Moon" to fully form,
21:59 not least of which because I saw it at 8.30 in the morning.
22:02 It's a lot of film to process first thing in the day,
22:06 but when I came out of the movie,
22:08 I was definitely wrestling with some complicated feelings.
22:12 I felt in some senses almost disappointed by it initially,
22:15 especially because I don't entirely think
22:18 the movie's viewpoint is quite where it needs to be,
22:22 and I do think that it needs more Osage in it,
22:25 but as time went by, as I thought upon it more,
22:28 I began to respect and appreciate it as well.
22:32 I also think that it's a valid attempt
22:35 at trying to tell a very dark
22:37 and very under-told chapter of American history,
22:41 one that's almost been actively suppressed in many ways.
22:45 Yes, it's an imperfect movie,
22:47 but it's also an important one that deserves to be seen.
22:52 I do think that it's a movie
22:53 I'm not going to revisit very often.
22:56 I don't think it's my favorite Scorsese movie,
22:59 and it's a very heavy and harrowing feature,
23:03 but it's also one that I think
23:04 it's important for people to see,
23:06 and the movie does have a terrific ending.
23:10 I do think that the Radio City epilogue
23:13 is actually the film's genius masterstroke at the end.
23:17 Certainly, I think that that is where Scorsese
23:20 wrestles with the idea of turning this story
23:23 into entertainment in its own way,
23:27 but also shows just how quickly
23:30 something can also be forgotten as well,
23:33 and I think that that is an absolutely genius touch.
23:37 "Ensign Earth" is one of the world's largest sellers
23:39 of memorabilia and collectibles,
23:41 including action figures, clothing, toys.
23:44 If you're a fan of something, they've probably got it,
23:47 and if you use my affiliate link, e.toys/filmbrain,
23:51 you'll get 10% off in-stock orders,
23:53 as well as free domestic US shipping on all orders over $79.
23:58 If you like this review and you want to support my work,
24:00 you can give me a tip on my Ko-fi page
24:02 or my YouTube Super Thanks feature,
24:03 which is right below the video.
24:05 You can find all my social medias on my Linktree page,
24:08 or you can go to my Patreon,
24:10 where you can see my videos early, among other perks,
24:12 including access to my Discord server,
24:14 or you can simply like, share, and subscribe.
24:17 It all helps.
24:18 Until next time, I'm Matthew Buck, fading out.
24:22 (dramatic music)
24:25 (dramatic music)