Under Blue Moon, I Saw You: Deconstructing Martin Scorsese's Killers of the Flower Moon

KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON 

(Martin Scorsese, 2023, USA, 206 minutes) 

The term auteur often, but not exclusively, refers to directors who write or co-write their own screenplays. Martin Scorsese is an auteur. He has created a distinctive body of work defined by certain themes, visual tropes, and other characteristics. But he doesn't always write or co-write his own screenplays. Of his 26 feature films to date, only his 1967 debut, Who's That Knocking at My Door, bears a solo screenwriting credit. 

This isn't to suggest that he doesn't know how to write, but rather that he would prefer to co-write--which he has done at least six times--and to concentrate on directing. And he is definitely a reader. Altogether, 17 of his feature films have been adapted from novels or non-fiction books, most recently David Grann's 2017 Killers of the Flower Moon, a deeply-researched account of the murders of Osage Nation people in 1920s Oklahoma. 

It's a fool's game to expect a movie to reproduce a book, and that isn't what I wanted or expected from Scorsese's film, which he cowrote with Eric Roth, an Oscar-winning writer who has been involved with some terrific pictures, like Michael Mann's The Insider (faithfully adapted from Marie Brenner's Vanity Fair article), and some not-so-terrific ones, like Robert Zemeckis's Forrest Gump (a de-fanged version of Winston Groom's 1986 novel).   

As Grann told Mark Yarm of Depth Perception regarding books and movies, "They really are different mediums." It's a lesson I learned the hard way as a teenager when I expected Stanley Kubrick's 1980 adaptation of The Shining to recreate the chillingly realistic scenario Stephen King had conjured up in his 1977 novel, but that isn't what he did, and it took me years to appreciate his over-the-top, hallucinogenic take on King's more traditional haunted house material.

In Scorsese's take on Killers of the Flower Moon, he concentrates on three primary players: full-blooded Osage native Mollie Kyle (Montana-born, Seattle-raised Lily Gladstone, who is of Blackfeet and Nez Perce descent), her Texas-born husband Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio in his sixth film with the director), and Ernest's uncle, cattleman and civic leader William "Bill" Hale (Robert De Niro in his 10th), the self-proclaimed King of the Osage Hills, whereas David Grann concentrated on those three, in addition to Tom White (Jesse Plemons), the Texas Ranger-turned-FBI agent tasked by J. Edgar Hoover to investigate the murders. 

Though White's biography, both before and after the investigation, takes up a substantial portion of Grann's book, it makes dramatic sense to minimize it in the film, and it's to Plemons' credit that his decent, no-nonsense inspector makes a significant impact with relatively minimal screen time. 

By contrast, Mollie becomes even more of a presence, since Scorsese depicts both her courtship and marriage to Ernest--events absent from the book--but it's a mixed blessing. Gladstone is perfectly cast, and she ably captures the forthrightness that appears to have defined the real Mollie, but it's never completely clear what this perceptive, coolheaded woman sees in Ernest, who doesn't have much to offer. She knows he's after her money, and he doesn't completely deny it, so she isn't a total mark, but she surely could have found a more worthy partner. I can only assume some combination of loneliness and lust allowed her to overlook some pretty obvious flaws.   

Still, life is pleasant enough for a time, but when Mollie's three sisters start to drop dead, along with several other townspeople, it becomes clear that something is very, very wrong--and that Ernest is involved in some way. In the book, his duplicity doesn't become apparent as quickly. In fact, Grann structures the entire narrative like a murder mystery, though there's nothing tawdry or sensationalist about his approach. Scorsese and Roth give the game away too soon, and it deprives this lengthy film of much of the tension that drives the taut book. To be clear, Ernest is only one henchman among many--all white--that targeted Osage citizens for their oil headrights. 

Scorsese instead builds the suspense around Mollie's health, which rapidly declines once she starts taking the newly-discovered insulin for her diabetes--the town doctors, who are as hinky as they come, instruct Ernest to add a little something "extra" to each dose--and the efforts of White and his G-men to gather enough evidence to start making some arrests. 

If Mollie seems a little enigmatic, despite Gladstone's best efforts, the same can't be said of Ernest or Hale. As written and performed, it's always clear what these money-hungry guys are about. A deglamorized DiCaprio and an older-than-ever-looking De Niro are so good, in fact, that it's easy to forget that this pairing in a Scorsese picture has been a long time coming. 

The director began his feature-film career with Harvey Keitel, with whom he would continue to collaborate--as recently as 2019's The Irishman--before shifting to De Niro as his primary leading man and then to DiCaprio. The actors in tandem unite the two ends of Scorsese's career, while also representing a 30-year reunion between De Niro and DiCaprio, who first teamed up in the 1993 adaptation of Tobias Wolff's memoir, This Boy's Life, as a Northwest teenager and his abusive stepfather, Dwight, in the 1950s. If Hale is considerably kinder to his nephew, Ernest, he's ultimately a criminal mastermind, while Dwight was more of a petty tyrant. 

It must have been satisfying for Scorsese to finally work with these two in the same film, since De Niro wasn't available to play mob boss Frank Costello in 2006's The Departed, and so he went with his second choice: Jack Nicholson. It would be Nicholson's last great role before retiring. 

If the three leads acquit themselves nicely in Killers of the Flower Moon, there are plenty of strong supporting performances from, among others, Pat Healy as a G-man, Larry Fessenden as a radio actor, and Americana musician and social media star Jason Isbell as Mollie's brother-in-law, who nicely holds his own against DiCaprio in a tense drawing room sequence. 

Production designer Jack Fisk and costume designer Jacqueline West, who have often worked with director Terence Malick, and the late musician and composer Robbie Robertson, who was of Cayuga and Mohawk descent, also do stellar work. In his 12th collaboration with Scorsese, dating back to the landmark 1979 Band concert film The Last Waltz, Robertson provides a reverb-drenched, bass guitar-based score that neatly splits the difference between elegiac and understated. The film is dedicated to his memory.

Brendan Fraser, on the other hand, makes a bizarre appearance as Hale's attorney. Granted, cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto, who last worked with Scorsese on The Irishman, shoots him from a low angle, making Fraser look larger than life in an Orson Welles-in-the-1950s kind of way. When his W.S. Hamilton shouts "You dumb boy!" at Ernest, who is indeed a dumb boy, the audience at the press screening laughed. I'm not sure Fraser's outburst--which is as unexpected as Philip Seymour Hoffman's "Pigfuck!" in P.T. Anderson's The Master--was intended to be funny, but I certainly enjoyed it. 

If the film's structure blunts its impact, the story is still undeniably powerful, and Scorsese's sympathy and respect for the Osage always shines through, not least because he doesn't depict them as perfect, but as real, flawed, inherently decent human beings who didn't deserve the fate that befell them. This is particularly true of two of the earliest victims: Mollie's hard-partying sister, Anna (Cara Jade Myers, who is of Wichita descent), and her "melancholic" brother-in-law, Henry Roan (William Belleau, Esk’etemc First Nation), with whom she and Hale share a complicated history. 

As for Mollie herself, Scorsese gives her the relatively happy ending she fully earns, except Mollie's guardianship would actually continue until she was 44, at which point she was finally judged "competent" (I find this as enervating as the fact that Michael Oher, the football player Michael Lewis depicted in The Blind Side, wasn't judged competent until he was 37--and only after he sued to terminate Sean and Leigh Anne Tuohy's control over his finances). By all accounts, Mollie was always competent, except Osage with headrights were required to report their every expense to a white guardian, the exact sort of dynamic that made it easier than ever for these seemingly respectable businesspeople to take advantage of their Native American wards. 

As Grann writes in his book, the Reign of Terror, as the murders of the Osage became known, made the national news in the 1920s. It wasn't just some obscure, regional story, but an all-American scandal that everyone knew about until, over the years, they didn't any longer. It had faded from view. The book helped to bring it back, and the movie is likely to reach an even wider audience, though anyone who hasn't read it should know that the situation Scorsese depicts, tragic as it is, was actually a lot worse. 

As Grann found through his research, particularly his interviews with the descendants of the victims, the murders appear to have begun as early as 1918 and continued as late as 1931, even though several perpetrators--many of whom Scorsese includes in the film--had been caught, tried, and convicted for the murders that took place between 1921 and 1926. 

Once Tom White's investigation was over, he and his men scattered to the four winds (White would end up leaving the bureau altogether). Their job was over, but the story--the killings--continued. By then Hoover and the FBI had moved on to other cases. Though the Osage get some justice in the film, just as they did in real life, there were dozens of other suspicious deaths that weren't deemed sufficiently important or timely enough to merit investigation. And we'll never know how many.

But because of the book and now the movie, the world knows about Mollie Burkhart, who lost most everything she held dear, except for her two oldest children, during the Reign of Terror. Those children had children, and Mollie's granddaughter, Margie Burkhart, served as one of David Grann's primary sources for Killers of the Flower Moon. In a way, it's the best revenge: Mollie's story, and the story of the grave injustice suffered by her people, may have faded for a time, but now it's more alive than ever.

Killers of the Flower Moon opens on Fri, Oct 20, at the Meridian, Pacific Place, and several other area theaters. Erica Tremblay's Fancy Dance, starring Lily Gladstone, screens at Northwest Film Forum on Sun, Oct 22, as part of Seattle Queer Film Festival. Chase Hutchinson will be interviewing cowriter Miciana Alise after the screening. Click here for more information. 

Images: The Telegraph (Gladstone), Amazon (book), Vulture (DiCaprio and Gladstone), Cowboys and Indians (Robert De Niro), Apple Original Films (Jason Isbell and Cara Jade Myers), and Discussing Film (Jesse Plemons).