MOVIE REVIEW: Killers of the Flower Moon

KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON– 2 STARS

In Killers of the Flower Moon, there’s a ominous guitar beat from the late composer Robbie Robertson that steadily becomes the inescapable and intoxicating pulse of the entire film. Reverberating with a style of blues and rock throughout, his personally-played bass guitar strums will hit overtop of the diegetic period music filling the ambience. Every now and then, a glide of strings, a flutter of harmonica sounds, or the extra beats of a drum will join Robbie’s little booms. But, all the while, that guitar never quickens.

For better or worse, that’s a microcosm of the entirety of Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon. As helpful as Robertson’s plucked metronome is to fill voids and create a foreboding cinematic heartbeat, your own pulse rate ends up matching that placidness. No matter what heinous deception, jarring murder, or well-appointed finery appears on screen, very little in the film intensifies or accelerates beyond that methodical drowning dirge.

Make no mistake. You will see plenty of revered, notable performers and swaths of impressive production value throughout the sizable length of Killers of the Flower Moon. Those elements will capture your gaze and hold your attention as they are introduced and developed. Yet, at some point, due to temperate repetition or portending indifference (or both), the pedigree effect wears off, and the fair to middling suspense and partial respect to history get lost in the same pace of the same guitar.

The sights and sounds of a funeral for a departed Osage Native American elder and the gushing arrival of oil– played in slow-mo like a rave party right out of Coachella– on tribal land open Killers of the Flower Moon. The rich Texas Tea coming out of the Fairfax, Oklahoma earth belongs to the Osage Nation and made them among the richest people in the country during the 1920s, even with claims that required approval and held in trust by the federal government. The Osage knew their worth, but that didn’t stop white opportunists from coming to the region by the trainload seeking to pinch their own fortune.

From the first establishing shots of Killers of the Flower Moon, the quality of the craft teams is triumphantly evident. The vast set creations and location usage conceived by production designer Jack Fisk (The Revenant, The Tree of Life) and set decorator Adam Willis (Marriage Story) and the striking range of costumes by four-time Oscar nominee Jacqueline West steep this film exquisitely in its period. Cinematographer and fellow multi-time Academy Award nominee Rodrigo Prieto (working his fourth Scorsese film) keeps the interior gazes and exterior vistas pristine with framing and lighting. No squinting is ever necessary to enter this movie’s imagination.

Circling back, one of those opportunists was World War I veteran Ernest Burkhart, played by the headlining Oscar winner Leonardo DiCaprio. He arrived in Fairfax following his older brother Bryan (Scott Shepherd of Jason Bourne) and sought to work for his uncle William King Hale, a powerful cattle magnate and political boss played by fellow Academy Award winner Robert De Niro. Hale had, more or less, infiltrated the trust of Osage Nation for years as a public liaison. He earned elder status, learned their language, practiced their cultural manners, and was a financial benefactor and trading partner to many locals of all ethnicities.

LESSON #1: HIJACKING BLOODLINES– Behind that generous public front, Bill Hale’s strategic master plan was all about scouting and securing futures by hijacking lines of inheritance. By getting key people– including Ernest, Bryan, and family friend Bill Smith (Grammy Award-winning singer/songwriter Jason Isbell)– married into Osage families, their marital status opened the practice of breeding biracial children to dilute the dwindling population and put themselves in lines of succession to acquire the lucrative familial headrights if anything were to happen to the pure-blood relatives.

Bill assigned Ernest to be the Studebaker chauffeur of Mollie, played by Kelly Reichardt muse Lily Gladstone of Certain Women and First Cow, the oldest of three sisters of an original Fairfax family. Bill Smith married one of the other sisters Minnie (Jillian Dion) while Bryan tried to tame the wilder, pistol-toting sister Anna Brown (Cara Jade Myers). Mollie became smitten by Ernest’s confidence and dreamy blue eyes. A few scenes of wobbly courtship and attraction happen and, in short order, Mollie and Ernest are married.

LESSON #2: PICK BETTER HUSBANDS– Not to put a Zack Morris Saved By the Bell timeout to Killers of the Flower Moon, but an intervention was missed a century ago in Fairfax, OK. The lesson is quickly obvious. Ladies, please pick better husbands. If you know something greedy and disingenuous is up, as Mollie clearly does, don’t let the fox in the henhouse and don’t marry that unvetted, outsider guy. And, to the tight-knit greater overall community, don’t let it become an obvious and suspicious pattern. Circle the wagons, pull your women aside, and put a few edicts in place to screen some of those crooks. Alas, this is pulling from documented history where this lesson was missed and terrible results occurred.

LESSON #3: DO YOUR HISTORY HOMEWORK– Those nefarious stakes set off what became known as the “Reign of Terror,” a suspicious and unchecked spree of deaths targeting Osage claimholders and their family members that claimed over 60 lives in 13 years. Scorsese’s film centers only on the first two sections of David Grann’s best-selling source novel– the Reign of Terror and the ensuing FBI investigation led by Bureau of Investigation agent Tom White (Jesse Plemons, back for more western wear after The Power of the Dog) and his deputies. The dramatic license for American greed out in full force.

LESSON #4: MURDER AS AN INSTRUMENT OF ADVANCEMENT– As the killings increase, family trees are destroyed and civic relations crumble. Cases are misreported or swept under the rug, all for people killing to take away generational wealth. Each death vaults an enemy higher and increases the number of people complicit, including Ernest himself where Killers of the Flower Moon reaches the point where ithis turn to do the deed and take a life as a test of loyalty for the advancement happening illegally.

Because of the condensing decision by Scorsese and spectacle screenwriter specialist Eric Roth (Forrest Gump, Munich, Dune), those first two portions from Grann keep Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro well fed with arc after arc as the unquestioned camera-hogs of the movie. Aligned to Scorsese’s career streak, Killers of the Flower Moon becomes an outright crime saga positioned to allow his stars to show off. Unfortunately, and in quite a surprising fashion, neither of Scorsese’s top male muses exactly scorch the screen with electrifying or poignant performances in this film.

Someone call the postal service, because there’s some mail to pick up at the DiCaprio and De Niro residences. With the scope of downright premeditated evil in William King Hale’s history, Robert De Niro should be staring holes through our hearts and rattling our cages. Instead, his form of whispered menace and seen-a-million-times facial expressions do not carry the same intimidation factor they used to decades ago. While Killers of the Flower Moon marks Robert’s tenth film with Scorsese, there are other lesser-known actors who could have slayed this part and raised the hairs on our collective necks.

As for Leonardo DiCaprio in his sixth go-round with Scorsese, he may finally be, at age 48, a shade too old for the part he took across from Gladstone 11 years his junior. Despite all the talent in the world, his choices of character ticks for Ernest Burkhart veered too close to being an embarrassing ripoff of Billy Bob Thornton’s bit. His constant frump of indignation, sourpuss frown, and podunk voice inflection are dialed up very high, where even the two signature “Leo Shouting” scenes barely break the character’s glum rut or create any flickers of fire. This is not a good performance from who is definitively the best of his generation.

Interestingly, the Tom White role occupied by Jesse Plemons was originally written for DiCaprio. Thought it’s admirable to see DiCaprio take the challenge, one has to wonder if the two actors switched places, where Leo brought a little sizzle to being the hunter and Plemons amplified the saddening descent as the busted prey. Between those two and either heating up or replacing De Niro, Killers of the Flower Moon could have stood to be acted far better at the crucial nucleus that was carved out with their pairing.

LESSON #5: HAVING THE WRONG LEAD CHARACTER– Frankly, Killers of the Flower Moon should have been Lily Gladstone’s movie. She is an extraordinary pillar of stoicism in a role haunted by the proverbial target on her character’s back in the form of the traditional patterned blankets all the women or local privilege wore. When she’s not ignored by the men or bedridden from poison for an entire act, Lily Gladstone is the emotional bonfire of this movie expressing pain, resolve, and initiative. Had this film taken Mollie’s perspective and moved her Oscar-winning oppressors to the invading periphery, greater poignancy would have resulted to galvanize the parallel social and political messages of then and now Grann, Roth, and Scorsese were mining with the film.

LESSON #6: HIGHLIGHTING THE WRONG PERSPECTIVE– Moreover, this should have been an Osage Nation movie. In good faith, Scorsese hired an entire team of cultural consultants to be accurate, yet their entire perspective is set incredibly deep in the background to put crimes and criminals first. Imagine if it was switched. The diverse cast behind the superstars are bit players in what is supposed to be their spotlighted heritage. Sadly, the concluding third section of David Grann’s book covering the author’s researched generational aftermath of the wide-reaching tragedy for the local tribespeople was excised for the film.

Surely, one would think that with 206 minutes of breadth, a well-steeped path to proper historical reverence and flexed justice would be waiting at the end. Hardly so. Right when an exhausting and momentum-diminishing third act of courtroom proceedings in Killers of the Flower Moon was finally peaking with exposed truths thrust upon our villains forced to face their actions, Scorsese and editor extraordinaire Thelma Schoonmaker jolt the film to a truly odd epilogue. In the final reel, a conclusion of a radio theater production years after the events is presented using overacting thespians and their DIY sound effects to present how it all turned out for every major character, capped off by Scorsese casting himself as a stage narrator offering the final words of the film.

While artfully recreated, this idiosyncratic conclusion is all kinds of peculiar. First off, it speed-reads important exposition as if Roth ran out of digital typewriter paper or Scorsese and his financiers ran out of money to finish the movie properly after already spending a stupefying $200 million on its frontier filet mignon buffet. Secondly, it robs the epic film that came before the rightful earned comeuppance the guilty parties had coming. This was never going to be the happiest of endings, but folks need satisfaction, catharsis, and some pounds of flesh on the scale. Lastly, with Scorsese himself stepping to the mic, the ending moment reeks of self-importance. He’s practically announcing the need to care for “his” opus, even though it spent the previous three-hours-and-change granting every possible shine on the bad guys of the story and not the victimized ethnic group deserving the cinematic focus.

We live in a current landscape where no one wants the oppression porn of hurting minorities anymore, yet here’s Killers of the Flower Moon blowing POC’s heads off without resolution. If you’re going to still do that and cross those lines, make it matter. Depict the tangible and strong agony leading to empathy for the victims and their circles better than what is here. Put the full consequences on-screen to garner unity. Instead, we are left watching and wondering if the two lead white offenders are going to get away with it. This slippery slope of narrative equity sinks Killers of the Flower Moon.

It’s nearly hateful to call this richly made production all artifice, but, damn, Killers of the Flower Moon is flatly indifferent within itself where it matters. Other than the crime aspects, what in this picture gets full rumination and reflection? No, really. What is there? Whiskey ruins people. Greed ruins them worse and white, opportunistic Americans abused both vices and treated Native Americans like shit for centuries. Killers of the Flower Moon does not create sweep for its compelling history, lift a credible romance for an emotional anchor, or even formulate fearful evil to resonate with an audience. It breaks no new ground and settles on being an actor’s showcase for two titans who didn’t need the help.