This review contains some spoilers.
Hannah Arendt’s phrase, “The banality of evil,” kept popping into my head as I watched Martin Scorsese’s elegiac and powerful Killers of the Flower Moon, which is based on a true story.
At one point late in the film, our main character, Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio), is asked, “Are you a good man?”
“I think I am,” he responds.
“You think…or you know?” FBI agent Tom White (Jesse Plemens) probes.
Ernest hesitates. “I know,” he says.
In that moment, there’s obviously a bit of doubt that has crept into Ernest’s sense of self, but in some ways, he believes it. It’s amazing how we can trick ourselves into believing that we are righteous, even when we are clearly not.
Ernest is not the mastermind behind a plot to murder the members of Osage nation to acquire their oil—that would be his uncle “King” Bill Hale (Robert De Niro), who is a more traditional version of evil, an ingratiating and pseudo-upstanding man who is actually as cold-blooded as they come. But Ernest goes along with his uncle—at first in small ways and then larger, until there’s no difference between the evil orchestrator and his dim and greedy nephew.
Yes, greed is a major motivator in Ernest’s life. “I love money!” he says, more than once, with a rascally grin. But what fuels his crime spree—first theft, then accessory to murder, then much worse—is white supremacy. He and most of the white people who have come to Fairfax, Oklahoma to chase some of the Osage oil money, truly believe in their own divine right to both the land and the oil (doubly ironic, of course, since the Native Americans were here first). They accuse the Osage of not “earning” the money, as though anyone earns the good fortune of striking oil. They see the murdered Osage as collateral damage on their mission to take what’s rightfully theirs.
King Bill has a cattle farm in Fairfax and has presented himself as a benevolent white man who is there to usher the Osage into the 20th century (the film is set in the 1920s). They trust him, and even turn to him when the murders begin, as an advisor of sorts.
Ernest is home from war and looking for work. It’s Bill who suggests that his nephew woo an Osage woman—one with a “full blood” estate, so if she were to die, Ernest and his family would have full rights to the land.
“Most Osage women don’t live past 50,” Bill says, ruefully, as if white men weren’t the primary cause of their early demise.
So Ernest meets Mollie (Lily Gladstone), a quiet and dignified Osage woman, with the slightest hint of wry, world-weary humor behind her penetrating gaze.
She knows that Ernest isn’t too bright, but she loves him and his stolid ways all the same. And he loves her back.
But he’s too stupid or greedy or, frankly, racist to realize that what he’s doing to Mollie’s people is a crime against the woman he loves—and their eventual children.
As Mollie, Lily Gladstone is a revelation—her calm decency and intelligence anchors the film. Talk about a star-making performance! This is, somewhat notoriously, a 3 and a half hour film, and she captivates the screen—not just holding her own against her more seasoned co-stars, but sometimes dominating them. (It’s Mollie’s persuasive self-possession that compels President Coolidge to send the fledgling FBI out to Osage County.)
Scorsese is obviously a filmmaker who has his acting muses. In the first part of his career, that muse was De Niro; later DiCaprio took on the leading man role. This is the first time, as far as I know, that they’ve worked together on a feature since 1993’s This Boy’s Life, one of our first indications that the young whippersnapper could really go toe-to-toe with the master. It’s wonderful to see the two men working together again here—DiCaprio is no longer that beautiful boy but a middle-aged man, thickened with age. He hides some of his usual crack alertness and charm here. Ernest is slow and often confused—although we do watch him gain a kind of grotesque confidence as the film goes on and he acquires more money and power. And De Niro plays Bill as a man who has cultivated an avuncular persona, but whose brutality is never really far from the surface.
A large assortment of character actors, including Cara Jade Myers as Mollie’s ill-fated sister Anna; William Belleau as the depressed Osage member Henry, who has the misfortune of getting his affairs tied to King Bill’s; and Plemons’ clear-eyed FBI Agent, who takes a certain amount of pity on Ernest, expertly round out the cast.
Yes, the film is three and a half hours. What’s so impressive about it is how Scorsese manages to inject urgency into even small moments. When you’re Martin Scorsese, a man and a woman listening to the rain can be as compelling as a bomb exploding. That’s his genius: He uses every tool available to him—brilliant acting, pitch-perfect music (here, a lot of Native American folk music is utilized), a camera that knows when to swirl and when to stay still, a razor-sharp script—to keep his films almost uncannily entertaining. It is a magic trick of sorts. The film feels perfectly paced, but never rushed.
This final chapter of Scorsese’s career is one that is filled with reflection and melancholy. He’s always shown us men behaving badly, but usually with a rock and roll intensity that makes the bad deeds dazzling. In his last two films—The Irishman and now this—he’s shown us the terrible consequences of those deeds: Robert De Niro’s aged gangster alone and bitter in a nursing home, reflecting on a life that amounted to nothing; and here, showing us how white supremacy can eradicate an entire people, an entire history (he explicitly evokes the Tulsa massacres that snuffed out “Black Wall Street”).
I wrote a lot about The Wolf of Wall Street when it came out—I loved the film (and it has only risen in my estimation since I first saw it) but I felt it glorified Jordan Belfort’s life a little too much. Most retorted that Scorsese could not be responsible for people misinterpreting his films. I slightly disagree. As a director, he’s the ultimate seducer; it’s his great gift. But here, he uses that gift to confront us with a horrible, unthinkable truth. We can’t look away from the film—and nor should we.