Martin Scorsese’s ‘Killers of The Flower Moon’: A Gripping Epic About Greed, Betrayal and the Banality of Evil

Killers of the Flower Moon

Cast: Robert De Niro, Leonardo DiCaprio, Lily Gladstone, Brendan Fraser, Jesse Plemons

Direction: Martin Scorsese

Rating: ****

“Call me uncle, or call me king,” William Hale (Robert De Niro) tells his nephew, Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio), who has just arrived in Osage County, Oklahoma, after being discharged from the Army where he worked as a cook.

Hale looks Ernest in the eye, calls him a war hero and asks about his interests, including in women. 

“I love money,” Ernest says and then adds, “I like the heavy ones”.

It’s the 1920s and Hale, an old White man, owns a large ranch in what is essentially Indian reservation land belonging to the Osage tribe whose members have recently become the richest people in the world following the discovery of oil. 

Scorsese uses archival footage to show the per capita wealth of the Osage. They drive fancy cars, have White maids, nannies, drivers, and own jets. 

Hale, also the deputy sheriff of Osage County, talks to Ernest about his great relations with members of the Osage tribe, most of whom, he says, are good people. But, he adds, it’s basically the responsibility of White folk to manage the oil-spewing land and money. And the way to do this is to marry a full-blood Osage woman and inherit the “headrights” because, he says, they don’t live for very long. 

Martin Scorsese’s film — based on a 2017 non-fiction best-seller, Killers of the Flower Moon: Oil, Money, Murder and the Birth of the FBI by journalist David Grann — tells the chilling, true-crime story of greed, depravity, White supremacy and staggering complicity in the serial murders of Osage that were committed with impunity by White men. Justice was evaded for years through circuitous layers of malevolence and treachery that Hale and men like him had created around the Osage tribe. 

The murderers were often White men who married Osage women, had children with them, smiled and greeted other Osage, attended their rituals, and seemed to care. Helping them for a share of the booty were doctors, lawyers, sheriffs and the readily available contract killers. 

Ernest settles in Osage County, drives a taxi and often chauffeurs Mollie Kyle (Lily Gladstone) as she, like most other Osage, has to make regular trips to take the permission of the “guardians” appointed by the U.S. government to spend her own money on travel, food, health.

Mollie, a sharp, sensible woman, wears traditional Osage attire and the shawl she drapes around feels like a protective cloak she needs when she ventures out. She’s calm, quiet and seems to dwell more inside than outside. 

Mollie has an ailing mother and four sisters — Minnie, Reta, Anna and Lizzie. Ernest’s brother, Bryan (Scott Shephard), is married to one of Mollie’s sisters and she takes her time to warm up to Ernest’s romantic overtures. On Hale’s goading, Ernest proposes and soon they are married despite the disapproval of Mollie’s mother.

Hale often summons his nephew. And in between talking about the Bible, the good Lord, the good Osage people, he instructs Ernest on how to carry out a murder. 

Mollie’s sister dies of an illness, another’s house gets blown up, Lizzie, the one married to Bryan, is shot in the head. And Mollie, a diabetic, falls ill. But, troubled by the deaths of her sisters, she hires a private detective and even travels to Washington to ask the President for an investigation into the murders.

But as someone says in the film, “You have a better chance of getting convicted for kicking a dog than killing an Indian.”

It took the murders of more than 60 Osage, most of them between 1921 and 1926, and a payment of $20,000 for the Bureau of Investigation (that later became FBI) to launch an investigation into what local newspapers had termed as a “Reign of Terror”.

Tom White (Jesse Plemons) arrives with a team of undercover agents, begins asking questions and men finally go to trial for murder.

Three-hours-and-26-minutes long Killer of The Flower Moon is Scorsese’s 26th feature film. At its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival on Saturday, it got a nine-minute-long standing ovation.

Killers of The Flower Moon is a gorgeous-looking film with stylish period detail, but all that is the backdrop for Scorsese’s masterly storytelling of deep-rooted racial contempt and the birth of America through bloody betrayal.  

For a director who made Goodfellas, Mean Streets, Raging Bull and Taxi Driver, there isn’t a moment in Killers of the Flower Moon when the violence is dramatized or fetishized. Scorsese tells the story of Osage murders honestly and with sensitivity. He foregrounds relationships — between Hale and Ernest, between Ernest and Mollie — and retains the essence of the tragedy by showing the ordinariness of the murders. Or, as Robert de Niro said at the post-premiere press conference, “the banality of evil.”

Scorsese does, however, throw in a delightful surprise at the end. But even that speaks of how easily tragedies get reduced to glib thrillers. 

David Grann’s book, split in three parts, begins with Mollie and then focuses on FBI agent Tom White, but Scorsese says that after discussions with DiCaprio, he decided to make Ernest the heart of his film. That may have been the case in the screenplay that he wrote with Eric Roth, but in the film, the two characters who dominate are De Niro’s Hale and Lily Gladstone’s Mollie.

The relationship between Hale and Ernest is symbolic of the maze of criminality created around the Osage by men joined together by greed and their abiding belief that the Osage do not deserve their wealth or the ownership of their land. 

Robert De Niro plays William Hale as a two-faced man whose other, evil face is never visible except in an unforgettable scene where he delivers corporal punishment for orders not carried out properly. 

He is always warm with members of the Osage tribe, behaving as a benevolent guardian and an ally. He’s a friend who orders a kill and then looks the bereaved in the eye and announces a reward for the killer. The Osage later referred to Hale as “The Devil” and cut him out of all their photographs. 

Leonardo DiCaprio is excellent as the pathetic, venal Ernest. His verbal and moral simpering, as he constantly professes his love for Mollie but then plots her death, keeps him from owning up to his crimes even to himself, as if his feelings for her were real, but his actions were not.  

Stoic and lovely Lily Gladstone is the haunting moral core of Scorsese’s film. She observes what’s happening around her with graceful reserve, often suffers in silence but is also courageous and resourceful in seeking justice. When she finally confronts evil, it’s not with rage, shock or anger. She does it with the weariness of someone who knows she has lived with treachery. Her stunning performance holds the film together and is worthy of an Oscar nomination.

‘Killers of the Flower Moon’ is scheduled to release in theaters in October 2023.