Killers of the Flower Moon Review: A Film That Embodies All The Souls Of His Cinema
Cast: Leonardo DiCaprio, Lily Gladstone, Robert De Niro, Brendan Fraser, Jesse Plemons
Director: Martin Scorsese
Where to Watch: May 20, 2023 (Cannes), October 6, 2023 (Cinema)
Filmyhype.com Ratings: 4.5/5 (four and a half stars) [yasr_overall_rating size=”large”]
Killers of the Flower Moon is a political film, a 3 hours and 26 minutes long odyssey of great cinema but also of raw violence, of undiluted anguish. The intent is precisely that: to make the viewer feel besieged by an evil that lives and feeds on the social structures that are supposed to prevent injustices. One feels under siege, exactly like the protagonist Mollie, but with more awareness than her. At 80, Martin Scorsese still wants to take risks and get serious, indeed: in his view, it is the only reason to continue making films at his age, with the many goals already achieved. Killers of the Flower Moon is a new film for him in terms of tone and genre, but above all, it is a very strong indictment of the violent and abusive essence of the US nation. A state, a democracy built by whites who create rules and systems to be able to crush the natives and the unwanted under their cowboy boots, leaving no way out for the victims.
The slow genocide of the Osage Indians is also narrated from the point of view of their executioners, who move with impunity, aware that “it is easier to send a man who killed a dog to prison than one who killed an Indian”. It is certainly not a farewell film, indeed we hope that there will be many more. Yet it is a film that truly manages to encompass all the poetics of a director who for over 50 years has not only changed the way of making cinema but has also narrated a country with a ferocity and lucidity that few other authors have been shown to have. Despite this, as we will see in this Killers of the Flower Moon review, Martin Scorsese never rests on what he has done in the past but continues to evolve his language and his idea of cinema.
Killers of the Flower Moon Review: The Story Plot
The 1920s, Oklahoma. War veteran Ernest Burkhart arrives in Osage County where he is reunited with his powerful uncle William Hale. Here he meets and falls in love with Molly, part of the wealthy Osage Native American community, affected by a series of mysterious murders. Scorsese’s Western brings to the screen a true story, reconstructed in David Grann’s essay: that of the genocide of the Native Americans of the Osage tribe. After being driven off their lands several times, the Osage are assigned a hostile land, where survival is difficult. In the 1920s, however, this patch of land where nothing grows turns out to be rich, very rich in oil.
Thanks to the agreements with the oil companies, the Osage Indians become very rich, dividing the proceeds from the sale of black gold. However, their wealth attracts looters, swindlers, and murderers around them. All white men are deeply convinced that natives do not deserve their wealth, as “non-Americans”. Behind good intentions, a handful of white men begin to enter the Osage families by marrying their daughters, while the suspicious deaths of young members of the tribe follow one another. Among the wealthier families is that of Mollie (played by Lily Gladstone), a native who suffers from diabetes. Mollie is sharp, wise, and austere. She knows that the blanket of her tribe that she carries on her shoulders is a target, and she knows that the whites only want the money from her, but she still decides to move Ernest (played by Leonardo DiCaprio), a good-looking veteran but not exactly brilliant in reasonings. With only her husband as an ally, Mollie will see death tightening around her and her family, while the authorities do nothing, and it seems impossible to understand the perpetrator of so many crimes.
Killers of the Flower Moon Review and Analysis
Scorsese had a stroke of genius when he decided to give the character of Lily Gladstone a central role in the structure of the book. Her performance, painful but full of dignity, is the best in a trio formed by Robert De Niro and Di Caprio. We will most likely see her again at the Oscars and in a meritorious way. However, DiCaprio stands out in a different role than usual, characterized by the extreme foolishness of the character. Ernest is the worst kind of man: a gullible fool who thinks he’s clever and only good at lying to himself. His ambivalent relationship with Mollie is one of the beating hearts of this film.
Killers of the Flower Moon is a great film, but it asks a lot of the viewer: three and a half hours, the willingness to witness deaths and brutal violence, the will to face a black story in which hope is absent and the moral of the story leaves a gloomy and deadly feeling on. Scorsese puts himself at the service of the forgotten history of the Osage tribe and tries to make what happened to them indelible. He does it with a film that is certainly not easy to watch (for many reasons), but which is pure cinema, full of vitality, energy, indignation, and politics. Scorsese cannot get out of a white and age-related perspective, but he genuinely puts himself at the service of the cause and also gives a great female character to this year of cinema, even if read through a male lens.
It is not even a coincidence, therefore, that Scorsese has decided to collaborate again with two of the most representative actors of his cinema – Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro – making them act together for the first time after 30 years (in The Desire to Start Again the Titanic actor wasn’t even 18). Because no one, better than them, could represent the two opposite and complementary aspects of this universe made of violence and interests. DiCaprio here plays an empty and miserable man, perhaps even silly, apparently disinterested and unaware of what he does and happens around him; De Niro is the powerful, manipulative man with a plan and a very specific purpose, a man who, just like in the “far west” from which he comes, believes himself not above the law, but the law itself. Both are exceptional – De Niro exudes charisma and power from the first scene, while DiCaprio builds in intensity in the last part – and their duets are among the best and funniest things about the film.
If tragic, epic, and grotesque coexist wonderfully, the same cannot be said of the rhythm. Killers of the Flower Moon, perhaps penalized by a not yet definitive editing (and with some uncertainties), proceeds in flames. He starts overbearing, proceeds confidently, then sits down halfway as prey to sudden tiredness, and then gets up again with an extraordinary ending, capable of giving a moral turning point to the entire film with a brilliant choice. If the rhythm is undulating, everything else is set in stone. Like the choice to tell the characters through their bodies and their faces. As if everyone in this film were emblematic statues. This Leonardo DiCaprio, bastardized as never before, knows it well, whose angelic face has now become an old memory. His Ernest is marked by a grimace of indignation always stamped on his face.
A disgust that maybe he doesn’t feel so much for the world but for himself. Despite a Luciferian eyebrow, worthy of the best Jack Nicholson, his character is so incompetent and empty that he is never really scary like a devil. He’s just pitiful. From start to finish. On the other hand, Robert De Niro carries the full weight of Evil on himself. He walks with difficulty, drags himself, moves slowly, and his face is now a grotesque mask. To counteract these lurid infamous, there is the hieratic figure of a wonderful Lily Gladstone, who embodies all the pain of an oppressed people. Her character (Native American Molly) talks little and looks a lot. She is the spectator of a horror whose marks she bears yet illuminated by constant light. As if Scorsese caressed her with light to apologize.
Time is running out. Martin Scorsese said it clearly in an interview. And Killers of the Flower Moon was born from the need for an author who comes to terms with the end that is coming. A film that embodies all of Scorsese’s cinema and at the same time reinterprets it. A film steeped in guilt, shame, and pity for an entire nation. The of him. The one that he told with dizzying fury in the past, and now watches with more detachment, but without ever washing his hands. No, because in Killers of the Flower Moon, there is always the powerful breath of great cinema. What he tells through images, has the patience of great novels (let’s remember this: the film is based on the book of the same name by journalist David Grann), and offers memorable sequences to be handed down to posterity. Time is running out, it’s true. But the last grains of sand are beautiful.
Killers of the Flower Moon Review: The Last Words
Killers of the Flower Moon is yet another great work by a director who has made and continues to make the history of cinema: in three and a half hours it contains his entire filmography, explores new paths and new genres, and gives us extraordinary new interpretations from part of its two fetish actors, Leonardo DiCaprio, and Robert De Niro, to which is added a wonderful Lily Gladstone. This is great American cinema at its best. In Killers of the Flower Moon Martin Scorsese gives us a film that embodies all the souls of his cinema: the disenchantment of the Western and the decline of the gangster movie. All by getting his hands dirty with the historical faults of the United States of America.
