Review Tales

It feels like as Quentin Tarantino gets older, his work dives into the past where he can change history and create a better world than our present. But as Martin Scorsese grows older, his work reckons with the dark past of America, as well as his role as an influential artist. This isn’t me pitting 2 iconic directors against each other, but I seek to highlight what growth and mileage does to an artist – and what a growth and mileage Scorsese has had! This man has been making films at least since the 1960s and has netted at least one masterpiece per decade.

Within a 60-year career, he has made one film that almost got a president of the United States killed (Taxi Driver); one film that got him targeted by Christian fundamentalists (The Last Temptation of Christ); one that got him in geopolitical trouble with the Chinese government (Kundun); and at least 2 films with the most F-bombs (The Departed and The Wolf of Wall Street).

While he and his trusted editor Thelma Schoonmaker have made countless rip-roaring entertaining cinema with kinetic camerawork and editing, his latter films have emphasized crossing over, morality, legacy and complicity. This trend within Scorsese’s filmography took shape with 2016’s Silence, and has continued into 2023’s Killers of The Flower Moon.

One thing that has not changed with Marty, is his fascination with hidden, distorted, unrepresented history. We all know about the Titanic, about the World Wars and Cold Wars, about the holocaust, about serial killers like Zodiac, Dahmer and Bundy. These are historical figures, events and eras that have permeated through our collective consciousness and accessible to the common man.

But Marty has always taken the unpopular route of highlighting history that is less palatable. Whether it’s the Italian mafia, Jake LaMotta, Jordan Belfort or Frank Sheeran, Marty has given audiences front row seats to the inner workings of men and secret societies that have been lost in time. With Flower Moon, Marty has made a brutal retelling of the wiping out of a people who were at one point the richest on earth per capita: the Osage.

David Grann’s source material (released almost 100 years after the actual atrocities) was about the investigation of the murders, but Marty saw the core tension in the relationship and betrayal of the main couple. This is not without criticism on my part, it does render the investigation a bit short but more importantly it diminishes the scale of the horrors. Hundreds were murdered in over 20 years, yet here we focus on a dozen at most.

However, it still feels shocking on rewatch when it is revealed that the entire town was complicit. Scorsese’s choice to explore the evilness and its impact, as opposed to an FBI investigation, just felt more respectful. Instead of indulging in the detective’s greatness, he points the finger at all party involved; the killers, the system, the exploiters, himself, and us, who are entertained by the pain of others.

William ‘King’ Hale is the alpha wolf: a high-ranking Freemason with so much sway in the community that his relatives call him king (he appoints himself as sheriff and reverend). That scene where he “punishes” Ernest in that ritual room, is not something to just be overlooked. Hale hints that he is working for people above him, and that this whole quest for Osage oil headrights is him following orders too. The highest rank in Freemasonry is the 33rd Degree, where one has to honoured by his community.

This puts into perspective why Hale (a 32nd Degree Mason) is altruistic and omnipresent in every town event, donating to all causes such that he has a public alibi whenever an Osage is murdered. De Niro makes each line reading and gesture memorable. It’s probably up there with his early Scorsese stuff. He’s alive, he’s alert, he’s commanding and he knows what the hell he’s doing. He’s the embodiment of “your murderers come with smiles, they come as your friends, the people who’ve cared for you all of your life”. His performance is the closest we’ve gotten to John Houston as Noah Cross in Chinatown – a quintessential Americana villain.

Ernest Burkhart is more coyote than wolf, slowly sucking the life out of the wife he claims to love. Ernest came across as a low IQ imbecile, but still smart enough to know he is causing harm and enabling his uncle. DiCaprio approaches the character as a weak-willed, cowardly, greedy, and stupid blank slate. It still feels shocking on rewatch when it is revealed that Ernest was a killer, even having a hand in the murder of Mollie’s Private-Investigator. Each time you’re almost begging him and cheering him on to do the right thing, but at the end you realize he still is the same guy who killed all of them.

As much as he thought he loved his wife in his own twisted way, he was also being duped by his uncle. Ultimately, he denies his complicity to his wife like a coward. This is not a film particularly about protagonists with agency. Ernest is extremely passive and has a love for money. But most of his actions are reactive and committed by way of influence or coercion. I never saw a character who pushes back against anything, or who attempts to seize his own destiny. It’s a very fatalistic narrative. Perhaps that’s the point.

I have gone back and forth on Brendan Fraser’s over-the-top performance. He comes across as a Coen Brothers character lost in a Scorsese crime drama. But who am I to question maestro Scorsese’s artistic decision? Clearly, Marty was satisfied with Fraser’s performance. His character is a big town lawyer out of state, so naturally his cadence and presentation would seem out of step in this community. A ravenous wolf indeed.

That line, “can you find the wolves in this picture” is a skeleton key to understanding a lot of what the movie is trying to say. The fella in charge of overlooking the guardian system for the rich locals is played by character actor Gene Jones (the poor shop owner being coerced by Anton Chigurh in No Country for Old Men to call a coin toss).

In a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it reveal, he is shown as the leader of the marching KKK chapter in town. And then later on, he is seen serving on the jury in the big court trial. No one is hiding. It is all quite blatant and out in the open. In the illustration of the wolves in that book, the wolves are in the foreground, after all. Clear for us to see. This isn’t a whodunnit, but a ‘whodidntdoit’!

Imagine inviting someone to your land and they end up controlling all of your essentials and slowly kick you out. Imagine sharing the same bed with someone you make children with, simultaneously killing your family slowly one by one for that money. Worse enough that the government thinks you and your tribe are not “competent” enough to handle your own money.

Mollie’s narrowed perspective is similar to protagonists in films like Rosemary’s Baby or Get Out, not just because the lack of information would add to the tension, but because it forces the audience in the mindset of Mollie and the Osage, living through a nightmare caused by those who are physically and sometimes intimately closest to them. Lily Gladstone as Mollie is the Mona Lisa brought to life: she communicates a multitude of generations and emotions with just an expression.

Mollie’s sister Anna (Cara Jade Myers) is the one most consumed by Western appetites. She has a different accent and wardrobe than her sisters, almost like she’s avoiding her traditional roots to escape being a target too. When her sister Minnie dies, Hale gives a mourning Anna a whiskey flask. Myers brilliantly suggested to Marty that alcoholism be her character’s poison. The implication that the doctors on Hale’s payroll wanted to do an autopsy on Anna’s brain to find the bullet, is just as queasy and sickening as it sounds.

Scorsese may be well known for representing Catholic guilt, but in Flower Moon, he molded it into what some might call White guilt. What is shocking and unthinkable to the Osage people and modern audiences was considered so normal and justified via a belief in White Supremacy that they barely thought of masking their actions and intentions. If Mollie is a symbolic stand-in for the Osage’s plight, Ernest is symbolic of the kind of accessibility that White supremacy is attracted to, even for those who don’t consider themselves true believers: dumb, mediocre, and average on a good day.

This aspiration to Whiteness is also the very undoing of the Osage. It was Osage families themselves who invited and married these wolves into their lives. Scorsese’s film hints at some kind idolization of White culture in indigenous communities. Even the first scene of the pipe’s burial can be read as the inevitable surrendering of tradition about to happen. Marty leaves the audience wondering what the hell Mollie saw in this banal and basically stupid outsider (besides being played by Hollywood heartthrob Leo DiCaprio). What was behind her disastrous decision to marry him? What was she hoping to accomplish?

Were the Osage a side character in their own story?

Should the film have been told from Molly’s point of view?

Could it have been co-produced by the Osage or even just indigenous people in general?

Why tell the story at all if you’re not going to make it directly about who was affected by it?

Does everyone like Scorsese more than they like the story and they are making it out to be better than it actually was?

All I know is this film is from the point of view from a White man. I can understand why actors and individuals sympathetic to the Osage were upset. But to say that the Osage voice was excluded is false: the Osage were involved heavily in the film as extras and consultants; the Osage language department ensured the traditional clothes were accurate. The movie was not aimed at an Osage audience, but for the rest of the world. Scorsese could never have told this story from an Osage point of view – that would take an actual Osage!

Killers of the Flower Moon doesn’t have what makes Marty’s most notable films so enjoyable: that masculine, visceral thrill of violence and greed which justifies itself to the viewer through the perspective of its charismatic and sympathetic criminals. If this is Scorsese’s final movie, it’s important enough for me to appreciate why.

The pacing in the movie goes with the representation of an evil or violence more systemic and cultural than Scorsese’s mafia movies. It is a gradual percolation of insidious violence, inversely proportional to how it is looked down on by the “wolves”. I couldn’t help but regard the film as the B-side to Silence, with religious violence repeating itself over and over, dragging on to a luminous ending.

One of the best pieces of advice I’ve heard when reading history is to put yourself in the perspective of the villainous, the evil, the perpetrators. Don’t assume you’d be the outstanding heroic figure. It’s much more likely that you’re the villain. If you can’t look at that, you’ll never be able to prevent it when the situation arises. History was never meant to be easy to look at for humanity is capable of great good and horrifying evil and that is why we must look at it, study it and learn from it for we must make sure that we do not repeat the dark deeds of our ancestors. People are capable of evil and virtue in equal measure. There have been societies that experienced centuries of true peace and freedom. There have been societies that never knew either. What we reap is based upon the organization of our societies, and the values we practice.

The radio drama epilogue feels like Marty accusing himself as a wolf, or us being wolves for indulging in the entertainment that is based on the suffering of a culture and subsequent commoditization of their culture, tragedy, and story by the ones who created the suffering. I appreciate his self-reflection in this work more than in his other movies. His ‘shame’ in participating in the glorification, our general misunderstanding of his obsession with ‘wolves’ and the darker side of American culture by us not seeing or not caring about how bad his characters can be.

The epilogue is Marty’s acknowledgement that this story about a misrepresented people would most likely have never gotten made or seen by the masses were it not for the Scorsese/De Niro/DiCaprio brand. After all the turmoil, Scorsese is admitting his own film, good as it is, is no different from the radio show: actors playing dress-up, using period cars, costume and effects. He implicates himself by inserting himself at the end, reckoning with his role as a filmmaker. This is a frank, meta-way to end the film: a very critique of how the artform itself distorts what really happened into fiction.

Killers of the Flower Moon aims to be more than entertainment, challenging us to see what happened to the Osage Nation as more than a just true crime story. It pushes us to examine, recognize and resist the type of evil on display. Here is a work of art that is not merely saying that money is the root of all evil, but that valuing material things above human life that is the greater crime. It’s not money that’s evil, but valuing it above human life. Humanity should come above all.