Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio) returns from war to live in Grey Horse, Oklahoma with his rich and affluent uncle William “King” Hale (Robert De Niro) on his cattle estate built on Osage territory.  It is a vibrant community as the Osage people who live on the reservation have amassed fabulous wealth for themselves after oil was discovered on their land.  Ernest begins to work as a chauffeur for Mollie (Lily Gladstone), an indigenous woman, and the two eventually get married and start a family.  Mollie’s family, and the Osage people at large, suffer a great tragedy as they begin dying at an alarming rate with no investigation into their deaths.  Word eventually reaches DC and Tom White (Jesse Plemons) of the Bureau of Investigations is sent to Oklahoma where a massive and deadly plot to funnel control of the head rights away from the Osage people and into the control of the white men who have married into their wealth is uncovered and eventually brought to trial. 

Martin Scorsese directs the monumental Killers of the Flower Moon from a script co-written with Eli Roth based off of the David Grann novel of the same name.  The production pause brought about by Covid-19 allowed Scorsese the time needed to strip down and reframe his latest film away from its initial focus on Tom White and instead bring in more input and representation of the Osage nation across its 206-minute runtime.  Trading in the skyscrapers for the dusty, American West, Scorsese reunites with longtime creative collaborators such as editor Thelma Schoonmaker, cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto, and composer Robbie Robertson which is to say nothing of his continued relationship with De Niro, DiCaprio, and Plemmons in front of the camera.  Killers was bankrolled by Apple Studios but distribution was handled by Paramount Pictures after its out-of-competition premiere at the Cannes Film Festival.  The involvement of a traditional studio giving the film a theatrical release also brings hope that it will receive a home video release as well instead of being left to rot on Apple’s low-subscriber, designer streaming platform after the 2024 Awards cycle concludes. 

For a film as overwhelming as Killers is, it is surprisingly accessible while still being dense with history.  This is partially due to the narrative mortality of the film being rather cut and dry as far as it is concerned with Hale who is our tour guide in the opening gambit of the film, informing us about how this faraway community operates.  Before Prieto’s camera glides overhead and then down through the bustling train station, a sepia-toned echo of how Scorsese opened some of his most acclaimed and bombastic films, audiences are privy to a funeral led by the leader of the Osage tribe (Talee Redcorn).  They are laying to rest a ceremonial pipe, the symbol of their traditional ways, as the council has decided that the path forward is to allow their youngest generation to be educated in the ways of the white settlers.  It will be the first of many funerals that we will see across the film and when the camera first lands on Hale seated in his tall, backed chair, surrounded by wealth, we know he is not to be trusted and his empire has been built on the back of fraud. 

De Niro has one of the loudest performances in the film, really getting to lean into the nasty and downright evil nature of Hale.  Scorsese was smart to not mask that Hale is a rotten man, but that does not mean that De Niro is without an arc.  Rather, as the mastermind behind a string of murders from which he conveniently benefits, the arc is just how far and just how ruthless and cold can this man become. It also puts the community on trial as everyone seems to know he is pulling the strings but turns a blind eye given what he does for them. He opened a dance studio. He gets insulin to Mollie, a medicine so new and expensive she is one of only five people in the world able to afford the luxury.  The audience, in our oversized recliners, also participate in the complicity even though our stomachs may turn as Hale puts up $1000 of his “own” money for leads on who is murdering the Osage people.  Scorsese is no stranger to despicable people, but so often the violence in his narratives exists within a separate universe from the wider community; criminals cheating criminals until someone pulls the trigger.  Here, Hale is behind the killings of his own friends and neighbors, all while wearing a smile on his face and without a single hint of remorse.  

For those who have followed Scorsese’s career even with just spotty attendance, they will notice a shot towards the end of the film where De Niro leans in and places his forehead against DiCaprio’s. It is a poignant image that, from a younger director, could almost be seen as one actor passing the torch down to his latest muse, but Scorsese’s storied loyalty instead allows us to see these two icons on screen together. 

Turning focus to Ernest, his is the role that the film most closely tracks. DiCaprio has a truly difficult and beguiling role here at once deeply allegiant to his nefarious uncle but also genuinely in love with Mollie, the gullible man constantly finds himself making the wrong decisions. Next to De Niro, DiCaprio still appears young, albeit not as baby-faced in his earlier roles, but when he is acting separate from the octogenarian, he looks old – old enough to know better – which, no matter how hard he tries, puts the character of Ernest in a really odd spot for audiences to witness. There is no evidence to suggest that Ernest is – to use a more modern term – on the spectrum and which would make him an easy target to be manipulated by Hale, but DiCaprio at times appears to be tapping into some of the affectations of an earlier role of his, Arnie Grape, and coming to set looking some 20 years older than Ernest would have been at the start of Killers, he really struggles to thread the needle of morality for his character. He is not the doe-eyed boy sitting atop his uncle’s knee any longer, he is a war veteran, and while the town of Grey Horse operates in its own way given the specific wealth distribution of its residents, audiences will struggle to accept that Ernest was merely tricked into action and realizing all too late that there is no escaping Hale’s web. Without being able to accurately chart where Ernest is going, the narrative does teeter slightly into being a bit unwieldy as the role gets away from the actor in the lengthy middle act, but there is enough merit in the individual moments that keep us engaged. 

Oddly enough, DiCaprio is at his best when Ernest is acting of his own accord, even if he is just a colossal screwup at every turn putting at risk his uncle’s empire. Always a cog in Hale’s crushing wheel, Ernest orchestrates the mugging of William Burns (Gary Basaraba), the private investigator hired by Mollie, organizes the bombing that will kill Mollie’s sister Rita (JaNae Collins), her husband Bill (Jason Isbell), and their housekeeper, Nettie (Shonagh Smith), and he also becomes increasingly aware that the insulin he is administering to Mollie is part of a larger plot to kill her, as well. He is sloppy, though, oftentimes placing trust in people who do not have the same eye for details to make sure their tracks are covered, but it is in this web of crime and corruption that DiCaprio excels and the film as a whole feels most comfortably as a “Martin Scorsese Picture.” 

His 26th narrative feature film to date, Scorsese breaks the mold, especially as it relates to the other films in his American Crime cycle, and gives a considerable amount of control over the story to Mollie. It is unfair to Gladstone to file her performance away as a comparison to another “Scorsese Wife,” just as it is impossible to view Killers entirely separate from Scorsese’s body of work especially in how it fits into this latest – and potentially last – phase of his career that started with Silence (2016) and has since been a desperate search for morality in a cruel and violent world.  Even more so than before, Scorsese is interested in how the crimes committed by his leading men poison the world around them; how they betray the safety of the ones they love in an effort to provide for them. For example, in The Irishman (2019), Welker White plays Jo, the wife of Jimmy Hoffa, and there is a scene where she goes into her car, turns the key just shy of engaging the ignition, and there is this moment of pure dread that washes over her – and us – as we await the explosion of a car bomb. Relief comes when there is no explosion. No bomb. But the threat will always be there.  

Mollie’s entire middle act is living in that fear, looking over her shoulder as her family is being picked off one by one among others in her community, counting backward until death, dressed as her uncle-in-law, at last, comes for her. It is an emotionally robust role, though not one with a lot of dialogue; a lesser actor and a lesser script would mistake this meter for weakness or meekness and the character would fade into the background, but instead Gladstone gives Mollie a steely resolve. Her performance is in stark contrast to the more typical leading performances given by De Niro and DiCaprio, and there are many times when that shift almost seems to throw DiCaprio off kilter. Gladstone imbues Mollie with relentless calculation; taking control and funding the investigation, demanding her son see a doctor and inadvertently removing themselves from the planned bombing that would have closed Hale’s plot, making the journey to DC to meet with the president, and dictating how her medicine is to be administered. Unfortunately, to stay in line with history, the back half of Killers finds Mollie mostly bedridden from her husband’s poison which makes the continued love that she shows Ernest so exceptionally painful to watch. 

One could go on, exceeding the runtime of the film, in praise of the incredible performances throughout the film. Mollie’s sister Ana (Cara Jade Myers), for example, a fiery woman, always armed, equally unafraid to take control of any situation. Her demise marks a true turning point in the film, but for the ten or fifteen minutes in which Myers is handed the reins, there is a liveliness to the narrative that goes unmatched and unchallenged. Mollie’s mother Lizzie (Tantoo Cardinal) graces the screen in one of the most beautiful representations of death as she rises from her bed to join her ancestors. Henry Roan (William Belleau), Mollie’s first husband is a melancholic man who falls prey to Hale’s sympathetic advances. It is a tragic role, as many of the Osage roles are, but Belleau, in his short amount of screentime, forges such strong empathy with the audience. Finally, In the courtroom, Hale’s attorney W.S. Hamilton (Brendan Fraser), and the prosecutor, Peter Leaward (John Lithgow) go toe-to-toe in chest-beating, howling testimony that feels – admittedly – outlandish at first, but with so much corruption and ignored evidence, it might as well have been a kangaroo court anyway so why not play it like a farce. 

The way Scorsese chooses to end this film is beautiful: an overhead shot close on a drum as an Osage chorus sings. The camera pulls up revealing the community dancing in a circle around the drum.  It is a long and meditative shot, in the same emotional vein as the cemetery procession at the conclusion of Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List (1993). There is an undeniable sense of poignancy and remembrance, but there is also community, resiliency, and the strength that that provides.   

The true stumper is the penultimate scene where we join a studio audience watching the recording of an episode of The Lucky Strike Hour radio series that gives us the resolution to the story.  Narratively, it is a strange and jarring choice; one that needs to be wrestled with for quite some time. It can be seen as sensationalism having turned these murders into entertainment within the entertainment, or that it lets Hale and Ernest off easy as we do not get to see them brought to justice. It does not allow Gladstone a chance to show Mollie having moved on from Ernest, divorcing the man and remarrying later in life. Short of extending the already punishing runtime another 20 minutes to show these characters living out the end of their lives, this sequence is a creative way to not just run intertitles at the end and it is edited with the same pop and urgency as the rest of the film. Emotionally, it may fall a little flat as it accounts for the final days of Ernest and Hale, but after witnessing their menace over the last three hours, it is hard to eulogize them even though the film is not seeking to absolve them of their sins.   And then Martin Scorsese himself walks out, blue suit against red curtain, with a script in his hand.  He delivers the final words of the film, a story he is truly connected with, but for those of us in the audience who know and have followed his career for any length of time now, it is almost like the conductor turning to face the crowd and saying “that’s all folks!” though here, he is not just dismissing the audience from the auditorium, he is almost speaking on his entire body of work.  He stated recently in an interview with GQ that there are still stories he wants to tell, but he is not blind to his own mortality, either. By placing the scope of these murders in such a concentrated scene at the end of the film and in the context of entertainment, it is a self-aware reflection of what his own films have done over the last five and a half decades. He concludes with the account of Mollie’s death from diabetes, citing her obituary that made no mention of the horrific crimes that destroyed her family. To hear these crimes read out, one after another after another, harkens back to Mollie’s opening monologue as she listed off others who had all died from mysterious circumstances – her repeated “no investigation” in the same condemning, unsurprised tone – and it is just accepted as a part of life. That Scorsese does not try to frame this tragedy with a modern understanding of justice is a bold and important stance to take, but one that makes the film incredibly bleak. There is no silver lining here, and frankly, there should not be. He is not looking to rewrite or redefine history, rather, he presents us with a wealth of facts and evidence – much of the testimony in the film lifted from court transcripts – and asks us as an audience to apply our own morality to the events we just witnessed.

Killers of the Flower Moon is the earliest set of Scorsese’s American Crime cycle after Gangs of New York (2002), and while it is not set in the streets of New York, Las Vegas, or Philadelphia, it is still very much thematically at home with those works.  There will be criticism abounds about why Scorsese is telling this story instead of someone from the Osage community, but it is important to note that the film was reworked from the ground up with the Osage people heavily involved. It would certainly be a different kind of film had someone from the community led the effort, but Scorsese is respectful throughout and tells the story in the only way that someone of his background can; he is not seeking to speak for the Osage people, but rather to account for the crimes committed by the settlers. What is most interesting though is here we have a full connection not just to the men pulling the trigger, but to the victims as well. Eventually, Tom and his investigators come to Gray Horse and help to frame up the film in a more traditional cops and robbers’ dynamic in the final ninety minutes, but the first two hours is like watching a festering disease take over and destroy something from the inside out. It is the same disease that plagued Henry Hill, Sam Rothstein, Jordan Belfort, and Frank Sheeran… greed; greed over money, land, people, and power.