Killers of the Flower Moon PEOPLE Review: Leonardo DiCaprio Stars in Martin Scorsese’s Sinister Western

Almost two centuries ago, the historian Francis Parkman wrote that the fate of the American natives had always been unsettled and a foregone conclusion: the native man “will not learn the arts of civilization, and he and his forest must perish together.” Passionate film by director Martin Scorsese based on facts Killers of the Flower Moon shows how these arts of civilization included greed, deceit, murder, and the patience to put it all into practice – in the case killers, against a tribe in the 1920s.

This is the most sinister film ever made about the West and probably the most chillingly pessimistic portrait of the American character since There will be blood.

In the decades before World War I, members of the Osage Nation in Oklahoma became rich – millionaires – after oil was discovered on their land. What could be more tempting to white ranchers (whose acreage held no promise of such riches) than to marry Osage women and take control of their oil interests? That’s what rancher William Hale (Robert De Niro), the devil’s notion of a life coach, lays out as a plan of action for his aimless young nephew Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio), who has just returned from the war.

Martin Scorsese says Leonardo DiCaprio convinced the director to let him play the villain instead of the hero in the Killers

Killers of the Flower Moon.

Melinda Sue Gordon/Apple

Ernest becomes the chauffeur of one of those wealthy Osage women, Mollie Kyle (Lily Gladstone). He woos her—clumsily, as he does most things—and marries her. She loves him, and he may love her, but Ernest loves money. Mollie feels it too. What she cannot know is that Ernest and his uncle will kill her sisters, one by one. All those Osage oil claims will now flow to Mollie.

And if Mollie herself dies too soon…

The film carries a slow, agonizing air of suspense, made all the more acute by Ernest’s clumsy attempts to hire killers competent enough to do the job. (Assassination on the Plains is a brutal but imprecise science.) The tension begins to ease only with the arrival of FBI agent Tom White (Jesse Plemons). White quickly puts together a case, as any trained, uncorrupted lawyer would – if there was one around.

Lily Gladstone with DiCaprio as her husband.

Melinda Sue Gordon/Apple

DiCaprio, starring in his fifth film for Scorsese, isn’t quite right here: Ernest is a dim-witted, greedy charmer, but as he begins to realize that his love for Mollie outweighs (or maybe just equals) his desire to kill her, DiCaprio signals moral growth mostly with a protruding jaw, as if he had packed too many rolls of tobacco. On this issue, therefore – as an ambiguous portrait of a marriage in which love and hate are perversely intertwined – Killers it fails.

Ali Gladstone, a Native American actress who recently appeared on FX reserved dogs, is outstanding in the most important, but also the most enigmatic role in the film. She has tenderness, caution, distance, sometimes courage—she joins an Osage delegation in Washington, DC to request an investigation into the murders in the community—and a cumulative tragic force. Her Mollie is almost a country unto herself, shadowed by fleeting, shape-shifting clouds. As mute frontier bride Holly Hunter in the Piano, she somehow exists outside and above the cruelties that threaten to break and destroy her.

JaNae Collins, left, Gladstone, Cara Jade Myers and Jillion Dion.

Apple TV+

You may have heard it Killers is a long time — 3 hours, 26 minutes — and moves at a serious, measured pace. But how exactly should the story of systematic genocide go?

Unlike Christopher Nolan, the director of the second great historical epic of the year, Oppenheimer, Scorsese isn’t trying to create an invigorating, restless kinetic experience. A murderer breathing rises and falls naturally, allowing Scorsese to quietly lead us into completely unexpected moments. The brief moment in which we see a vision of the afterlife of a dying Osage woman—she is led, laughing, into the woods—is one of the most beautiful, mysterious scenes he ever shot.

Then, in a startlingly strange coda, the director himself steps forward and, with a sad fatalism that Francis Parkman might have appreciated, brings the saga to a close. (In theaters October 20, R)

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Source: HIS Education