GREAT SPIRIT, FULL BLOOD
MARTIN SCORSESE’S KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON (2023)
OCTOBER 24, 2023
The power and presence of soul, both of the individual and the nation, are both the story’s and the camera’s chief concerns in Martin Scorsese’s long anticipated late work.
Rarely in a Scorsese movie has the action moved so slowly. Noble indigenous women step gently down wooden stairs onto dust roads, wrapped around the shoulders in elegant wool blankets. Men in trim vests and bushy mustaches inch around pool tables in gradual prowls. An automotive “race” passes by down the main street with early 20th century roadsters, never going as fast as nearby horses could. There is no wide eyed, manic racing around like Henry Hill (Goodfellas, 1990) or lightning-like fly throughs from a Hughes H-1 Racer (The Aviator, 2004). Things are slower here in the early 20th century west.
We are drawn in and decelerated, made to fix our gaze intently and at length on a story told for the first time at this scale. From 1921 to 1926, the Osage people of Oklahoma, thrust into incredible wealth through the discovery of oil on their lands, lived through a “reign of terror” in which there were likely over 100 murders and mysterious deaths, most of which received no investigation. It was agents in J. Edgar Hoover’s newly formed “Bureau of Investigation” that uncovered the plot of a local landowner and political figure determined to infiltrate the Osage and siphon their inheritance.
This is genocide at a family and community level. This is the Tulsa Massacre, with Black prosperity laid waste (also included here in a stroke of awareness). This is western white oppression in its fifth century. This is the history of America. A history lived far from the glimmering metropolis of New York in the same decade, or Hollywood forming in the golden hills of southern California. There is gold here, of the oil variety, but the film prefers to stay in the busy homes of its residents, or jostling through the town center, or in cars, close enough to smell the motives and the aftershave.
The story begins and remains faithful to the one told in David Grann’s acclaimed 2017 book, Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI. Leonardo DiCaprio plays Ernest Buckhart, a war veteran returning home and straight into the manipulation of his town hero uncle, William Hale, played by Robert DeNiro. The world building is immaculate, as only a six decade master like Scorsese can bring to life – with help from another master. Production Designer Jack Fisk, recently profiled in a career spanning piece in the New York Times Magazine, uses all of his experience, bravado and melancholy to iterate on American pastoral themes since Badlands (1973) and Days of Heaven (1978). Those two films serve as an elegant prologue to his latest achievement, and first collaboration with Scorsese, two masters finally crossing paths. Fisk’s commitment to the practical, textured, accurate period production becomes the foundation of his films, and perhaps even their centers. What Edward Hopper did with houses by railroads, Fisk does with houses on plains: American iconography rendered real.
Scorsese has said he probably has “one more [film] in him.” But it ended up being the last by composer Robbie Robertson, who passed shortly before the film’s release, and who collaborated with Scorsese on a number of his hits, like Raging Bull (1980), The King of Comedy (1982), The Wolf of Wall Street (2013) and Silence (2016). Here, we get a steady, driven, almost heist-flick intrigue from its bass, light drums and harmonica – but in places where music would draw us in, we hear, as is one of the director’s areas of exploration – silence. But it never takes you out of the story, as does many an over eager composer, stealing emotion and over-sculpting it.
The story unfolds at an even pace, and we soon see a simple structure that will carry us through. But it is the first 15-20 minutes of exposition about the Osage that I found the most moving of all. In addition to Scorsese’s 26 feature films, he has made 17 documentaries, and the blending of these skill sets is on beautiful display here. Never in his filmography have we felt such reverence for a people, culture or idea as we see in this first section. We learn about indigenous people that comprise just one of the more than 1,000 tribes that have lived in the northern continent. We see and hear customs, tradition, dress, prayer and hope, a foundation upon which the story’s evils will rise.
Which is why some of Scorsese’s longtime pals seem out of place in this hallowed setting. I will venture out on a bullet-riddled limb to speak of sacrilege, and wonder if the film may have been stronger without Robert DeNiro. Cape Fear (1991) was fun, wacky and wild, but as we heard there, his southern accent just doesn’t sing. In his characters’ passionate outbursts, the New York vowels always come through. Instead of immersing into his character, my first thought whenever he appeared on screen was, “Will the accent hold in this scene?” The most natural he is in this film, and a bit arresting to see, is when he is walking up stairs, his legs visibly thin, slow and shaky, balancing his slight frame and three piece suits. Like his longtime friend and director – this is a twilight performer, and we are seeing him age before us. DeNiro’s filmography nears 140 films. We should all be so spry, this many performances later. But Scorsese and Eric Roth, with whom he wrote the film, do his character a disservice by withholding from his character any interiority, backstory or depth. How did he come to be this way? What does he do with the money for which he murders? What are his secrets?
A similar performance exposure befalls our star, Leonardo DiCaprio, as well – for the first half of the film, he is committed to a jutted out jaw, southern drawl and slow articulation. But in his most fiery moments, he speeds right back up, recalling Calvin Candie, Howard Hughes, Jordan Belfort and every other character he’s played who is prone to outbursts. But committed he is, and what he typically provides the camera in charm and energy he replaces with dim wits and desperation – something new and novel for him. The degree to which he’s believable in this character mirrors how this character could be believable as a loyal husband. We’re never quite sure of the precise degree of his awareness and complicity, given his mental limitations, so the film always has us in its pocket, just as his wife Mollie keeps him by her side.
Much has been said about Lily Gladstone’s central performance as Mollie Buckhart, to whom Ernest plays husband, and whose family perishes, one by one. She is not only the emotional center of the film, the source of gravity and truth – she is a calm, steady, sound minded and self possessed woman in the middle of a Scorsese film. His gaze has shifted, and now directs us to hers. She does more with her eyes and face than many performers with their entire bodies. Her Osage name is “Wah-kon-tah-he-um-pah,” meaning “great spirit,” and she is a “full blood,” meaning she has the most amount of rights to the land (and the oil) as an individual can.
There are many scenes in which we wish she’d leap up and strike back at her oppressors, with the fire and brimstone of Casino’s Ginger (played by Sharon Stone in her best role), eviscerating the men around her. But it never happens. In possession of herself until the very end, she stands straight; looks directly; speaks clearly and plainly (in both English and Osage). She will be an Oscar nominee and hopefully our winner, with every good reason, the first of which being her luminosity across this great work of filmmaking.
It is her performance that lights the torch of this film, and serves as its central metaphor. She is the physical manifestation of the plight of indigenous Americans since European settlers arrived: noble and spiritual, brought to ruin first and quickly by murder; secondly and gradually by disease. Somewhere between 135 and 150 million indigenous Americans perished over the last 500 years. Everything was taken from them, beginning with their land and resources. Gladstone embodies this journey, challenging our assumptions about how much grace and self possession a person or people can embody through an epic and horrifying decline.
The extras in Scorsese pictures – be it the stiff aristocracy in The Age of Innocence (1993) or the impoverished throngs in Gangs of New York (2002) – are always all in. But it’s the indigenous people, many of them from the Osage Nation, who give this film its cultural, local and contemporary authenticity like we haven’t seen before from him. Costumes feel not like costumes, but real tradition. Language sounds organic to our ears. Motions are simple and easily performed, without fanfare or emphasis. During a traditional ceremony, an infant is given the name “sun hawk woman,” as her head bobbles about in the morning light. Perhaps it is a filmmaker turning toward the earth, and to the quiet past, versus characterizing and even satirizing modern white man and their self destruction.
Killers also diverges from the Scorsese canon in its absence of sensationalism in violence. Bullets through heads are common Scorsese fare, but here, save a few quick, gruesome shocks, much of violence occurs off screen. The largest explosion is heard and not seen. There are no baseball bats to the head. No bodies thrown from building tops, spurting fountain-like blood. There is violence, to be sure; but it is no longer the loudest voice. Instead, the silence and steady eyes of its central character that remain in our memories for days afterwards.
How the story unfolds will feel differently, too. While we’re used to a devastating downward Scorsese spiral and light denouement, here, our man is working according to history. There are often no firecrackers when it comes to social justice – just flames that eventually peter, and go out. The film’s ending coda sparks curiosity, but again, is historically accurate. It is also a good reminder – of just how many histories there are out there, and how most have no Scorseses, or Ava DuVernays, or Alfonso Cuarons, or Ang Lees to illuminate them, let alone to this magnitude. Are there thousands? Millions? And how many filmmakers will have the courage, mastery and grace to tell them?