Consideration for the sensitivities of ethnic minorities has never been much of a concern for Martin Scorsese: a cursory glance at the back catalogue shows he has spent his career alternately trashing and ridiculing Italian-Americans, Irish-Americans and Jewish-Americans. (Your classic Wasp-Americans get it in the neck in his glossy period literary adaptation The Age of Innocence.) Which is why his late-breaking pivot to unusual levels of respect and collaboration with the Osage tribal nation for Killers of the Flower Moon resulted in such an interesting and – for Scorsese at least – radically different kind of film.
It wouldn’t be possible to tell the gruesome story of the Osage murders any other way. An absolutely emblematic example of incomers’ greed, manipulation of the law, “manifest destiny” and cold inhumanity, it’s a narrative that still chills the blood to this day. Scorsese’s approach – apparently prompted by co-star Leonardo DiCaprio – was to move away from the police procedural line taken by the source text by David Grann and carefully extract a slice of human drama: the story of Mollie Kyle, who survived the killings, and her husband, Ernest Burkhart. Their relationship is scrutinised in forensic detail, and invested fully with the ambivalence both are assumed to feel. Hence the enormous running time: extraordinary for a film that has no physically arduous journey at its heart. Scorsese’s film actually wears its size incredibly lightly – no wonder he was irritated at suggestions it needed a toilet break.
The film’s aim seems to be to use this single relationship as a way in to understand the larger picture; in doing so it arguably sacrifices a sense of how wide-ranging and truly horrible the murders were. But the payoff is worth it: in providing two meaty roles for DiCaprio and co-star Lily Gladstone – as well as yet another essay in human nastiness from Robert De Niro as rancher William King Hale, who was convicted of one of some 60+ suspicious Osage deaths – Killers of the Flower Moon offers amazingly rich character drama, providing both the housing for the cultural reparations that Scorsese (and no doubt the wider Hollywood community) wants to offer the Osage, and the ballast for really heavyweight acting from all three leads.
Scorsese knits it all into a seamless whole, deftly balancing the main stories as well as (somewhat late in the day) bringing in the flatfoot element in the shape of Jesse Plemons’ FBI guy Thomas Bruce White. The crime-detection thread certainly helps to tie the narrative up, but in relegating it to a sub-theme, Scorsese is making the point that he, and Hollywood, can’t go on the way it has. With this brilliant film he has ended the discussion.
