Cannes Film Festival 2023: ‘Killers of the Flower Moon’ Is Martin Scorsese’s Umpteenth Masterpiece Exploring the Gnarled Mechanics of Crime

Hotly anticipated as the first Western in the long and varied career of cinema’s most devout servant Martin Scorsese, the elegant, elegiac Killers of the Flower Moon both fits within and defies that genre’s classification. By the classical definition, the oater tracks the white man’s campaign to tame the state of nature and clear a path for civilization to follow, a violent wrestling of chaos into order. Late in the film, the formation and arrival of America’s first federal law enforcement agency— government men, as they’re called — signals a giving way of rawhide independence to organization at the national level. But this isn’t the Wild West; in the town of Fairfax in the august Osage country, the indigenous population has already established a prosperous local economy oriented around the geysers of oil marking them as God’s chosen people. The so-called “savages” speak perfect English, dress in the finest finery, and own more just-invented cars per capita than any other market. Scorsese’s umpteenth masterpiece instead chronicles the insidious, low-down efforts of outsiders to infiltrate, subsume, and destroy a culture standing in the way of a hideous modernity. 

As the tellingly-nicknamed William “King” Hale (Robert De Niro, mustering the good stuff for the last living director still able to get it out of him) explains to his nephew Ernest (a demonic Leonardo DiCaprio), their takeover comes from the inside out. Though ordinances already require the richest natives to declare themselves “incompetent” and go to the bank with a Caucasian “guardian” to access the money they can’t be trusted to spend correctly, they do still hold legal title to these princely sums. The invasive species seeks to change that by concealing their rapacious capitalistic hunger behind a smile, ingratiating themselves with the Osage often to the point of matrimony. Beyond diluting the bloodline, this intermarriage places Ernest and men like him in line to inherit the all-important headrights that bring passive income from the black gold siphoned out of their spouses’ reservation soil. So if those wives weren’t around, and their family members had all died under mysterious circumstances, then qui bono? So begins a dirty plot to seize control of the next century, noted by one concerned character as an echo of the similarly racist massacre in Tulsa. 

A Western without the heroism, a serial-killer thriller without the mystery, a romantic drama without the love — Scorsese’s latest resists genre convention and shies away from their attendant enjoyments, an adroit choice for a downbeat, mournful account of nearly-lost history. The original draft of the script placed focus on the newly-formed FBI and its emissary Tom White (Jesse Plemons), a cowboy-hatted Texas Ranger turned G-man who occupies about half of the nonfiction book adapted for the script. He’s been relegated to a more functional, minor position by Scorsese and his co-screenwriter Eric Roth, the cleared space filled by the Osage, in particular Ernest’s wife Mollie. Played with a rounded-edge alto voice and eyes that go on forever by the dizzyingly great Lily Gladstone, she supplies the film with its moral anchor, willful and self-possessed even as she spends most of the run time ailing of diabetes exacerbated by a Hitchcock-adjacent poisoning scheme. 

A Western without the heroism, a serial-killer thriller without the mystery, a romantic drama without the love — Killers Of The Flower Moon resists genre convention and shies away from their attendant enjoyments.

Ernest harbors impure intentions from the jump, promptly getting to work robbing unsuspecting Osage upon his arrival in Oklahoma after a tour of duty as an army cook in WWI, but he’s not faking his attraction to Mollie. The chemistry between them has a genuine warmth and playfulness, his aw-shucks good-ol’-boy bit charming her behind her eye-rolling. But as Ernest himself states aloud without much awareness of its cruel dissonance, he’s attracted to money just a little bit more, and so the combination of inbred bigotry and unfettered greed sets him on the path to damnation. The authentic tenderness between him and Mollie can’t outweigh the loyalty to King, an addition to Scorsese’s rogues’ gallery of toxic mentor figures alongside Jack Nicholson in The Departed, Matthew McConaughey in The Wolf of Wall Street, and the late Paul Sorvino in Goodfellas. As in those three films, Scorsese exhibits a fascination with the gnarled mechanics of crime, how men in positions of power rearrange social and economic structures to their own benefit. This time around, in a relative departure for the auteur, we spend a goodly chunk of movie in the courtroom as the culprits answer for their sins, the one segment during which this three-and-a-half-hour saga threatens to lose steam.

Transgression, absolution, and redemption form the main pillars of the Scorsese canon, and they bear the load of a heaving tragedy once again in the case of this epic, though not for the pale-faced encroachers. From the first aerial view of the main drag in Fairfax — the crowning achievement from legendary production designer Jack Fisk, going apeshit with a limitless supply of Apple’s money in his first Scorsese collaboration — to the breathtaking, kaleidoscopic final shot, Scorsese foregrounds the struggles and resilience of the Osage. Many of their present-day descendants either consulted or appear onscreen, a gesture of Scorsese’s open-minded admiration for all devout worshippers previously expressed toward Buddhist monks in Kundun. The Osage refer to God as Wah-Kon-Tah, present in the natural bounty bursting forth from the ground as in the owl that appears as the vanguard of death. Their faith rings eternal, a lodestar that will never fade into memory, no matter how the covetous may try to appropriate and erase their heritage. In its grand and humble way, this landmark film guarantees it. 

Charles Bramesco (@intothecrevassse) is a film and television critic living in Brooklyn. In addition to Decider, his work has also appeared in the New York Times, the Guardian, Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, Newsweek, Nylon, Vulture, The A.V. Club, Vox, and plenty of other semi-reputable publications. His favorite film is Boogie Nights.