Flasz On Film

At a ripe age of almost eighty-one, Martin Scorsese has no intention of hanging his rifle on the hook and retiring into the sweet embrace of his rocking chair, where he’d be entitled to sit and ponder over the vast expanses of cinema he has had a hand in terraforming over the course of the last six decades or so. In fact, he has been able not only to capitalize on the recent changes in how movies are financed by bringing to life his long-gestating passion projects (vide Silence and The Irishman), but more importantly, he has used his Lebensabend to take a more holistic and all-encompassing view of his own work, the inspirations behind it and how it fits in the grand scheme of everything.  

In a way, the long-awaited epic Killers of the Flower Moon fits perfectly as a continuation of a meandering discussion on the history of America and how the worlds of crime and politics interweave to become the foundational fabric of its society which Scorsese explores in The Irishman in a similarly contemplative manner. However, the filmmaker has become more acutely aware of the limited amount of time he has left to live on this planet, or maybe simply he has grown tired of mincing his words, because he seems less inclined to dance around subjects he has been so profoundly haunted by for way longer than many of us have been alive. In no uncertain terms, Scorsese decides to turn a historical epic into a sermon on how America’s post-colonial legacy weighs on the filmmaker’s shoulders and how – he suspects – it might radiate powerfully enough to exert influence on the lives of people living on the American soil today.  

To this end, Killers of the Flower Moon, co-adapted from David Grann’s non-fiction bestseller by Eric Roth (Forrest Gump, Munich) and Scorsese himself, extends the filmmaker’s gaze way beyond what mainstream audiences would consider his comfort zone of exploring larger-than-life egos and their imprints on the world around them and positions itself as a natural extension of both Gangs of New York and The Irishman by way of peeling off the epidermis of well-behaved puritanic normalcy draped over America’s cultural heritage and showing the world the grime, blood and sin upon which the world’s foremost modern empire was built.  

With grace, tact and deliberate poignancy, the film takes us back to post-WWI Oklahoma where the local Osage population had found themselves living atop a rich oil reserve, to which they retained their rights and became immensely affluent. However, where there’s money, there’s greed and where there’s greed, there’s little room for morals. Thus, Scorsese zooms in on this subject by way of introducing us to Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio), a veteran coming back home to work for his uncle William King Hale (Robert De Niro), who is a locally recognized public figure, an entrepreneur and (at least seemingly) a champion of a progressive idea of bringing the Osage and the white settlers together to form a cohesive community. However, nothing is what it seems on the outside because Hale (who exemplifies more generally held sentiments among white Americans in the area) presides over a criminal empire built on fraud, intimidation, blackmail and murder of the Osage indigenous to the area, all with the aim to slowly but surely take over their land and seize control of the oil riches.  

As the movie slowly unfolds, Scorsese lets us shake hands with Burkhart and hang onto his hat as he (again – seemingly) uses his innate charm to build a life for himself in the area and eventually comes to marry a local Osage girl Mollie (Lily Gladstone). But in contrast to what a typical prestige narrative would perhaps suggest – and maybe because real life is not a fairy tale after all – what we are soon thereafter allowed to understand is that Ernest is not a kind-hearted simpleton who falls in love and wants to become a part of the Osage community, even though he learns the language and respects his wife’s customs, but he is rather a cynical villain bent on letting his uncle take over everything the Osage hold dear and facilitate their displacement, even if it means killing his own wife and her closest kin.  

And as much as the story itself – the plague of murders of Osage women stretched across multiple years – is more than enough to make the movie a compelling piece of slow-burning subterfuge and emotionally draining complex drama of conflicting duties, deception and fiendishly subtle oppression, Killers of the Flower Moon goes a step further and uses its narrative underpinnings as a case study of how America was built on the backs of the indigenous population with nothing short of malicious intent behind it. In fact, I’d venture a guess that Scorsese wants us to do a bit more than to just ingest these facts. He would like us to wrestle with them, which is partly why Killers of the Flower Moon falls well outside of what mainstream audiences may consider acceptable theatrical entertainment.  

As I suggested above, Killers of the Flower Moon is not a movie-movie. It’s not here to entertain you with its spectacle spread across three easily discernible acts and send you home with something to talk about at the watercooler at work. Scorsese wants the film itself to serve as a runway for our own thoughts, however uncomfortable they may be, to not only brew quietly in the background while the film runs its course, but to openly intervene in what’s unfolding on the screen. This is perhaps why his film might be quite uncomfortable to sit through (even though Scorsese is decidedly less graphic and unsettling with his craft of imagery). It’s a movie that is equally an experiential time capsule and an emotionally charged sermon designed to pierce our hearts and force us to look upon our souls, regardless of if you are an American or not.  

The kind of evil Scorsese uncovers in this sprawling epic crosses boundaries and affects many other cultures. Although he is definitely grappling with his own legacy of inbuilt guilt for which there is no way of making tangible reparations (because you can’t turn back time or bring dead people back to life) as a descendant of people who came to settle in on the American soil and fractionally contributed to the brutal supplantation of the indigenous populations, Scorsese succeeds in opening up Killers of the Flower Moon to everyone else… because his movie is about the pliability of the human nature and how easy it is for simple greed to make us do despicable things to people we might consider our family.  

By finding a delicate balance between keeping the grander narrative continually in the scope of the film and keeping sharp focus on Mollie (a magnetizingly stoic and self-assured woman in her own right) and Ernest (a two-faced villainous snake incapable of developing a moral spine), Scorsese makes this movie a piercing exploration of evil and fundamental dishonesty and suggests there simply is no other way than to acknowledge them as parts of who we are, as opposed to aberrations  of who we think we are.  Consequently, this otherwise complex historical epic with prestige aspirations becomes a vessel for the accumulated intergenerational suffering, guilt and perhaps an attempt at penance for sins of those who lived before us.  

There aren’t many filmmakers out there who can be as piercing and ruthless while also being so comprehensively regal and magnanimous as Martin Scorsese is in the way he went about bringing this massive narrative together. In fact, I’d go as far as to say that Scorsese is the only living filmmaker capable of making Killers of the Flower Moon into the masterpiece of modern cinema that it is. Not only is it a phenomenal platform for outstanding talent to come together – Gladstone is nothing short of electrifying while Di Caprio continues to find new layers of his perfectly honed craft – but it is above all a film that is both acutely aware of its own gravitas and capable of carrying out its mission without ever dipping into a realm of unceremonious preachiness.  

And this is where the magic is. It takes a genius of visual storytelling – a literal titan of cinema – to turn a historical epic into a vehement sermon and to somehow make the viewers forget they are being lectured and force them to lower their guards. But not to pummel them with guilt and invitations to chest-pounding and meaningless mea-culpas. Instead, Scorsese wows with his visual scale, ensnares with attention to detail and floors with his singular ability to imbue a story like this – meandering and deliberately paced as it is – with an unmatched sense of urgency.  

Killers of the Flower Moon is as heart-rending as any story of love and betrayal would be and as blood-curdling as any historical account of a genocide should be, all somehow working in tandem. Consequently, Scorsese uses his time with the audience not only to teach and preach, but perhaps predominantly to show the world that it is important to remember the sins of our past, but that it is equally indispensable not to let them define the present. In a potent display of his cinematic mastery, Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon explores that inexplicably chilling realization that some acts cannot be undone. They can only be remembered. And the legacy of those who suffered can and should be carried forward into the future to prevent those injustices from reoccurring.