Killers of the Flower Moon movie review: A compelling story of greed, evil, privilege and exploitation

The two moments are about the only instances when Killers of the Flower Moon allows its actors to be anything other than characters driving a story. It’s a compelling story alright, of greed, evil, control, privilege and exploitation – layered just enough with religion, like these things are. It also wants to believe it is about a complex love, though the film doesn’t spend enough time on it.

That is not to say that it isn’t another breathtakingly impressive work from Scorsese – beautifully shot, with arresting music. The director has co-written the screenplay from a book that, for the first time, explored the murders and terror wrought upon the Osage tribe in the 1920s by the White man, after oil changed their fortunes. It is the dark underbelly of famed American enterprise, laid bare in all its blood and gore.

In a departure from the book, which focused on the investigation of the Osage murders and how these directly led to the rise of the FBI, Scorsese zooms in on the people at the heart of that probe. They include Mollie; Ernest (DiCaprio), the man who works his way into her heart and allows her into his, to some degree; and Ernest’s uncle Hale (De Niro), who pushes them towards a marital union with the aim of laying his hands on Mollie’s inherited riches.

Gladstone, who is exceptional till the film requires her to recede as the men take over with all their scheming, and DiCaprio make an intriguing pair — Mollie all patience and reticence, Ernest all bluster and blah. No, he “isn’t thick… but strong”, he insists to a patronising Hale, and you know that Ernest has been trying to convince others about this for a long time. However, even in the WWI he just survived, he served only as a cook for the infantry, a detail Hale coaxes out of him.

So when Hale reels him in, dangling the carrots and stick, Ernest is willing. “I love money, I just love it,” he declares. What is more disconcerting is how Mollie, who over one memorable lazy afternoon tells her sisters how she realises Ernest is a “coyote” who wants her money, but that she desires him, loses her agency almost immediately as they are married.

From then on, as the Osages get killed, including Mollie’s three sisters, in barely concealed, ruthless murders, the Native Americans are hardly more than victims. They are aggrieved, hold meetings against the White man’s conspiracy, and make declarations of fighting unto death. But when they do actually fight back, including a remarkable journey made by Mollie and others to Washington DC, to convince the government to investigate what has befallen their tribe, the film accords them barely a glance.

At one time, the scare that has set into the tribe, with its ancient beliefs in nature and spirits and communing with the dead, causes them to put up fairy lights outside their homes – dubbed the ‘fraid lights’. But this sense of terror is there just for Hale to chuckle over, and Ernest to wonder about. We don’t see it from the Osage point of view.

In fact, the point of view is almost entirely Ernest’s and Hale’s. It’s one man torn between guilt and greed, and another man clawing in the space between. While clearly the money has changed the power equation in the Osage Country, with some Whites in the employ of the tribe, many Osages now in thrall of the good life, and others held to binding treaties with their White “guardians” (a subject the film doesn’t bother explaining), there is no exploration of this large grey area in Killers of the Flower Moon.

De Niro is as usual marvellous, so convincing and creepy in his ambiguities that, even with all the evidence, one can see why the Osages saw him as a “friend” and “benefactor”. DiCaprio has the most difficult role of all, and while he is brilliant in flashes, especially in his court testimony, he doesn’t get to work enough on what is the beating heart of this story: Ernest’s relationship with Mollie.

Scorsese could not have planned it, but Killers of the Flower Moon comes right when questions of land and who it belongs to, natives versus settlers, is occupying our headlines. Who but one of the greatest story-tellers of our time to address the same?

Killers of the Flower Moon movie director: Martin Scorsese

Killers of the Flower Moon movie cast: Leonardo DiCaprio, Robert De Niro, Lily Gladstone, Jesse Plemons, Cara Jade Myers, Scott Shepherd

Killers of the Flower Moon movie rating: 4 stars