Get the latest Syracuse news delivered right to your inbox.
Subscribe to our newsletter here.

Martin Scorsese knows he’s running out of time.

In a May interview, the 80-year-old acknowledged his own mortality, expressing the desire to continue telling stories. With the time he has, the director left no stone unturned in his latest feature film, “Killers of the Flower Moon.”

Through exceptional performances and a rejection of certain aspects of his cinematic style — flashy, long camera movements and ambitious, greedy characters that suffer an eventual downfall — Scorsese wants to show how greed can infect every aspect of society and shouldn’t be glamorized.

Scorsese portrays the ideas that make up the American myth, like the American Dream, have violent undertones. Money can be earned through hard work, but sometimes that hard work involves ruthless murders. He’s told stories like these before, but never in such a devastating manner, which is saying a lot from the man who directed some of the most violent, brutal and brilliant films ever like “Taxi Driver,” “Raging Bull,” “Goodfellas” and “The Irishman.”

Adapted from David Grann’s 2017 book of the same name, the film tells the story of how conniving men like Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his uncle William Hale (Robert De Niro) slowly murder members of the Osage Nation, a Native American tribe in Oklahoma. They do so after oil is found there, making the Osage some of the richest people in the country. The movie becomes more complicated as Burkhart marries into wealth through an Osage wife, Mollie (Lily Gladstone).

Scorsese’s latest epic is not a whodunnit like Grann’s book is. Even as no-nonsense FBI lawman Tom White (Jesse Plemons) shows up two-thirds of the way in and solves the murders, the audience must sit with the knowledge of who the murderers are and the avarice that drives these men to become killers.

Early in the film, when Burkhart reads from a children’s book, he says, “Do you see the wolves in this picture?” The wolves in this movie aren’t hard to find at all, especially since this line was placed in the initial trailer spliced with a shot of many of the film’s white characters who either murdered or controlled the Osage.

At the film’s premiere, Osage language consultant Christopher Cote shares his complicated feelings about #KillersOfTheFlowerMoon pic.twitter.com/DKR0KcsLTs

— The Hollywood Reporter (@THR) October 17, 2023

Burkhart’s greed blinds him throughout the film and eventually costs him everything, especially as his plots to steal Mollie’s inheritance money become increasingly careless. This is exemplified on a micro-level early on when he steals money from some Osages and immediately gambles it away in a single night, gleefully exclaiming, “I love money!”

Scorsese has had materialistic, selfish characters in his films before, such as Jordan Belfort in “The Wolf of Wall Street.” However, that film and role have been criticized for glamorizing the life of a Wall Street crook.

Whether this criticism holds any weight is up for debate, but Scorsese, and DiCaprio for that matter, use the role of Burkhart to reckon with what happens when an ambitious idiot is driven by money with no concern for loved ones. There is no sympathizing with the protagonist.

Along with using character types that have worked for him in the past, Scorsese attempts to critically reflect on his own style in “Killers of the Flower Moon.”

At first, Scorsese reminds the viewers of his style, particularly with how he uses the camera. There are continuous landscape shots that show the scope of the oil fields. There are tracking shots of Mollie’s family that are nearly identical to the iconic Copacabana scene in “Goodfellas.” There’s also the same frantic rush like shots from “Goodfellas,” “Casino” or “The Wolf of Wall Street”.

With “Killers of the Flower Moon,” Scorsese looks for a much bleaker tone than his previous pictures. In the film’s latter half, Burkhart has some form of an idea that what he is doing to his wife and her people is wrong. Gone are the long tracking shots, and in their place are cold stills where the camera holds on for an extra second longer to emphasize the horrific actions.

To achieve this even further, the film purposely uses graphic violence to portray evil and carefully shows how racism and prejudice become institutionalized. Scorsese specifically shows how these plots are carried out, whether it be through brute force or subtle poisons.

Much of the thematic and emotional appeal of the film comes from the well-publicized rewrite of the script, which refrained from making another story about the hero being a white man. The source material originally focused on the Osage and the hate crimes committed against them, but Grann’s book was also focused on the FBI and White solving the case. This film mainly focused on the emotions of the former.

With this change, the film gets to focus much more on Mollie, a character that Gladstone played with a quiet brilliance. She is not the most vocal of characters, an intentional decision to show how the Osage feel around the racist members of the town. But when she speaks, Gladstone’s performance demands attention

And yet, Gladstone is almost absent from good portions of the film. While this can be justified since this is what happened to Mollie Burkhart in real life — she remarried, remained estranged from Ernest and passed — it calls into question whether or not the film should’ve been more from the perspective of the Osage.

In an interview at the film’s premiere, Osage language consultant Christopher Cote expressed his complicated feelings.

Was Scorsese the best person to tell this particular story about the events that happened to the Osage? No, he wasn’t. But Scorsese has been a true master of directing films portraying evil and how that guilt can weigh on a person for over five decades.

The director tells this story like nothing he has ever done before and reflects on whether or not making movies about real-life criminals is the right thing to do. But Scorsese possibly comes to an even darker conclusion: these people and historical atrocities can eventually be forgotten with cold indifference.

Published on October 25, 2023 at 9:48 pm

Contact Henry: henrywobrien1123@gmail.com