I read David Grann’s nonfiction book, the basis for this new release, last year and really enjoyed it. Yes, it’s a story about a great injustice, but it was compellingly written and a fascinating story of justice at best partially realized. I sent the book when I was finished along with the excellent (but very thick) history book The Battle Cry of Freedom to my parents. Dad likes history. Mom likes murder mysteries, and Grann’s book reads like one for the first two-thirds or so. Then Dad ended up reading Killers of the Flower Moon because the history book’s length was intimidating or something, even reading sections to my mom. I did not see that coming.
I likewise didn’t expect Martin Scorsese to make a movie out of it with, for the first time, both of his frequent collaborators in the form of Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro. I love Scorsese’s work, so that three and a half hour runtime was not going to scare me off.
World War I vet Ernest Burkhart (DiCaprio) is coming back and looking for work. A somewhat aimless man with a stomach injury that will keep him from doing much physical labor, he goes to see his wealthy uncle William King Hale, a cattle man near the Osage Indian reservation in Oklahoma. The Osage are, because of oil on their reservation, the wealthiest people per capita on Earth, but the law doesn’t allow them to control their own money, and a lot of them die under suspicious circumstances that are never really investigated. As it is, Hale suggests Ernest maybe try to get an Osage wife, something that comes about as Ernest, working as a cab driver, starts driving around Mollie Kyle (Lily Gladstone), and while both of them are well-aware that Mollie is rich and Ernest is potentially just interested in her money, they pair do fall in love and get married.
But then Mollie’s family members start to die off one by one, all under suspicious circumstances, and while Hale is trusted by the locals as a friend of the tribe, yeah, the movie doesn’t really hide he’s behind a lot of these incidents, and it reaches a point where the killers are barely trying to hide anything. Why should they? The local sheriff, the doctors, pretty much every authority figure in town, they all seem to be on the same side as Hale to take the oil rights from the Osage by any means necessary, and Ernest, well, he doesn’t seem all that bright. Ernest is a man who seems to have a knack to always make the wrong decisions, but he and Mollie do seem to love each other as the pair get married and start having kids together. But sooner or later, someone might go looking into all these suspicious deaths. Will Ernest side with his wife or his uncle?
Lily Gladstone has been getting a lot of positive attention for this, and she earned it, but DiCaprio and De Niro also both turn in great performances. Gladstone’s is a quiet one, one that fits in well with what the movie said early on about how the Osage are a quiet people who are more about listening. Meanwhile, DiCaprio’s Ernest is just a somewhat clueless man. He learns what he does about the Osage initially from what looks like a children’s book his uncle loans him. As for De Nero, he comes across as a charismatic but oily man, one used to getting his own way and not really a mustache-twirling sort of evil. He’s the symbol of the system that is apathetic at best towards the Osage and only cares about adding to an already impressive fortune. DiCaprio and Gladstone, meanwhile, are two people who love each other despite the fact that, well, one may be trying to kill the other and the other isn’t a fool.
Scorsese paces this one out slowly. It’s a deliberate movie, one that has a story to tell that could maybe be a bit shorter, but I didn’t much mind. This is another one of those banality of evil sort of things, where men like Hale won’t generally get their own hands dirty when they can find easily disposable minions to do the work for them. And while arguably DiCaprio gets far more screentime than anyone else, the movie does work to do right by the Osage–who were consulted by the director. Plus, honestly, Scorsese found a unique way to do the standard way that so many based-on-a-true story movies do when they tell the viewer what happened after while also reminding the audience that other issues happened (the attack on Tulsa’s Black Wall Street is mentioned a couple times). It’s probably one of the best Scorsese movies he’s made in a while, and it’s an important story for people to know more about.
Grade: A
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