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For fans of James Dean, nothing beats the moment in “Giant” (1956) when an oil well erupts. Dean raises his arms and bathes in the rich rain. Clocking in at three hours and twenty-one minutes, “Giant” chimes with Martin Scorsese’s latest movie, “Killers of the Flower Moon,” which, not to be outdone, is five minutes longer still. In an extraordinary sequence, near the start, we see men of the Osage Nation, stripped to the waist, dancing in slow motion, and in unfeigned joy, as a shower of oil falls upon them. It may be the one happy vision in the entire film. From here on, oil will take second place to another precious commodity that gushes with the aid of human know-how. There will be blood.
Written by Scorsese and Eric Roth, “Killers of the Flower Moon” is adapted from the nonfiction book of the same title by David Grann, a staff writer at this magazine. Grann explores the quest for oil under Osage country, in Oklahoma, in the springtime of the twentieth century, and the auctions at which leases for drilling were purchased from Osage landowners. (A single lease could cost more than a million dollars.) In 1920, one reporter, describing the newfound Osage wealth, proclaimed, “Something will have to be done about it.” What was done is soon revealed in the film, as vintage stills of the Osage, posed in their finery or in resplendent automobiles, make way for other images, composed by Scorsese with equal calm: dead bodies of the Osage, viewed from above, laid out on their beds. A voice-over gives their names and their ages, adding, “No investigation.” If they are being murdered, nobody seems to mind.
Grann ranges wider, in time and in territory, than Scorsese is able to do. The book arrives at the dire proposition that there was “a culture of killing,” with Osage victims numbering in the hundreds, many of them missing from official estimates. As often as not, they were slain for their “headrights,” shares in the mineral trust of the tribe. (Were an Osage woman to meet with an unfortunate accident, or succumb to a puzzling illness, her rights would pass to her nearest and dearest—a grieving white husband, say.) Grann homes in on a bunch of characters in and around the towns of Gray Horse and Fairfax, and Scorsese does the same. We meet an elderly Osage widow named Lizzie (Tantoo Cardinal) and her daughters, Mollie (Lily Gladstone), Minnie (Jillian Dion), Rita (Janae Collins), and Anna (Cara Jade Myers). Then, there is William Hale (Robert De Niro), a cattle owner, prosperous and genial; he cultivates warm relations with the Osage and speaks their language. No one could accuse him of modesty. “Call me King,” he declares. Hale has a nephew, Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio), who is not long back from the First World War. He served with distinction as a cook.
You may be wondering who, of all these folk, will be the lodestone. For Grann, it’s Tom White, who, in 1925, was sent by J. Edgar Hoover, of the Bureau of Investigation (the forerunner of the F.B.I.), to delve into the Osage deaths. White cuts a genuinely heroic figure, upright and just, and his sleuthing guides us surely through the skeins of evidence. He shows up in the movie, too, but not for a long while, and—although he’s well played, with a courteous tenacity, by Jesse Plemons—in no way does he bind events together onscreen as he does on the page. Instead, bewilderingly, it is Ernest Burkhart whose fortunes we are invited to follow. Huh? This dumb dolt, with bran for brains? Why should he take center stage?
Early in the film, Burkhart has a talk with his uncle, who asks whether he is fond of women. “That’s my weakness,” Burkhart replies. “You like red?” Hale inquires, and we realize that he wants to marry Burkhart off to an Osage woman, like an aunt in Jane Austen trying to hitch an unpromising nephew to a local heiress. The slight difference is that very few aunts in Regency England, as a rule, arranged to have notable persons bumped off with poisoned hooch or shot in the back of the head. Hale doesn’t merely hope for Osage lucre in the long run; he wants it now, by whatever means necessary. “If you’re going to make trouble,” he says, “make it big.” Everything to come is foretold in this conversation. Burkhart does indeed court Mollie and make her his wife, to the satisfaction of his scheming uncle and to the detriment, I would argue, of suspense. Somehow the very appearance of De Niro, in a Scorsese film, is enough to give away the plot.
The loyalty of directors to their actors is a noble trait, and often a highly productive one. Think of the troupe that rotated around Ingmar Bergman, shifting between major and minor stints; in 1957, Max von Sydow was a medieval knight, bestriding “The Seventh Seal,” and then a gas-station attendant, in “Wild Strawberries.” No less faithful, Scorsese (who used von Sydow in 2010, in “Shutter Island”) has turned repeatedly to De Niro and DiCaprio, and some of the results have been stupendous.
DiCaprio, however, is a curious specimen. The more agonized the roles into which Scorsese has plunged him, in films like “Gangs of New York” (2002) and “The Departed” (2006), the less DiCaprio has been at liberty to flourish his prime asset—namely, his boyishness. He strikes me as a perennial kid, adrift in a land of grownups, and only truly at ease when he can lark around. That’s why his best and his most believable performance was back in 2002, in “Catch Me if You Can,” directed by Steven Spielberg, whose casting eye is unrivalled, and who spied the essential lightness in DiCaprio. Scorsese, on the other hand, has strained to drag him into the dark. If their happiest collaboration is in “The Wolf of Wall Street” (2013), it is because, for once, the actor’s puckish vagaries are not reined in. Scorsese loosens the leash.
I would love to report that DiCaprio is rejuvenated by “Killers of the Flower Moon.” Sadly not. He does get to banter with De Niro, during a car ride, but listen to the topic under discussion: the killing of an Osage man, Henry Roan (William Belleau), which was meant to resemble a suicide but went awry. We can’t help laughing along with Hale and Burkhart, as if they were two goons in a Scorsese Mob movie; meanwhile, the thought of poor Roan gets lost in the mix. Such is the dilemma that weighs upon this film. Although its moral ambition is to honor the tribulations of an Indigenous people, it keeps getting pulled back into the orbit—emotional, social, and eventually legal—of white men. Mollie is diabetic, and Burkhart gradually suspects that the insulin injections he is giving her may be doctored; yet the focus remains more on his clenched and frowning perplexity than on her wasting away.
More than once, Mollie refers to herself as “incompetent.” This is not a joke but a formal term, which the film, for some reason, never bothers to define; many Osage were considered ill-suited to handling their own funds, which had to be administered by a white guardian. Yet it is a joke, as dark as oil, because Lily Gladstone, as Mollie, is unmistakably the most compelling presence in the movie. Her gait is dignified and unrushed, her humor is vented in a high and lovely yelp, and her smile is deliciously knowing and slow—so knowing, in fact, that it’s hard to imagine what Mollie sees in Burkhart, whom she calls a coyote. It’s not as if she’s blind to his basic motive. “Coyote wants money,” she says. All of her sisters make their mark; Myers, especially, does a wonderful job as Anna, who is handsome, wanton, fiery, and fatally drawn to the bottle. But Mollie is at the core of the family, and Scorsese, to be fair, does her proud with a scene in which a crowd of onlookers, gathered near a corpse that has been found by a river, parts in silent respect to let Mollie through. The camera takes the part of the bereaved.
If you relish that kind of staging—people being shifted, smoothly or brutally, around the frame, the better to boost the narrative sway—then Scorsese, aged eighty, is still the guy you need. Check out the sequence, for example, in which a wanted man is arrested. He sits in a barber’s chair, in the foreground; when lawmen enter from the street, behind him, we notice them well before he does. Even as they draw close, he stays put, making no effort to scuffle or scarper, and that simple quiescence proves that his hour of reckoning comes as no surprise. Hell, it might just be a relief.
“Killers of the Flower Moon” is rife with such passages of action and inaction, in tune with its symphonic stateliness. Themes of oppression, vengeance, and resistance are developed and recapitulated throughout, and there’s also a strange coda, in which Scorsese himself turns up. He plays an announcer on an old-school radio drama, which retells the saga of the Osage murders, complete with cheesy sound effects. Needless to say, the heroes of the show are Hoover’s boys from the Bureau. Is Scorsese claiming that, in contrast to this low-rent travesty, he has reclaimed the original terrors of the case; or is he, more humbly, confessing that his film is just one more version of a tragedy that can never be fully fathomed or explained? Next time, perhaps, an Osage voice will tell the tale anew. ♦
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