Killers of the Flower Moon

KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON   ***

Martin Scorsese

2023

IDEA:  In 1920s Osage County, Oklahoma, white settlers carry out a complex scheme to kill the community's Native American inhabitants and inherit their oil fortunes.

BLURB:  Sometimes, even when he’s not making a mafia movie, Scorsese ends up making a mafia movie. In Killers of the Flower Moon, the system of power through which William Hale exerts his control over Osage County has the unmistakable structure and logic of an organized crime syndicate, with Hale as the don enlisting various lackeys to do his dirty bidding. A self-proclaimed King in an opulent farmhouse separated from town, he operates through coercion, blackmail, and a sense of absolute impunity owing to his position as a powerful white man. Scorsese devotes the bulk of Killers of the Flower Moon to his machinations, which are carried out in systemic complicity by a host of white male accomplices at all levels of society, from his doltish nephew to a pair of physicians. The violence perpetrated against the Osage, through the hegemony of colonialism as well as in specific targeted murders (often shown, in a sign of the oppressors’ brazenness, in broad daylight), is depicted by Scorsese with a matter-of-fact bluntness that leaves no room for ambiguity about the institutional evil at play. While his indictment is forceful and damning, Scorsese’s focus on the figures of white supremacy presents a problem of perspective. He is so compelled by the slimy Hale and Burkhart that his Native American characters feel close to peripheral; even Lily Gladstone’s Mollie, the putative heart of the story, is shunted aside for much of the film as she withers away on her sickbed, seen mostly from the point of view of her more psychologically-legible husband. Were Scorsese and his co-screenwriter Eric Roth not comfortable narrating through the perspective of a Native woman? Even if so, could they not have given more of the film’s epic 206-minute runtime to the Osage themselves, to their thoughts and inner-lives, their experiences beyond atrocity? Instead of being that expansive historical-cultural portrait, Killers of the Flower Moon mostly hews to the Scorsese familiar of patriarchal violence, transposed to a context where it effectively and valuably, if staidly, highlights a timeless American fascism.