★½

Martin Scorsese has traded his Catholic guilt for leftist guilt, but even before his lapse he never resorted to propaganda.

His new Killers of the Flower Moon combines There Will Be Blood (2007) with Gaslight (1944), but before you get to thinking that I just praised the film, take a seat.  Then stay seated staring at a blue wall for about 7 hours without getting up.  Congratulations!  You just replicated the experience of watching this film.

The Irishman is three minutes longer than this, yet this feels twice the length of that and without half the justification.  At least The Irishman begins with an old man in a nursing home promising you a story you’re never going to believe, and then proceeds to use that story to explore the criminal machinations behind mid-20th century American politics over 30 years.  Killers of the Flower Moon opens with the Osage predicting their own demise, and then spends the next three and a half hours faking character drama as the predictions come true seemingly to the tribe’s surprise.

The racism of Killers of the Flower Moon comes in two forms.  First: the distance it gradually places between itself and the perspective of the Osage Tribe.  These people get noticeably stupider as the film progresses to the point where it is almost impossible to sympathize with them.  The second comes from the revelation that this film reflects an updated “version” of the script, which is supposed to have a greater balance between the Hale/Burkhart family and the Osage Tribe.  Seriously?  If this is the multiracial version, the original script must have been written by someone who assumed his taxes would double every time there would be an Indian on screen.

The social intelligence of the Osage Tribe is given its obligatory moments in the first hour or so, and then slowly disappears until the Osage are as distant from us as a crinkled old photo.  The relationships and connections between people are so utterly impersonal and perfunctory; Scorsese has lost his keen ability to examine how the greater picture of society is made up of little intimate pictures where emotions ripple out small and big.  The Osage seem perfectly aware that the white devils have never forgiven them for the oil they found under their new land after their exile from Missouri, and the fact that it made them the richest people per capita in the world.  The women even gossip about it in their own language – a scene where Scorsese fails the Bechdel Test on purpose just to make the point clear.  Then the fox they already know to be in the henhouse starts to strike, and suddenly they have no idea what to make of it.  What sort of people are these?  Perhaps the great wealth they amassed has given them a sense of complacency?  Maybe they consider a constructive use of their money to maximize developments around them or at least minimize the security threats?  Nope and nope; Killers of the Flower Moon will not give these people agency.  It will not empower them to be anything other than the rightful princes and princesses of oil, as though to suggest implicitly that pipeline installments and fracking today is just an exercise in killing more flower moons and desecrating the corpses of the dead.  That, of course, is exactly the uninteresting direction the film takes us for all three and a half hours.

For all the silent-era vignettes integrated with the regular narrative that Scorsese uses to connect the past to the present, there is a picture of culture that is simply missing from the world he seeks to frame here.  The first major widescreen picture, Raoul Walsh’s The Big Trail (1930) was also the first motion picture to feature John Wayne as a main character.  It’s a great film with an even greater series of stories behind it, where five different tribes participated in the casting, shooting, and storytelling.  Merely four years after the real Ernest Burkhart (Leo DiCaprio) was sent to prison for his role in the Osage murders, John Wayne talks to a bunch of bloodthirsty kids in one of the most extraordinary moments in the history of cinema.  They want to know if he’s ever killed an Indian before, and he tenderly replies:

No, you see, the Injuns are my friends!  They taught me all I know about the woods.  They taught me how to follow a trail by watching the leaves, how to cut your mark on a tree so you won’t get lost in the forest, and they taught me how to bury in in the snow so you won’t freeze to death in the thorns.  And they taught me how to make a fire without even a flint!

In a single scene in a 1930 picture, the contributions of the Indians are given an acknowledgement and level of respect that is foreign to filmmakers and audiences today.  Killers of the Flower Moon paints a pretentious picture of malice where such respect could never exist because the Osage Tribe are not given authenticity, despite the involvement of the tribe itself in this film.  They are simply – “the victims,” useful only for their corpses and resting poses.  Instead of taking a page from Steven Spielberg who, 30 years ago, released a picture about a much more direct and egregious genocide against a race (which was also in part driven by envy for “hoarded treasures”) and used the story to draw humane connections between people while staring into the face of Amon Göth, Scorsese takes the easy road.

It’s also a false one, despite the general accuracy of David Grann’s novel adapted for the film.  Killers of the Flower Moon just repeats tropes, pretending to build to a climax and never getting there.  It offers convolution instead of complexity; the difference between the two being entirely emotional.  When the Tulsa Massacre of 1921 occurs, it is simply there to avoid its omission being a headline.  It is referenced again after a house explodes where a hysterical woman cries out: “It’s like Tulsa all over again!”  No, ma’am, it was not.  The Tulsa Massacre was a riot that escalated from an attempted lynching over an almost certain false report of rape by a white woman against a black man that led to a shootout outside the sheriff station.  A white mob invaded Greenwood after the news spread, killed hundreds, and torched one of the wealthiest black neighborhoods in the United States.  In another moment, the Ku Klux Klan is discussed – with King Hale (Robert De Niro) pointing to them as the bad whites in contrast to his obviously Indian-friendly soul, and then you see the KKK in a parade behind the Indian Mothers of Veterans.  The symbolism is not subtle, but it is meaningless.  The KKK did not share the same contempt for the Indians as it did for blacks, Catholics, Jews, Mexicans, Asians, immigrants from Europe, and white “carpetbaggers” and “scalawags.”  Indians were targets of Klan violence far less often than others.  Their inclusion here is just boogeyman filmmaking.

The tedium of the blank slate stare of Mollie Burkhart (Lily Gladstone) is outdone by Leo DiCaprio giving the worst performance of his adult career.  A master of the accents – Irish (Gangs of New York), South African (Blood Diamond), Boston (The Departed), Queens (The Wolf of Wall Street), and western (The Quick and the Dead and Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood) – the one he puts on here is painful and strained to the point that it is laughable in contrast with De Niro’s effortlessness.  He seems to think his character’s try-hard imbecility gives the impression of greater menace.  It doesn’t.  De Niro can convey that because he’s playing a big smiling salesman.  Leo is playing a lacky – a role the screenplay and the world built by this story make unfit for him as the lead, and he has about as much chemistry with Lily Gladstone as George Costanza and Susan Ross.

Scorsese uses the film’s unnecessary and unengaging length as its own metaphor for the slow genocide of the Indians.  It is the “demography is destiny” political trope as a staple of a film recounting a timeline over merely a handful of years.  This is a pitiful parlor trick when there are no ideas left as to telling a story like this.  The story told here deserves empathy, not empty, propagandistic guilt for its own sake.  In The Irishman, which Scorsese obviously created as a kind of capstone picture for his career as a filmmaker of crime family dramas, and which is crucial to any understanding of the folly of this one, the murders and turmoil are an outgrowth of the characters whose personalities and agendas were bigger, even when subdued, than the political responses they so often received.  So big, in fact, that the depth of the guilt echoes the depth of the human connection – hence the ending.  In Killers of the Flower Moon, marriage is as much of a political weapon as the gun.  Scorsese has explored the ethics  of marriage and its effect on society in The Age of Innocence and even as far back as Who’s That Knocking At My Door? to great effect.  The intrigue there is lost here.  Even The King of Comedy – which is the closest Scorsese cousin to Killers of the Flower Moon, where a man, played by Robert De Niro, full of envy and likes to be called a king, stalks, hounds, and then kidnaps his idol to get what he has, and then spends the rest of his prison sentence convinced that he is still a great friend to him – had a better sense of emotional gravity to its moments.  When moments of head-to-head character conferring are played up in Killers of the Flower Moon for laughs, in repetition of similar, far better, moments in Goodfellas, The Departed, and The Wolf of Wall Street, the laughs were forced because my audience needed a break.  Everyone walked out of the theater exhausted and weary rather than engaged and saddened.

The thing that will enrage them, hopefully, will happen a little later when they have to gas up their car and they wonder if the reason prices are so high is because someone somewhere seeks revenge for those murders.

– Vivek