Killers of the Flower Moon’s guilt saga
Martin Scorsese has made so many movies about monstrous behavior — recycling gangster subject from New York’s petty urban thugs in Mean Streets to his Oklahoma-set neo-western Killers of the Flower Moon — that he no longer can properly gauge any moral conflict.
Adapting historian David Grann’s 2017 account published under that exotic title, Scorsese dramatizes a series of murders in the 1920s of Osage Native American tribe members who had struck oil and gained sudden wealth — the “richest people per capita” in the United States. This is presented ostentatiously — Scorsese-style, through a slow-motion tableau (although no movie over three-hours long should ever use slo-mo), with interspersed clips from a silent-movie documentary. Somehow, that’s doubly redundant. Mixing cineaste flamboyance and historical horror, Scorsese then favors the perspective of the killers.
Shady Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio), a World War I veteran, joins his nefarious uncle, King Bill Hale (Robert De Niro), in the Osage rip-off scheme, plotting Native American genocide (period tragedy, contemporary shame). All that Killers of the Flower Moon has going for it is the woke idea that America’s white men are spiritually sick. It’s the latest variation on themes from the oil-well saga There Will Be Blood, with the added Millennial gloss of racial blame along the lines of Biden-era white self-revulsion. (A malign influence of longtime muse, now Trump-hater De Niro?)
This period nightmare brings to mind the recent outrageous claim by then–Chief of Staff of the Army General Mark Milley: “I want to understand white rage — and I’m white!” But through the opportunistic, corrupt Ernest, Scorsese explores the Milley fallacy rather than true rage. That explains the emphasis on Ernest’s false-hearted romance and eventual marriage to the quiet, heavyset Osage parvenue Mollie (Lily Gladstone). He goes from gaslighting Mollie to slowly poisoning her through insulin injections. It follows the pattern of killings by which low-class whites attempt to swindle the Osage out of their fortunes. (A silent movie clip of the 1921 Tulsa race massacre is included for extra shame — or Spike Lee’s approval.)
None of Scorsese’s Mafia movies were as convoluted as this. He used to focus on complex tribal treachery (Italians killing one another, Irish, Wasps, and Jews), as in GoodFellas, Casino, Gangs of New York, and The Irishman. It appears that Scorsese has forgotten what he once excitedly revealed about sociology and psychology in Mean Streets and Taxi Driver.
Those classics of American turmoil were haunted by the specter of racism. (Charlie’s attraction to a black stripper in Mean Streets was as powerful as his religious guilt; Travis Bickle, in Taxi Driver, obsessively identified with black criminal figures.) Yet, in the age of Diversity Inclusion Equity (D.I.E.), Scorsese gets superficial, not more personal. He depicts the Osage as types — as overdressed, rowdy, pathological nouveaux riches, occasionally superstitious, sharing only slight interaction with resentful, miscreant whites. There’s no equivalent to the flashes of racial antagonism in Mean Streets and Taxi Driver, or envy of the black jazz Other in his troubled musical New York, New York — insights that made those movies powerful expressions of American self-consciousness.
Instead, Killers of the Flower Moon pits white reprobates against indigenous innocents. Gladstone’s Mollie is a passive victim, given to bovine Streepian furtiveness and suffering. “Evil surrounds my heart,” she moans, triggering Scorsese’s close-ups of ugly, mean, frowning white faces staring Mollie down — even though Gladstone’s complexion is whiter than theirs.
Scorsese settles for superficial racist stereotypes of open hostility. Ernest’s fraudulent courtship of Mollie is less convincing than his gambling boast “I love money!” And King Hale combines Simon Legree with Mr. Burns in The Simpsons, all but rubbing his knuckles to indicate that he is the evilest man in the world. (These traits seem left over from De Niro’s bizarre would-be political assassin in David O. Russell’s Amsterdam.)
Ethnic tribalism, Scorsese’s original theme, was always more authentic than Tarantino playing at racial fixations, but the times have twisted that obsession. Killers of the Flower Moon is obviously hobbled by topical attitudes — an Osage gathering laments knowingly about white betrayal, actually invoking the modern word “genocide.” It mourns a people without will or fight but plagued by melancholy, diabetes, and other maladies apparently affecting only their community.
But such topicality was never Scorsese’s strength. His trailblazing ethnic eloquence came from his pop-culture and cinematic reflexes, and that’s where Killers of the Flower Moon fails. The cynical Ernest-Mollie pairing lacks the open-heartedness of D.W. Griffith’s audacious cross-cultural love story Broken Blossoms. (Griffith’s portrayal of white scallywags also bests Ernest’s white companions, the Troubleboys.) Exploring America’s dishonorable past causes Scorsese to confuse his knowledge of genre. This latest gangster foray is in the mode of a Western, but Scorsese substitutes John Ford’s complex awe and all-knowing American mythology with Millennial white self-hatred. Ford always found the moral center of his stories, despite America’s contradictions. When Scorsese pushes his redemption button on Ernest (absurdly copying The Heiress), I don’t buy it. This is not a greater truth, it’s a derangement-syndrome sickness. (Fact is, The FBI Story, Mervyn Le Roy’s 1959 movie starring James Stewart, already handled the Osage killings with economical moral clarity.) From the phony blues score to “Kyrie Elieson” at a funeral, Scorsese’s true-crime narrative never repents. There’s no “Lord, forgive us;” only another wallow in sin. (The Godfather-style interiors evoke the dark, lacquered dankness of Jane Campion’s dreadful Power of the Dog.)
The transgressions of Killers of the Flower of Moon cannot do justice to this awful history because Scorsese’s regular gangster template is hackneyed. Even when he inserts himself as a Lucky Strikes Presents radio announcer, the attempt at redemption is too guilt-ridden to succeed. The Osage tragedy was never forsaken by American media. Killers of the Flower Moon is another instance of fatuous white guilt — a companion piece to the treacheries and condemnations of Spielberg’s West Side Story. Scorsese of all people should know the sensitivity that distinguished innumerable American movies that dealt with the tragic mistreatment of Native Americans, but this movie, instead, promises there will be Blood/Oil/Genocide. It is Scorsese’s first political movie, and, unfortunately, he has been radicalized against America.
