‘Killers of the Flower Moon’ is ‘Chinatown’ meets ‘Dances with Wolves’ 

Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon, which just opened in theaters around Israel (and will be available for streaming next month on Apple TV+), is an epic Western starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro that some have hailed as the director’s best movie in decades.

While I wouldn’t go that far, it features a fascinating fact-based story, some brilliantly filmed set pieces, and a great ensemble cast with some of America’s finest actors.

Essentially, the movie plays like Chinatown (about the fight for access to water in the real-estate boom of Los Angeles in the 1930s) meets Dances with Wolves (the story of a white Civil War soldier who draws close to a Sioux tribe), and Heaven’s Gate, an artsy Western.

But in spite of all the interesting elements in the mix, Killers never comes together to match the greatness of Scorsese’s previous classics, such as Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, and Goodfellas.

Based on an acclaimed nonfiction book by David Grann, Killers is about what happens after the Native American Osage tribe discovers oil on their tribal land in Oklahoma early in the 20th century, making them the richest people in America per capita.

This is a story I had never heard before, although I have since learned that the late New York City Ballet prima ballerina Maria Tallchief came from this community and grew up in a wealthy family; interestingly, in one scene, little white and Native American girls take a ballet class together.

White Americans schemed to acquire the Osage oil wealth, carrying out a series of murders that were ignored by the authorities for years. It’s very much a contemporary Western that offers a scathing, if not terribly original, critique of the exploitation of Native Americans by whites.

The film's plot and characters

THE FILM opens with a Native American ceremony in which they mourn the assimilation of the younger generation. As some of the young men leave and walk in a field of flowers, the “flower moon” of the title, oil begins gushing. A staged but realistic-looking newsreel follows, showing how the Osage spent their wealth by mimicking the behavior of the upper class: buying fancy cars, decking themselves in jewelry, taking up golf, etc.

Next, we meet Ernest Burkhart, a recently discharged soldier who served in World War I, played by DiCaprio, who is in his late 40s and must have been one of the oldest recruits in the military. While DiCaprio has been Scorsese’s go-to leading man for decades, he seems miscast here. He arrives in an Oklahoma town at the center of the Osage oil boom. Ernest has come to see his uncle, William Hale (De Niro), who owns a cattle plantation in the area.

Their opening conversation establishes that Ernest is not the sharpest tool in the drawer but sees himself as an irresistible ladies’ man.

His uncle, who speaks the Osage language and claims to love the tribe, gives him a job as a taxi driver and encourages him to woo Mollie (Lily Gladstone), an Osage woman who suffers from diabetes, so he can acquire her oil money. What is not stated explicitly is that the Osage men were so weak from alcoholism and their pre-oil poverty that they did not put up much of a fight as opportunistic outsiders married Osage women.

Mollie’s sister Minnie (Jillian Dion) is married to Bill Smith (Jason Isbell), a shady type. After her death from a “wasting disease,” which may have had something to do with unscrupulous doctors in the town, Smith marries Reta (Janae Collins), another sister.

Mollie herself realizes that Ernest is no great brain, but she avows that she is extremely attracted to him, although I never felt much chemistry between the two actors. We are just supposed to accept that she is crazy about him because the script says she is. In any case, Ernest professes his love for her often.

They marry and are enjoying some version of domestic bliss when Hale gets Ernest involved in increasingly complicated schemes to kill Mollie’s sisters and mother to gain control of her family’s wealth and to help with the murders of other Osage townspeople.

Mollie and the Osage community fight to get the murder spree investigated, while Ernest stands by, giving Mollie hangdog looks and botching most of the deadly tasks his uncle assigns to him. It’s never clear whether he messes up out of incompetence or the fact that he has genuine feelings for Mollie, although it eventually seems to be a little of both.

It’s usually not a great idea to hang a movie on a dimwitted protagonist, and it’s hard to care about Ernest, which is the deepest flaw at the heart of the movie.

The other major problem is Hale. De Niro tackles the character with his trademark scowl, and his malevolence is established early on and without any real shading or nuance, so I found myself wondering why it was taking so long for everyone in town to figure out that Hale was behind the killings.

He’s just an evil old white guy, and while, apparently, that’s what the real Hale actually was, it seems there could have been a way to make him more interesting. He is meant to be an engaging villain, but he is never even close to being as interesting as the key antagonist in Chinatown, Noah Cross (John Huston). And he never utters a line as memorable as Cross’s assertion that “most people never have to face the fact that at the right time and in the right place, they’re capable of anything.”

THE THIRD act of the movie revolves around a criminal investigation and a trial, which is an opportunity for a parade of terrific actors to shine in a few scenes. These include Jesse Plemons of Friday Night Lights as an FBI investigator, John Lithgow as a prosecutor, and Brendan Fraser as a defense attorney.

Unfortunately, the trial doesn’t quite generate the suspense that it should, and the movie often feels as long as it is. It runs a staggering three hours and 26 minutes, a dispiriting trend among serious-minded Hollywood movies these days.

But Killers has its virtues, and the flower that really blooms in this story is Lily Gladstone, a distinctive and appealing actress who made a huge impression in her breakout role as a rancher who falls in love with a college teacher played by Kristen Stewart in Kelly Reichardt’s 2016 movie, Certain Women.

The minute I left the screening of that film, I checked to find out who played the rancher, and knew that Gladstone was headed for bigger roles. Her character is the heart and soul of Killers, and because she is so much more interesting than any of the men, I was often annoyed when her scenes ended.

The movie has come under criticism for the fact that it tells a story about the Osage from the point of view of a white man, but the real problem is that Gladstone, who will certainly be nominated for an Oscar, didn’t get even more screen time and that her character spends many of her scenes slipping in and out of a diabetic coma without much to say.

Scorsese knows how to film complex sequences and find telling, unusual details to underline the action. The cinematography is gorgeous; Gladstone’s smooth skin is lit to make her look like she is in a Vermeer painting, and there are scenes of the corrupt town establishment that look like Rembrandt’s portrait of the powerful drapers’ guild. Many scenes reveal amazing details of Osage life, and I imagine Scorsese focused his energy on these details rather than on character development. When Ernest and Mollie marry, for example, she wears what looks like a 19th-century American military uniform with an elaborate Native-American headdress.

Their wedding mixes Christian tradition with Native American custom, which speaks volumes about the Osage’s challenges as they rush to adopt mainstream American customs but keep a little of their own tradition. Scorsese has always been fascinated with ritual and custom, particularly religious ritual, which is clear in such disparate movies as Mean Streets and Kundun.

At the end, instead of resolving the story with a series of titles, there is a radio play from the 1940s about the murders that we see being taped, and this play has a verve that much of the movie lacks. Scorsese puts himself front and center in a cameo here, perhaps because he knows he may not be making too many more movies.

Killers of the Flower Moon is middling Scorsese, and its tone and approach remind me of another meticulously researched drama he made, Gangs of New York. You could learn a lot about the Osage oil boom from Killers, but the characters won’t stay with you afterwards the way they would have if the film had been great.