Killers of the Flower Moon

One of the best movies of the year and a tough watch. 

Martin Scorsese, Lily Gladstone, Robert DeNiro and Leo DiCaprio deliver an epic about the evil that men do. 

There was a way to make a crowd pleasing story about the investigation into the Osage Nation murders. That would have looked like any number of murder investigation dramas. You will surely know by now DiCaprio was supposed to play the FBI agent leading the charge. 

I would have loved that movie.

Instead, Scorcese goes his own way trying to make a film about two people who love each other even if one of them is a monster. 

Scorsese, ever the Catholic, knows that none of us ever really reckon with our sins.  

As I watched it I was struck by how much DeNiro’s William King Hale felt like Dracula and that DiCaprio’s Ernest Burkhart was his Renfield. 

That movie spends so much of its time in a woman’s bedroom while she is sick from a mysterious disease was surely not a coincidence. 

Or maybe that was just me. 

It’s a tough ask to get an audience to spend most of a movie with Renfield even if he’s played by Leo.

It’s also clear that Scorsese does not want to glorify violence here and he either minimizes it or makes it truly horrifying. (Mostly)

If you go to this hoping for one of Scorsese’s gangster epics you will be disappointed.

This is the Scorsese of Raging Bull and Silence demanding that an audience bear witness and not look away. 

A movie dedicated to exposing racism and white nationalism at the dawn of the American Century at home and abroad.

At one point a character says he won’t murder anyone and then immediately agrees to the killing when he learns that the victim will be a Native American. And a parade through Osage Main Street features the KKK.

Marty has never been subtle. 

This is a true story, and Scorsese clearly wanted to make something that honored the dead and acknowledged the survivors and the culture of the Osage Nation. 

I think he succeeded even if I left without fist pumping CINEMA! contact high I normally have from Scorsese epics. That was clearly Oppenheimer’s job this year. Marty didn’t want me to leave the theater feeling good. And he succeeded. 

But there are still some of the best moments you will see in a movie all year inside this. 

Those include: A trip to the afterlife, a fight over the cost of a funeral, two scenes with Owls, Lily Gladstone’s slight smiles, Robert DeNiro’s driving glasses, everything Sturgill Simpson and Jason Isbell do and every scene with the Osage leadership council. 

Those men deliver two sermons with that old time fire. 

We lost Robbie Robertson this year. The leader of The Band and the man who has been handling the music for Scorsese movies for decades. As usual, every choice in Killers is the right one and at one point Blind Willie Johnson’s Dark Was the Night Cold Was the Ground provides a transcendental back drop. This is where the soul of man never dies.

Brendan Frasier again proves that he may be the best character actor in America and everyone should be casting him in anything and everything. 

He gets entrusted with the most important 10 minutes in the movie and he nails it down perfectly. 

I hope he and Gladstone get to spend the next few decades doing exceptional work in great movies. 

Scorsese also gives us a unique final scene.

You’ve seen the end of a movie like this a million times. Finally, you get to the part where the filmmaker has to give the audience everything that actually happens to everyone who is left alive. It’s done with text on the screen right? 

But here — like he did in Goodfellas where Ray Liotta just walks down out of the witness chair, breaks the fourth wall and tells you what happened — Scorsese finds a new way to bring the curtain down. 

That includes a cameo I absolutely did not see coming. Like a lot of this movie I’m conflicted on this. Was it a brilliant bit of business or too showy? 

Irregardless, this another great work from an 80-year-old filmmaker who continues to be one of the very best in the world.

This is one of the top five movies of the year and it probably won’t crack the Scorsese all time Top 10.

Tip your hat to the master.