It was the most anticipated film, bringing together everything from legends in front of and behind the camera to a three and a half hour story about a historical event that points directly to the original sin of the United States. Killers of the Flower Moon is a whirlwind exercise in historical memory in which director Martin Scorsese goes beyond everything—the thriller, the western, the tragic comedy, and even the romantic drama—to reckon with the greed of a country founded on the genocide of the moon at the Indians.
Killers of the Flower Moon is based on the book The Killers of the Moon (Penguin Random House) by New York journalist David Grann. For five years, Grann researched a crime story that ties in with the best crime novel and the fate that ruthlessly stalked Native Americans: the disappearance of the Osage Nation. In 1870, they were evicted from their lands on a corner of Oklahoma’s Great Plains (the infamous Trail of Tears), a country that in the 1920s spat out the black gold that changed everything again.
Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro at the premiere of “Killers Of The Flower Moon” at the Cannes Film Festival on May 20, 2023. Associated Press/LaPresse (Associated Press/LaPresse)
Earlier this decade, the Osage Reservation became the richest country in the world. In his historic fresco, Scorsese evokes another story, a few miles away and parallel. Just like the members of the Osage Nation in the city of Tulsa, also in Oklahoma, the so-called Black Wall Street emerged, who, like the Osage, lived in mansions, owned white servants, cars and jewelry. This African-American prosperity was wiped out by the city authorities’ orchestrated Tulsa race massacre, which reduced all the property of wealthy Black Wall Street to rubble. Today, Tulsa has an exciting museum that pays tribute to this massacre, and now a stirring film will travel the world to tell other victims of what happened in 1921 in a country that put more effort into overcoming slavery in the past . than to destroy Indians.
At 80, Scorsese has tackled an excessive film that will bring him back to the festival he won in 1976 with Taxi Driver and hasn’t returned to for nearly four decades other than his wacky comedy, Jo, what a Night! He chose the one with the best direction. Outside of competition, the veteran filmmaker has delivered a celebration of cinema and seniority with a blockbuster whose greatness is at the service of a crime story, which was investigated by the then-newly formed FBI, who worked with a team of secret police officers to unravel the mystery of the poisoning deaths , murder and disappearance of the Osage, investigations that brought to light one of the most horrific conspiracies in American history.
Scorsese’s favorite actor, Robert De Niro, plays William King Hale, the gangster mastermind who orchestrated the murders and poisoning of Native Americans made rich by oil. But the backbone of the film is Leonardo DiCaprio as William King Hale’s feeble nephew and the stunning Lily Gladstone as Osage Indian Mollie Burkhart, a woman who lost her entire family to murder or poisoning so he could keep his oil and fortune .
The cast of Killers of the Flower Moon pose at the Cannes Film Festival on May 20, 2023. LOIC VENANCE (AFP)
She is the heroine of the film, and Gladstone, who already shone with her own light in Kelly Reichardt’s wonderful “Certain Women”, composes with enormous sensitivity, beauty and elegance a character that Scorsese spoils with her noble gaze to the last second who hides the all the greatness and pain of the Indian people.
Her and DiCaprio’s relationship is a great metaphor for a story that doesn’t take a breather and isn’t afraid of excess. Also not for humor or caricature. In their seventh collaboration, DiCaprio and Scorsese play a complicated character, a poor man who the actor navigates between the human and the grotesque. DiCaprio and Gladstone, always with a touching dignity, are at the center of some of the film’s best sequences as it relentlessly navigates its tender and poisoned love.
Killers of the Flower Moon, in which Scorsese reserves a suspenseful epilogue, is not only a great film, it’s a film that knows how to be great and unleashes its full power as a historical classic. Colossal, by George Stevens, but directed by a country in total self-examination, built on the shoulders of wimps in the service of money and wretched murderers who thought they owned the land and all its fruits.
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