Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon runs 206 minutes and earns nearly every one of them. The film, co-written by Scorsese and Eric Roth from the 2017 nonfiction book, is a crime drama set in 1920s Oklahoma, where the Osage Nation grew rich on oil found under tribal land — and then began dying.
Trailer, via Apple TV.
The Osage Headrights
The Osage kept their mineral rights and collected the money. The law then required court-appointed white guardians to manage that money for full and half-blood members, treating them as “incompetent.” That arrangement is the engine of the whole film. It is not a mystery about who is killing the Osage. It is a study of how a legal system can be turned into a weapon.
Ernest Burkhart Comes Home
Leonardo DiCaprio plays Ernest Burkhart, a World War I veteran who returns to live with his brother Byron and his uncle William King Hale on Hale’s ranch. Hale, played by Robert De Niro, is a reserve deputy sheriff and cattle rancher who poses as a friend to the Osage. Ernest and Byron rob the Osage at gunpoint. Ernest then courts and marries Mollie Kyle, an Osage woman whose family holds oil headrights.
William Hale’s Arithmetic
De Niro’s Hale orders the killings of wealthy Osage and explains the logic to his nephew: the more of Mollie’s family who die, the more headrights Ernest inherits. Mollie’s sister Minnie dies of a mysterious illness. Hale then orders Byron to kill another sister, Anna. Hale arranges the murder of Mollie’s first husband, Henry Roan, but the hitman fails to stage it as a suicide. The sheriff and the judges sit in Hale’s pocket, so nothing is investigated.
Can you find the wolves in this picture?
Lily Gladstone as Mollie
Lily Gladstone is the film’s still center. Mollie is diabetic, her mother Lizzie is ill, and she watches her family come apart while the men around her keep smiling. Casting director Ellen Lewis first showed Scorsese Gladstone’s work in Certain Women. Gladstone won the role after a Zoom call with Scorsese about Catholicism; DiCaprio backed her, and the Osage Nation gave its approval.
Scorsese and DiCaprio, Sixth Time
This is the sixth Scorsese-DiCaprio feature and the tenth Scorsese-De Niro. Jesse Plemons plays BOI agent Tom White — a part first written for DiCaprio, who pushed instead for Ernest. The supporting cast includes Tantoo Cardinal, John Lithgow, Brendan Fraser, Cara Jade Myers, JaNae Collins, Jillian Dion and Jason Isbell. Robbie Robertson composed the score; he died two months before release, and the film is dedicated to him.
What the 206 Minutes Buy
The scale is real. With a reported budget of $200–215 million, this was said to be the largest amount ever spent on a film shoot in Oklahoma, and the Osage and Washington county locations show it. The film also folds in the 1921 Tulsa race massacre, letting the Osage see in it what could happen to them.
The picture’s weakness is Ernest. DiCaprio plays him as a man too dull to understand what he is doing, and the film leans on that dullness longer than it can carry. The Osage council, meanwhile, gets less room than it deserves.
What matters here is that Killers of the Flower Moon never treats the murders as a puzzle. The wolves are visible from the first act. The horror is the paperwork, the guardians, the judges, the uncle with his arm around your shoulder. That is a harder film than a whodunit, and the better one.
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