With the continued sagas surrounding SAG-AFTRA strikes and the ever-present threat of AI wrecking the film industry, it’s easy to forget that Oscar season is nearly upon us. With 2023 being the first truly good year for film since COVID came and went, there is a considerable amount of frontrunners for Best Picture (Barbie, Oppenheimer, The Holdovers, the upcoming American Fiction) who all have a valid chance of success at the Dolby Theater next year. There’s a lot to take in as a viewer, and if you’re like me and possess a tic-like need to review and blog about this stuff, there’s an awful lot to write about too. But if all the above wasn’t enough, there is also Martin Scorsese – a man with fourteen Oscars in what must be a very large cabinet at home – rolling in with another film to try and claim his fifteenth.

Killers of the Flower Moon is Scorsese’s attempt to relay David Grann’s true crime novel of the same name to the big screen. Like a lot of projects Scorsese has taken on throughout a sensational career, doing so is no mean feat. Grann’s book – which I’ve been fortunate enough to read – is a genuine literary tour de force. It focuses on the harrowing, depressing true story of an oil-rich Osage tribal community whittled down through murder by white migrants hungry for their wealth, and the FBI investigation that eventually brought the killers to justice. It is also a book that refuses to reduce what was essentially an attempted genocide of an entire people to mere page-turning entertainment, instead choosing to de-cry the treatment of Native American tribes throughout the pioneer age by giving them a voice and treating the crimes they suffered the full moral weight they’re due. It is, all in all, a damn fine book. But is the movie version capable of doing the same?

In short - yes. But not without its own idiosyncrasies holding it back a little. Killers of the Flower Moon is ambitious about the story it wants to tell, in both its generous length (three and a half hours) and the dizzyingly large cast it employs to complete the telling. By and large it succeeds tremendously in giving the book - and the people in it - the sympathy or the damnation they’re due. But while it should be commended for being one of the few Hollywood movies to actually lend Native Americans a platform to speak loudly about the centuries-long oppression in their homeland and the theft of their heritage, it makes a bad habit of offering the same emotional sympathy to some of its villains. All while being a deliberately slow movie that might not dilute the strength of its message, but will occasionally threaten to erode your patience with it.

On the most part, Killers of the Flower Moon is a slow burn, one that prefers to deliver the horror of its tale through quiet, somber revelations and a slow creeping of dread instead of gruesome brutality. It is still a shocking movie, but the shock of it is delivered through the methodical, systematic way in which its villains are able to infiltrate and carve up the Osage community they target for their own greed, and in how ambivalent (even mocking) the majority of the white cast are to the murders that begin to envelop the movie. Through its portrayal of the racial attitudes of the time, the movie succeeds in building a sinister, suffocating atmosphere - one that grabs the viewer by the throat and refuses to let go until the telling of the tale is done.

Nonetheless, it is also a movie that is self-aware enough to know that nothing but three hours plus of this might be too much for a mainstream (or critical) audience, so it is also not without the occasional tongue-in-cheek humour. The first scene of the film portrays an Osage ritual of ceremonial burial representing the tribe’s amalgamation with the new white settlers on their land, and the impending cultural death that entails. This promptly cuts to an oil gush and tribesmen celebrating under its thick black rain for all the forthcoming extravagant wealth that entails, before a sequence of 1920s-era silent movie vignettes show just what the Osage are doing with it - living well, dressing better, buying every luxury motor car in sight and even having white chauffeurs on hand to drive them around. It’s a brief, high-spirited and subtly eye-opening moment in a movie that spends most of its time steeping in anything but joy, but it is effective in showing just how the Osage became so incredibly rich, and why they became such a target for murder.

Certainly by the point that Ernest Burkhart - DiCaprio’s character in the movie - turns up at his uncle William Hale’s (De Niro) ranch on Osage land, there is a sense that the movie has taken a turn for the ominous. Hale is a benefactor of the Osage, a benevolent, smiling figure who both speaks their language and frequently attends their communal events as a trusted ‘brother’. Ernest meanwhile is a former WW1 soldier in need of a purpose - an earnest man for sure, but also naive with a weakness for money and women. Their first scene together quickly reveals their true motivations, and sets the tone for the rest of the film. Hale’s friendship with the Osage is only skin deep: predicting the tribe’s demise and dismissing them as a ‘sickly people’, he is dead set on accelerating their departure and obtaining their oil headrights for himself. And if that means using his nephew as a pawn to marry off into an Osage family, or just outright having them murdered, then both options are as equally valid - and unsubtle - as the other.

Hale’s control over his nephew (as well as Ernest’s brother Byron, played by Scott Shepherd) is as immediate as it is calculating - a testament to De Niro and DiCaprio’s dedication to their separate roles. But it is the relationship that Ernest builds with the Osage woman Hale suggests for him, Mollie (Gladstone), that the film centers itself around. One of four sisters, Mollie possesses rights to the local oil resources much like the rest of her Osage kin, and first becomes acquainted with Ernest when he becomes the driver for her family. Though obviously cynical about the influx of white men into her land, either in pursuit of fortune or a rich Osage woman’s hand in marriage (even half-jokingly branding Ernest a ‘coyote’ during one of his initial attempts to flirt with her), she is nonetheless ultimately charmed by him into a loving relationship that leads to marriage. And it’s mutual love on both sides. Even while Osage continue to wind up dead (a montage similar to the vignettes at the start of the film narrates the names of a number of murdered tribe members, their corpses and the result of any judicious inquiry into their killing - mostly summarized as ‘no investigation’), their relationship remains steadfast - so much so that Ernest is gullible enough to overlook his own coercion into it by Hale himself. 

The first half of Killers of the Flower Moon is as thoroughly engaging as it is casually disquieting. It details the Osage relationship with both their own wealth and the settlers they share land with, plus Mollie’s relationships with Ernest as well as her family (of whom Meyers as her free-spirited sister Anna, and Cardinal as family matriarch Lizzie, who despises any of her daughters’ relationships with white men, are particular highlights). All of this is punctuated with the increasingly frequent murders of tribespeople at the hands of Hale’s men, who are essentially made up of a loose network of bootleggers, bandits or even just civilians hiding in plain sight.  The cadence between the relationship building and the killings is balanced perfectly enough to make each new death a shock, and crucially, systematic in nature. As the death count grows, so too does the sense of helplessness the Osage find themselves with, facing up to a slow, encircling evil in the shape of newfound neighbours who have no interest in them, but only what they can extract from them. These may no longer be the battles of the old West but it is certainly a quiet and lethal invasion - which makes it all the more depressing that it’s being orchestrated by the one person the Osage trust the most.

William Hale is in no uncertain terms a monster - played impeccably so by De Niro who portrays him, just like in the book, as a man who doesn’t project his malice toward the Osage outwardly, nor display any anger or bitterness. Instead, as he continues to draw Ernest further into his murderous plots, he discusses the actual execution of them with the breezy air of a mildly discomforting chore that needs to be done - just bits of necessary business that have to be done for the good of the community instead of the murder of innocents that they truly are. As an influential and charismatic ‘king’ of the community capable of convincing both his gullible nephew, and his targeted victims, to trust him irrevocably (all the while sticking a knife in their backs), De Niro gives us a villain who is seemingly omnipotent in power and omnipresent on screen. Even when he’s not the focus of a scene, the camera continues to find him, standing around in the background of the weddings of Osage brides to white husbands, or while they grieve at the funerals of their murdered kin. Through Scorsese’s direction, he flips seamlessly between the ever-charming psychopath when he’s talking and a silent menace when he isn’t - and either way, is a truly despicable figure for whom mere contempt isn’t enough as his deadly plans come to fruition.

While De Niro certainly deserves a supporting Oscar nomination, Lily Gladstone’s performance as Mollie must surely make her a favourite to win Best Actress. She portrays Mollie as stoically firm, untrusting of anyone outside her community, but nonetheless open-hearted. And as the murders come too close to home, forcing her to endure the death of her sisters, her mother and first husband Henry Roan (a fine performance from William Belleau), she is hit with wave after wave of death and tragedy, the weight of which visibly takes a toll on her as the movie wears on. Her journey through the wrenching grief of losing her family, combined with her desperate clinging to the resolve to have justice delivered (even while her own husband is enamored in a plot to poison her) is both heartbreaking yet galvanizing to watch. In a film of many arresting, memorable scenes she steals pretty much every single one she’s in, and while it may not be the kind of role progressives want to see in big Hollywood films – that of the woman as a victim – it is an essential performance that truly relays the full horror of the real story that this movie lays bare, and one that ultimately puts her character as the strongest of the film overall.

With such incredible performances across the board and such good work done in the pacing to build the tension of the plot, it’s barely even noticeable that the actual FBI investigation, which the book itself actually centralizes on, doesn’t even begin until the halfway mark. But it is certainly noticeable by a rapid downshift in pace. The movie version of Killers of the Flower Moon sticks incredibly close to the original book, even down to the minute details. While that works great for building the characters, it sometimes feels like too much once the criminal procedural side of the film begins to hold. There are a lot of nitty-gritty details in each conspiracy to ruminate on and while it’s all done in true faith to the book, there are times when you just want the film to stop adding new faces and just get on with it. Even so, there are great performances from the newly arriving FBI team. Jesse Plemons is in fine form as Tom White, the former Texas ranger and head of the inquiry who combines Southern gentlemanly conduct with a steely determination to uncover the truth. Tatanka Means is also great as John Wren, a Native American member of the team sent in to infiltrate the Osage community. And their arrival does result in some great scenes, especially when they begin to wrap their investigation around Ernest to close the net on Hale.

As a character, Ernest is a tricky one to evaluate. Thanks to a typically astute performance from DiCaprio, he’s likable at the start of the movie - a bit of an oaf but clearly willing to be a good husband to Mollie. But as he starts to play a larger role in Hale’s conspiracies, to the point where he’s even coordinating these murders of his wife’s sisters and half-knowingly poisoning her with tainted insulin supplied from local doctors the Shoun Brothers (Steve Witting and Steve Routing) to ‘treat’ her diabetes, any sympathy you have for him evaporates. What’s more is that the film almost feels like it’s asking you to feel for his plight as he tip-toes between his own relationship with the Osage and his fear-driven loyalty to his uncle. It’s a bit of an irritation that he’s given such Shakespearean treatment when he’s still a willing accomplice to murder, pulling the focus away from the real victims of the piece and putting it squarely on him. When his final testimony against Hale in the film’s climactic courtroom scene is given an unnecessary no-cut, single-shot focus on him, not even Leo’s talents are enough to pull his money-hungry, murdering schmuck of a character through a convincing redemption arc.

Nonetheless, the movie does conclude in satisfying, thought-provoking fashion. The final scenes, without giving anything away, are able to put the focus of its message squarely back on the gut wrenching awfulness of what the Osage suffered, damning those who did it as well as damning those who trivialized it into material for pulp crime entertainment in the years that followed. This film also triumphs not just because of its leads nor its direction, but also because of its vast supporting cast as well. There are stellar cameos galore - particularly from John Lithgow and Brendan Fraser, appearing as the prosecution and defense of Hale as booming, blustering attorneys in the final courtroom scenes. Both Ty Mitchell and Tommy Schultz - the latter in his first acting appearance - get to deliver some great one-liners as bootlegger John Ramsey and notorious bank-robber and murderer Blackie Thompson respectively, both of whom are drawn into Hale’s plots to do the dirty work. But most prominently, Yancey and Talee Red Corn (the former from Reservation Dogs), who appear here as Osage elders, give such a rousing address for justice at a tribal council meeting that it’ll even make you want to get up, march out of the theater and kick down the doors of the White House to demand it. So many actors, so many top performances - it is rare to see such an ensemble of this magnitude deliver with such consistency, and it all enables this film to deliver with the emotional impact that it needs to.

Ultimately, Killers of the Flower Moon is an essential film that is dark, moving and genuine enough in the relaying of its material to be a worthy rendition of the excellent book it came from, as well as an Oscar nominee. But whether the awards come rolling in next year or not is unimportant compared to the message that it insists on - that the reckoning of America’s racist, violent past must still be acted upon, and Hollywood, still so much where we look to for morality in storytelling, needs to be the place to deliver it.