Hidden Hues: The Fascinating Failures of "Killers of the Flower Moon"

Martin Scorsese has finally made the movie his detractors have always wanted. For decades, they accused him of glamorizing the lifestyles of his criminal protagonists and failing to properly account for their violence. They said it about Taxi Driver. They definitely said it about Goodfellas and Casino. When he pivoted to nonviolent films like The Age of Innocence and Kundun, maybe the moralists thought they had won. Then they said it again about Wolf of Wall Street.

They won’t be saying it about Killers of the Flower Moon. By now you probably know that it’s based on the nonfiction book by David Grann about the murder of dozens (if not more) members of the oil-rich Osage tribe in Oklahoma in the 1920s. The book was structured as a whodunit, with an investigator from the newly-formed FBI coming in from Washington to suss out the culprits. The film was originally devised the same way, but apparently, Leonardo DiCaprio felt it needed to center the Osage a little more, and he persuaded Scorsese and his screenwriter Eric Roth to go back to the drawing board and create something new.

Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon is not a whodunit. Very early on, we understand that rich man William Hale (Robert De Niro) is the mastermind behind the murders, working to transfer the Osage’s riches into his own bloodline. We don’t know the full extent of his nephew Ernest’s (Leonardo DiCaprio) involvement, but he has at least some blood on his hands. We know because the director literally shows him scheming and committing acts of violence, but also because Ernest is characterized as a big, dumb idiot who is only out for his own enrichment, like many Scorsese characters before him. It’s not the best role for DiCaprio, who doesn’t play stupid with conviction. 

So it’s not the procedural Scorsese originally planned, but it doesn’t really center the Osage in the way we were told it would either. There are really just a few token acknowledgments of their perspective. The film opens on a scene of the tribal leaders lamenting the influence of White people on their culture, and it closes with a stirring shot of a different tribal ceremony. In between, we mostly understand their plight through Ernest’s wife Mollie Burkhart (Lily Gladstone), who must watch her family be murdered, be slowly poisoned herself, and eventually come to the horrifying conclusion that her husband is the perpetrator. 

Gladstone carries a lot of weight in this story. She embodies quiet power when Ernest is courting her; she knows he’s after her money—all the ambitious White guys marry Osage women there—but he’s also cute and charming.  She likes that. Then her story shifts. Her sisters begin to die in mysterious ways, and as her grief mounts, she wails for all her people. It’s a performance full of ridges and valleys, while the rest of the film is as flat as an Oklahoma prairie. 

Gladstone is so good that you’ll wish Killers of the Flower Moon were her movie, but Scorsese is inexorably drawn to the American criminal, even if he is careful not to make their thieving look as fun as he did in prior films. Ernest and his uncle don’t revel in their stolen wealth. In fact, we never quite understand why they want the money in the first place. “I love me some money,” Ernest says early on, a statement only marginally less revealing than Jordan Belfort’s explanation for his actions in Wolf of Wall Street. It seems the real point of gathering this wealth is simply to make sure the Osage don’t have it, which is a compelling point, although it necessitates Scorsese to abandon his typical means of drawing attention to the audience’s complicity in the crimes of capitalism. He usually makes crime look like fun, which offers an inherent explanation for why it often goes unpunished. This time, he fails to show us any of ourselves in these awful, murderous men.

The film’s violence is portrayed similarly to the violence in The Irishman, Scorsese’s last American crime epic. It is not sensationalized in the slightest. He exposes with precision their schemes to steal Osage wealth, chronicling the payouts, intimidation, arm-twisting, and, eventually, the silencing of witnesses. He shows us enough bloodshed to feel the brutality of their murders, but whereas once Scorsese’s view on violence was defined by his giddy curiosity about these men who live outside the law, here he sees it as a mundane fact of American existence. The film’s most brutal hitman is a sociopath who admits on the stand to his crimes without a hint of remorse or even nervousness. Violence has rarely been this banal.

That’s a statement worth making, although it’s not enough to pin a film on. It’s great that Scorsese has evolved into seeing violence as neither sexy nor thrilling, but the result is a film that feels more like a chore—or really, a homework lesson—than a compelling drama. Yes, you will learn a few things you didn’t know from Killers of the Flower Moon. But what is its artistic purpose? What is, to put it bluntly, the point? In his earlier films on American crime, he pointed out our hypocrisies.  We felt icky watching Joe Pesci commit brazen acts of violence in Goodfellas, but we were also drawn to his freedom from social norms. We laughed along with DiCaprio and Jonah Hill in Wolf of Wall Street as they explored the legality of midget-tossing, but we needed a shower afterward to wash away our sins. Killers of the Flower Moon looks (for a very long time) at the crimes of these rich, powerful White men and finds nothing particularly interesting, except that it’s not particularly interesting. That’s the film’s point—and also its problem. 

It makes me wonder if Scorsese was simply the wrong person to tell this particular story. When DiCaprio came to him with an idea for centering the Osage, perhaps Scorsese should either have said, “No, that’s not our story to tell” or “You’re right, let’s give it to an Indigenous filmmaker.” In this muddled version, we find ourselves stuck between Scorsese’s personal obsession with bad men and the obvious reality that Mollie Burkhart is the most interesting person in this story. She spends half the film writhing in a bed, while we are forced to watch her dumb husband begin to reckon with his misdeeds. We want more of her. We want more of her sister Anna (Cara Jade Myers), who, while drinking to excess and partying with various White men, is a kind of Indigenous character we’ve never seen before onscreen. And we want more scenes like the one early in the film where an obscenely wealthy Osage couple, decked out in jewels and fancy clothes, buy a new car from a desperate White salesman. This is new stuff to cinema. It’s the kind of thing that makes telling this story worthwhile, and I’m not entirely sure why Scorsese pivoted away from them to the people he has shown us so many times before, when his heart was clearly not with them this time.

The only way Killers of the Flower Moon really works is as part of a conversation with Scorsese’s filmography. On its own terms, it’s a fascinating failure, an object of evidence that White men, no matter how accomplished, talented or empathetic they may be, aren’t really equipped to tell the stories of America’s marginalized classes. The story here is not with Scorsese’s gangsters. It’s with the Osage, and every glimpse we get of their inner lives is so rich with hidden hues that it renders the story of dumb Ernest and his mean American uncle all the more pale in comparison.