Killers of the Flower Moon review: Leonardo DiCaprio isn’t the best bit
Killers of the Flower moon review and star rating: ★★★★
A round the halfway mark in Killers of the Flower Moon, you notice an incessant drumbeat. As it crescendos it goes through varying iterations, getting louder and more ominous until you shift in your seat. You wonder how much more of it you can take.
It soundtracks physical beatings and scenes of torture, emotional abuse and – of equal importance – the anxious moments of seeming mundanity before and after. There are probably too many films with three-and-a-half hour run times, especially recently, but Killers of the Flower Moon isn’t one of them. Martin Scorsese’s first dalliance with the Western genre never stops feeling like it is getting under your skin.
It is first and foremost an impeccable set of character studies which paint a picture of systemic oppression from White Americans in the 1920s towards the Osage Native American tribe, and secondly a Western that isn’t afraid to feel exactly how we’d hope Scorsese’s first entry into the genre would. On the lighter end, sets depicting townships in the mid west look like classic Westerns; everyone’s got a cowboy hat on and everyone rides a horse. Scorsese delivers on the luscious landscapes, making his film a beautiful sensory experience.
If the cinematography is pleasingly familiar, the story is not. Members of the Osage Native American tribe were murdered in the Prohibition era by white Americans when oil was discovered on their land. Scorsese finds boiling point and sustains it in this heart-rending examination of the horrors of the period by way of three central, impeccably-drawn characters. There is Robert De Niro’s William ‘King’ Hale, a political boss in Oklahoma State, his nephew Ernest Burkhart, played by Leonardo DiCaprio, and Mollie Burkhart, a Native American woman who marries Ernest.
Both men are captivating. De Niro and DiCaprio’s first meeting feels more Meet the Fockers than serious drama, but that’s kind of the point: King is an evil bastard, a coercive controller not afraid to murder Native Americans to get their land. He has a psychopath’s lack of empathy, and his killer charm is delivered sometimes with a wry smile, at others through calculating, rhythmic directions to “slow down” the health of Native Americans.
King really did exist, and you feel that De Niro’s version of him is uncomfortably close to the real deal. You want to keep watching just in case he ever reveals a touch of humanity. Opposite him is the vulnerable Ernest, who genuinely falls in love with Mollie but is under his uncle’s thumb. DiCaprio is in fine form, but it’s Lily Gladstone who should be lining up her awards season outfits for her performance as Mollie. She’s pitch perfect and outshines the two male leads, (as she should, given she’s the Osage lead) as the landowner who is coerced into marriage by Ernest and then manipulated away from happiness and health.
It can’t be easy learning to act with eyes that project the fear and belief that soon you’re probably going to be dead, but Gladstone achieves it. In Mollie she carries the huge obligation to faithfully represent the story of the Osage people and the horrors of the way they were treated. She conveys the pride and dignity of the Osage people, their warmth despite their financial privileges.
There is an intrinsic level of care and attention given to Osage culture, through presentations of their music, dance and wider culture, bed rocking Killers of the Flower Moon in a proper celebration of the Osage people which goes way beyond the paper-thin set-ups associated with the story lines of many Westerns. So it should: Martin Scorsese is a titan of modern film making and, in his 80th year, will be looking for Killers to cement his legacy as one of the visionaries of our time.
Following The Irishman and The Wolf of Wall Street, reinventing the Western is another string to his bow. Scorsese has already announced his next film, The Wager, which will again star Leonardo DiCaprio. Perhaps 80 is young these days in Hollywood. Bring it on.
Killers of the Flower Moon is in cinemas now
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