200 million dollars expensive, no studio dared to approach, despite Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro in the leading roles. So Apple TV jumped into the breach and funded Martin Scorsese’s long-time dream project, Killers of the Flower Moon. Now the true crime epic premiered at the Cannes Film Festival.
Scorsese made one of his angriest films. It is the breathless portrait of ruthless American greed being satiated at the cost of tens of lives. De Niro, as the “genius”, gives her the calculating face behind it. DiCaprio, on the other hand, paints a picture of stupidity, hideousness and, well, humanity. However, Lily Gladstone steals the show from the Oscar-winning Scorsese stars.
This is the real story behind Killers of the Flower Moon
Gladstone plays Mollie Kyle, a daughter of the Osage people who live on a reservation in Oklahoma. In the 1920s, the tribe members are among the richest people in the world because of oil discoveries. They buy limousines and live in mansions with white servants, as Scorsese shows in a prologue. However, the Osage are fleeced: by the state inventing a guardianship system to manage their money, by guardians stealing their wealth, by businesses that charge higher prices.
There would be enough material for a film if greed had stopped at discrimination and theft.
The trailer for Killers of the Flower Moon:
Killers of the Flower Moon – Trailer (English) HD
One after the other, Osage die under mysterious circumstances, including Mollie’s closest relatives. DiCaprio plays her husband Ernest, who through his uncle William Hale (Robert De Niro) is privy to this complete from the start – no spoilers. Over the course of 206 minutes, Scorsese, who co-wrote the screenplay with Eric Roth (The Insider), tells how the monstrous crime was carried out.
DiCaprio plays a dark version of his Titanic hero, Jack Dawson
Scorsese’s film fundamentally deviates from the original, not in fact but in perspective. In David Grann’s non-fiction book The Crime: The Osage Murders and the FBI (at Amazon *) the identity of the conspirators is not revealed until late. Scorsese takes the opposite approach. DiCaprio’s Ernest comes to Oklahoma as a fortune teller, a Jack Dawson who, instead of dying for the love of his life, pushes her into the water first. Like his Titanic hero, he has nothing in his pocket. Nothing but a relationship with wealthy rancher Hale, who lures him into dating an Osage woman.
For much of the film, DiCaprio mimics Ernest with the facial expression of a man who can’t add 1 and 1 but has to explain the binomial formulas. The corners of his mouth pulled down by gravity (or his intellect), the classic DiCaprio frown tensed like never before. It’s a suitably rough performance for a film that at times seems stunned itself by the outspokenness with which crime is committed in Osage County.
AppleTV+
Lily Gladstone and Martin Scorsese
But stupidity is relative in a country where double standards apply to people’s lives. It’s no coincidence that the script veers to the Tulsa massacre in 1921, in which a white lynch mob leveled a black neighborhood. De Niro’s William Hale, human Teflon, outwardly poses as the Osage friend, and in backrooms usurps her legacy. He doesn’t need more cautious accomplices. The law looks the other way anyway.
Lily Gladstone is the heart and star of Killers of the Flower Moon
The crimes and their perpetrators form one side of Killers of the Flower Moon. It’s the page with meticulously lined up murders and their victims. The site most resembling Scorsese’s gangster epics and most recently The Irishman. On the other side is Lily Gladstone’s Mollie. With a calm, clear gaze, she sees through Ernest, the knight of fortune, and yet falls in love with him. She gives him a hat, a house, a heart.
The audience knows his motives before they first meet him. Through Gladstone’s unwavering warmth, however, we learn what kind of person Ernest is could. Through Mollie’s eyes, we overlook his greed, fickleness, and lack of principle. We see that she believes in this human being’s existence, even as she languishes in bed with a “mysterious illness.” This is the side of Killers of the Flower Moon with parallels to Age of Innocence or Silence. Scorsese has one angry true crime epic and a sad love story, played by a grandiose ensemble full of contrasts.
Killers of the Flower Moon is coming October 19th in German cinemas.