![]() ![]() The first half of Grann’s book is structured as something of a mystery. Quickly, and almost imperceptibly, the impressionable and weak-minded Ernest is coaxed into Hale’s running, murderous plot to accrue even more Osage wealth. Full-blooded Osage do not actually control their own money they are declared officially incompetent and require white guardians to oversee their riches. I’m greedy.”) Hale and the people around him have taken advantage of the restrictive laws governing Native American wealth. (“You like women?” “Sure.” “You like Red?” “Don’t matter to me. And a twisted, tragic one at that.Įrnest’s growing relationship with Mollie is at first an extension of his bond with “King” Hale, who takes a great interest in his nephew’s prospects for marriage. For all its extravagant run time (three hours and 26 minutes!), its big-swing history lessons, and its tale of an Old West giving way to the regimentation of a modern police force, Killers of the Flower Moon turns out to be that simplest and slipperiest of things: the story of a marriage. But in adapting David Grann’s acclaimed 2017 nonfiction history, whose subtitle is The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI, Scorsese and screenwriter Eric Roth have shifted the scope of the story, pulling the timeline further back to show the growing relationship between Mollie Brown (Lily Gladstone), a member of a large and wealthy Osage family, and Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio), a WWI veteran who arrives in town to work for his uncle, William Hale (Robert De Niro), a local godfather type. The story would obviously also lend itself to yet another gangster epic from a man who’s made his share of them. It would be tempting to say that Killers of the Flower Moon is Scorsese’s attempt at a western, and in some of its sweeping vistas, particularly early on, you can sense him luxuriating in the open spaces and lawless frenzy of this world. It’s a somber historical accounting, but it also happens to be a familiar western-movie trope: One is reminded of Charles Bronson’s Harmonica hauntingly reciting the many victims of Henry Fonda’s aspiring-capitalist gunslinger Frank in Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West. World War I has recently ended, and the turn-of-the-century discovery of black gold in this region, to which the Osage were moved from their ancestral homes along the Ohio and Mississippi River valleys, has unexpectedly created immense wealth, making the Osage “the richest people per capita on earth.” But the new money has also led to a series of unsolved murders, and Scorsese grimly interrupts the action at regular intervals to show the faces, and say the names, of the Native American dead. The director revels in the frantic bustle of the Oklahoma boomtown of Fairfax where most of the film is set - a world of fast, shiny cars, hollering cowboys, and seemingly endless oil fields. The early scenes of Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon are a symphony of pointed dissonance. It’s not Martin Scorsese’s western, and it’s not another gangster epic. ![]()
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