Roundtable: Killers of the Flower Moon (2023)

Anton: Maybe I’ll just start by cutting to my take on Martin Scorsese’s latest, Killers of the Flower Moon, about a conspiracy to murder numerous Osage Native Americans in 1920s Oklahoma in order to obtain their oil rights. Although the movie has generally been received as a late masterpiece from the great director, I think the praise for the film is wildly overstated. Don’t get me wrong, I liked it well enough. The film is compelling in ways, especially in terms of the subject matter. Drawing on the 2017 book by David Grann, Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI, the film presents a story worth telling and being shared with a wide audience. And the performances are strong. But I’m not sure Scorsese and screenwriter Eric Roth tell this story in the best way, both in terms of the overall approach to the material and in terms of the length of this telling. The movie is both fragmented and overly long. It lacks mystery. This isn’t a high-water mark for late Scorsese, in my books.

Aren: I’ve got to agree in the broad strokes, which is that I think Killers of the Flower Moon is being celebrated as a movie it is not. I liked it a fair bit and had it as an honourable mention on my Top 10 Films of 2023, but I do not think it’s a late masterpiece (the way I think The Boy and the Heron is a late masterpiece for Hayao Miyazaki, for instance). There are clear structural issues in this movie that need to be addressed. It’s not a matter of being too long, but of having a pacing and point of view that might actually undermine some of the things that Scorsese and Roth are hoping to do as filmmakers. But I still think it’s a good movie, with excellent performances from Lily Gladstone and Robert De Niro, in particular. It offers insight into this fascinating historical episode.

Anton: Nah, it’s definitely too long. But we can debate the narrative structure later. Anders, where do you stand?

Anders: I guess I’m going to jump in and defend the film, because while I think you both are raising some legitimate points I’m not sure the critical response is “wildly overstated.” It’s a matter of degree for me, but I think that on the whole this film is much better than either of you seem to think. For instance, beyond the question of structure of length, can we admit the film looks great? I love the dichotomies between interiors and exteriors that the film plays with: indoors is connected to death and darkness and the outdoors to colours and light and play. I think it shows a masterful hand in a lot of the categories we usually judge films by.

Aren: Yeah, I really did appreciate how this movie was shot. I think it starts really strong, with the historical, silent film-style prologue that introduces us to the Osage Nation, who at the time are the richest people on the planet. The movie has a lot of fun with upending expectations here, with images of white chauffeurs driving around rich, fancy Osage men, Osage women dressed as flappers, and truly captures the idea of American wealth tied to oil, which leads to excess and all these systematic issues within the country. And the early shot of the Osage men dancing in the oil in slow-motion is just great. I agree it’s a movie with a very strong visual approach. Even if I have issues with the narrative approach, Scorsese is a master of framing and presentation.

Anders: But, yeah, the bestowal of terms like “late masterpiece” are especially strange distinctions when directors like Scorsese (and even more so Miyazaki) so rarely make missteps. I wonder if your response is leaning too far into critiquing the “discourse” than the film at hand, but I want to hear more about your critiques of the structure first.

Anton: Well, yes, I am critiquing the discourse, but mainly as an entry point into our conversation about the film. Rotten Tomatoes’ Critical Consensus summarizes Killers of the Flower Moon as “Enormous in runtime, theme, and achievement,” as well as “yet another artistic zenith for Martin Scorsese.” That’s just a summary of the critical comments out there. “Enormous achievement.” “Artistic zenith.” All I’m saying is that I don’t agree with that level of praise. It’s a fine film, but one that I think could have been actually better. So it’s a matter of degree for me as well, Anders. In my initial comment, I’ve pointed out aspects of the film that I think are well done, and which we can explore. But I also think there are significant issues with the film.

Aren: Perhaps it is a case of critiquing the discourse, as people are hyperbolic, calling every movie they like a “masterpiece.”

Anton: Exactly, and as critics, I think something we Brothers often try to do is say, wait, what is the nuanced take on this work? What works in this film and what doesn’t? Because usually the hot takes in either direction miss things, and because it’s not just about scoring points for movies we like, or dunking on films we dislike—as fun as that can be. Ha ha.

Aren: So I disagree with aspects of the discourse on Killers of the Flower Moon, as I think something like The Wind Rises or The Boy and the Heron absolutely count as “late masterpieces,” since they follow some movies that are not masterpieces (although still very good) such as Howl’s Moving Castle and Ponyo. And with Scorsese, Silence is more worthy of the phrase than The Irishman or Killers of the Flower Moon.

Anton: Yeah, I’m also in the minority that thinks Silence is his best film since The Departed.

Aren: The more accurate comp might be Steven Spielberg, where West Side Story and The Fabelmans were both treated as “late masterpieces” when it’s more of them both just being good movies in a career filled with good movies.

Anders: Yeah, the Spielberg comp works better for me, since I liked those films a great deal but don’t rank them among the director’s best. I think they mark a “return to form,” after Ready Player One and The Post (a film I actually don’t like), that we don’t see in this situation; I agree Silence is probably Scorsese’s best of the last decade and half and the true “late masterpiece” and I might like The Wolf of Wall Street more than almost anyone I know, but let me be clear that I think Scorsese’s last five features from Hugo through to The Irishman and Killers of the Flower Moon all range from excellent to masterpiece in my book.

Aren: Maybe I am quibbling about the discourse here, but Killers of the Flower Moon is a movie shaped by the discourse more than most, which we can get into specifics of later. Just remember that Scorsese changed direction in how he was going to tell this movie based on feedback from Indigenous consultants and by taking the temperature of the culture at large. As a result, many of the calculations in the film’s structure and perspective seem more self-conscious than is usually the case with him.

The Structure of Killers of the Flower Moon

Anton: Now, to return to Anders’ question about my critique of the film’s narrative and structure, I was left wondering why Scorsese and screenwriter Eric Roth would tell this particular story this particular way.

What do I mean by that? Well, why tell the Osage Murders devoid of mystery. From very early on, we know who the murderers are, and the film plays like a slow-burning confirmation and open revelation of everything we suspect and know through bits and pieces.

The book, which I haven’t read, is subtitled The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI, and that points to another narrative choice. The film seriously downplays the true crime or investigative aspect of the story. I believe that in real life, and as the book recounts, the FBI guy, Agent Thomas Bruce White Sr., played here by Jesse Plemons, had to go undercover and they cut all that out. In the film, the FBI and the investigations don’t arrive until two hours into the film, and their detective work remains on the outside of the narrative. We really only experience their investigation through its impact on Ernest, apart from several Scorsese trademark fast cutaways—which I also think are an element that does not work in this movie.

All this raises the question for me, what kind of a movie is this? What kind of a story is it trying to tell? Is this a true crime story? An FBI investigation? A revisionist Western? An historical epic? A western gangster movie? A story of domestic deception and betrayal? Yes, it’s all those things, but the film seems to lack a clear overall strategy to structure the material, and it never feels quite comfortable as being firmly any kind of story.

Aren: Yeah, there’s a basic question of framing. In film school, when directing a script, we were always taught to answer the question: who’s story is this? It’s a reductive exercise, but useful when approaching Hollywood pictures because it’s usually the case in conventional work. You might not identify the truly correct person whom the script is attempting to explore, but you need to identify your character whose story you’re going to tell and then centre your artistic decisions on that belief.

In Killers of the Flower Moon—a movie I do think is very interesting in some ways, to be clear—I’m not sure Scorsese ever answers whose story this is? Is it the story of Leonardo DiCaprio’s Ernest Burkhart, the dimwitted World War I veteran who marries an Osage woman, Lily Gladstone’s Mollie Kyle, at the behest of his uncle, William King Hale, played by Robert De Niro? Is it Mollie’s story? Is the story of the Osage Nation? The story of the FBI, embodied by Agent Thomas Bruce White Sr., who is the central character in the nonfiction book? Is it the story of America? I’m not sure Scorsese and company ever settle on the most satisfying answer to this question, but instead approach it as a hodgepodge of several.

Anders: To counter, I think you can make a film that is “multi-faceted,” one that takes multiple points of view and juxtaposes them. In my reading the film is clearly split between Ernest and Mollie as the two stories.

Aren: See, I don’t think the movie is split between Ernest and Mollie’s story. Rather, I feel like the movie is actually Mollie’s story, but Scorsese didn’t want the film to be a victim narrative, so he told her story by centering on her evil husband. Victim narratives are often monotonous, so focusing on the more active character of Ernest would allow more action in the film. As well, I don’t think Scorsese wanted to centre everything on the film’s sole Indigenous protagonist, as he wasn’t comfortable in speaking for her and the Osage Nation as a whole. We can dig into this more. But I don’t think this film is multi-faceted like a Robert Altman production or other big cast pictures. Rather, I think it’s more undecided.

Anders: I agree that this isn’t an Altman-style big cast, but I think too many of the scenes in the film are framed from Ernest’s perspective for us to say this is solely Mollie’s story. I think they are co-leads.

Anton: I think the movie at times is almost like Goodfellas, in that we are offered Mollie’s perspective to counter Ernest’s, who is our entry point into the story. But I don’t think the film clearly establishes this dual perspective as the overall governing narrative structure. There are times where Mollie’s perspective could be explored more, and there are times where Ernest’s ignorance and lack of understanding could have been leaned into. Like, the film doesn’t really want to limit our knowledge to either of those characters’ knowledge. It gestures at doing so, but then Scorsese likes to include a bunch of cutaways to show other information. So we see, very quickly, a killing, a body, etc. in that manner, often in overhead angles, that Scorsese likes to do. But I think it’s a legitimate argument to say that the extra information—these snippet scenes—disrupt the point of view potential of the approach. It’s like Scorsese wanted to throw in a few moments of his montage stuff, and use that to build out the film in a more epic way, but it doesn’t feel smooth, like in Goodfellas, but rather a part of the overall hodgepodge, messy feel of the structure.

Anders: I think those snippet scenes, and a few other choices in the film, are less a example of a “hodgepodge” but rather a move away from the immersive style and continuity editing you get in a conventional narrative film like Goodfellas.You are right that the film largely sidelines the FBI angle that you note the book emphasizes. I haven’t read the book. That might have been a very good approach. But I think that there are legitimate reasons not to go that way. The first is that one of the clear reasons that Scorsese structures the film the way he does (and also partly why it’s so long) is to really avoid making this into a true-crime potboiler. There is no mystery as to who is committing the murders. There isn’t even really a mystery as to the individual motive of William King Hale, or even Ernest. They are driven by their venality and greed.

Anton: But why do that? We need to address this, because I think this is fundamental to the movie.

Anders: I might go so far as to say that Scorsese is intentionally distancing us, making Killers of the Flower Moon the closest he’s come to a kind of Brechtian distancing-effect (Verfremdungseffekt), where he’s definitely trying to have the audience step back and think about it in a critical manner. This is especially apparent at the end, with the meta-narrative approach. So, yeah, this isn’t Goodfellas. All I’m saying is that while there’s a legitimate critique to say, “I don’t like that approach,”I don’t think it’s just carelessness or not knowing what to do with the material. It’s a gambit though. Maybe it didn’t work.

But I do think the film develops a mounting feeling of gut-wrenching guilt in the audience in a way it wouldn’t have if he had made it more about the FBI finally bringing some of these men to justice. Because that’s not really the story that this film is recounting. How many of us had heard about these killings before the film got on our radar? And the climactic scene of the film is Ernest literally denying to Mollie that he did anything wrong when he could have just come clean and possibly salvaged his marriage. Instead, as the final lines of the film note, as Scorsese literally reads: “There was no mention of the murders.”

Anton: And yet Scorsese delights in showing these murders in cutaways, so it is an interest of the movie’s.

I actually think that the film’s structure then alters the themes of the film, particularly its potential impact on an audience. So, you note that this story is likely not well known to most people. That alone would make it worth telling as a mystery, as something that is revealed to the audience through the structure of the narrative. Then we would feel some impact discovering that King Hale, this man who sets himself up as a benefactor and friend of the Osage, is actually conspiring to murder them and steal their resource rights.

Instead, thematically, the film is not about revealing who is guilty in this situation, but rather it is about confirming the guilt of the settler-conspirators, and then making the film climax on the main character’s denial that he really did anything wrong.

I’m not saying that there’s one right way to reveal and portray guilt for this story, but I am trying to show how the decisions Scorsese and Roth make shape what the film is saying. On the one hand, you could tell the story as a revelation of guilt. The audience would discover the guilt. Or you could tell the story as the confirmation and denial of guilt. And the effect is more outrage that someone could still deny their guilt.

To me, though, there’s clearly a lack of confidence in approaching the material. I really felt like Scorsese wants to tell this story but doesn’t clearly know how to do it.

Aren: It might honestly have been Scorsese and the other white filmmakers being somewhat uncomfortable with being white guys telling this story and being precious about focusing too heavily on one thing. I do want to watch it again though since it’s very dense. There is a lot of interesting stuff in the cutaways, even if I agree that they sometimes distract from a propulsive narrative or a clear throughline for the storytelling.

Anders: I think it is absolutely the discomfort of them telling the story through the lens of a white man, but also not wanting to just make it about the Osage characters solely and put words in their mouths, so to speak.

Anton: There might be something to that. Scorsese doesn’t want it to be structured around the feds saving the day or something. He also doesn’t feel he should tell it strictly from an Osage woman’s perspective, since that’s not his story to tell, so to speak. So he tells this historical true crime mostly from the point of view of his usual subject matter: gangsters. And De Niro is his usual fixer and mover. And DiCaprio is a dumber, simpler version of the young guy brought in too deep he has played for Scorsese already. But then it’s like he has to throw in scenes from Mollie’s point of view, or extra material about the context for the Osage, or cutaways to murders and investigations. There isn’t confidence with one direction or approach.

The Length of Killers of the Flower Moon

Anton: Talking through this might actually help me understand what the film is doing, even though I think the approach deflates the story of having a rich mystery or lots of tension. Like The Irishman, plodding doom is more the desired effect.

Aren: Regarding the film’s length, I thought The Irishman was more justified in its length, as its slow-build was central to the betrayals that the story revolved around, the idea of slowly eroding one’s soul. But I’m also worried about sounding too negative here. I thought there was some very compelling stuff in Killers of the Flower Moon and I’m very glad to have seen it in theatres, which is why I wish it had a better structure to help support the strong performances and the fascinating story overall.

Anders: I think it’s quite possible to find the film too-long, but I didn’t find it a slog.

Anton: I didn’t find it a slog, and I’m not saying the movie is boring. In my view, it’s less of a drag than The Irishman. But there were scenes that went on far too long, while other pieces were truncated. Scorsese jumps in time without explanation several times, and then lets a moment—such as the rain story—unravel in a very leisurely manner. When I think back on the film, it’s hard to actually think about how the story is told.

Aren: Yeah, just purely on cinematic terms, I thought many scenes went on a little too long, other ones were oddly abrupt, and the pacing is fairly regular, with few bursts of tension until the FBI shows up, which can make it feel longer than it is.

Anders: I will give you that a few of the scenes went on a touch long, which I found odd given Thelma Schoonmaker’s steady hand in the editing room. But I would say that partly accounts for why I think this is merely an excellent film rather than a “late masterpiece.”

Anton: But maybe this shows there isn’t a steady hand in the editing room anymore. The whole film just feels like it lacks the vitality to cut to the point ever, to make the hard choice to actually cut a scene.

Anders: It might be worth considering this as the impact of the production context, of a legacy director being given a free rein while being uncertain if they’ll ever get to work at this scale again. People do get a bit precious about their material.

Anton: I honestly feel like the movie is just shaggy. At times, it jumps from scene to scene without showing time passing, which makes the movie oddly confusing when it shouldn’t be.

I truly think the story could easily have been told in two and a half hours, a lost little of the actual material. There is nothing necessarily epic about the subject, and perhaps a tighter film would have generated more tension.

But it’s a master late in life, and the movie has that looseness to it, and a feeling of wanting to just wander around in certain scenes.

The Performances from Lily Gladstone, Leonardo DiCaprio & Company

Anton: We do need to talk about some of the acting, since I think the performances are among the strongest features of the film. What did you think of Lily Gladstone’s Mollie, who right now seems to be the frontrunner for Best Actress?

Anders: I think she’s very good, better than the clips in the trailers suggested, and I think she’s deserving of the praise she’s gotten playing a character that could just become a melodramatic martyr, and imbuing her with a rich texture. Yes, she’s taciturn and cautious, which makes the moments she opens up and laughs and makes herself vulnerable all the more tragic when we know it is going to lead to tragedy.

Aren: Yeah, she’s very good. I was skeptical from the trailers, but she’s fascinating to watch in the movie. She does a lot with very reserved affectation. She’s not a theatrical, elaborately performative actor, but conveys a lot through subtle gestures and her eyes. She was interesting to watch throughout and made the role more than it could’ve been had another actor portrayed it.

Anders: I also do think De Niro is very good in the supporting role. To return to your comment a little bit ago, Anton, I don’t think De Niro is just his usual guy here. He’s playing a kind of evil here that is frighteningly realistic. This is a guy who isn’t just the mustache twirling villain. He pays lip-service to his love for the Osage. He speaks the language! I think that most of the time evil uses that kind of appearance of trying to do things “for your own good.” and cloaks itself in notions of duty, logic, etc. King Hale is that guy.

Anton: You’re right, King Hale is an interesting villain. I should give him some credit. Not only is he connected closely to the Osage by speaking their language as you say, but he also is invited into their community discussions. At different points, different Osage speak highly of him. I also like that you point out how often he says it's “for your own good,” to Ernest, but also when speaking about the Osage. He justifies his killing of them and stealing their land rights by saying that they are a sick and dying people. And yet he is the one that is actually poisoning many of them. So his behaviour and machinations actually create the conditions he uses as justification for why “their time is over.” He coats his stealing their land and wealth as something inevitable, that is going to happen one way or another.

I wonder, though. Would King be a more complex portrayal if we ever in fact actually believed that he was good in some way? The way the movie is made it sets him up instantly as the bad guy, so we always know that his good comments about the Osage are covering his machinations. To me, this is one way that the structure flattens the film, by preventing certain possible sympathies to develop and then be dashed.

Aren: Yeah, I think really feeling the betrayal of King Hale within the narrative of the film would’ve made the impact even more.

Anders: Yeah, that’s a tough one. I think there might be enough there for us to have some admiration for Hale even if he’s clearly evil. Again, maybe that would just make the film even longer.

DiCaprio has played dumb guys in over their head, but in the case of Ernest, and the reason I think he’s a more important character than most seem to be is that it is his double-consciousness that the film hinges on. How can he reconcile his dumb devotion to his uncle and the obvious wealth he stands to gain through that devotion with the fact that he may in fact love Mollie in some weird way? He’s conflicted, but not in the typical way; the film forces us to face the way that human beings can compartmentalize evil and goodness.

Anton: Ernest is interesting. You are right, he clearly loves Mollie, in a way. You also wonder how “conscious” he is about anything he does.

Aren: Yeah, and there’s an obvious novelty to watching DiCaprio hide his own charisma and charm. He affects such a dopey face throughout the movie, constantly reminding us that this is not a typical DiCaprio performance. I think he’s good, but it’s not one of his best performances, and I’m genuinely intrigued by the initial casting idea of having DiCaprio play the FBI agent and Jesse Plemons play Ernest. I think Plemons might’ve been better at conjuring some of the more pathetic qualities of the character. He might be better suited to the material. But the casting of DiCaprio itself embodies the compartmentalization of evil and good, as you say, Anders. We want to admire the character because we admire DiCaprio as a movie star. But we’re sickened by him at the same time. The performances are evidence of this being a good movie, even as I don’t entirely understand every casting decision.

Robbie Robertson’s Score

Anders: I actually really like the score of the film, a last collaboration between the legendary Robbie Robertson who passed away after the film’s completion, and Marty. Robbie had been one of Marty’s longtime collaborators since The Last Waltz, the documentary concert film about The Band, Robbie Robertson’s famous rock and folk band. It’s also a way for Robertson to contribute to a story of the native North American peoples, as Robbie was himself of Indigenous heritage on his mother’s side: she was Cayuga and Mohawk and raised on the Six Nations Reserve just 30 minutes south of where I live in Waterloo, Ontario.

I like here though that he’s not just helping Marty queue up a great set of rock songs, but doing some composing. I thought the score was haunting and memorable.

Anton: Yeah, the connections you outline work nicely for this film. The score is also very slow and not showy, adding to the slowburn quality the movie seems to be going for.

Aren: I like the slow-burn quality, of how the music insinuates itself into a scene, slipping in and kind of haunting us in the background. It matches Scorsese’s approach to the material. The critic Josh Larsen described the music as a “snake sliding through the grass,” slithering into each scene, and I think that’s an appropriate way of describing it.

Culture & Religion in Killers of the Flower Moon

Anders: I think it was of note given that this is a Martin Scorsese film that the Osage are themselves Roman Catholics in the film, and historically a great number of Osage people are Catholic. Is there anything to the film’s portrayal of guilt and the wages of sin that struck you as particularly Catholic? I think that the film interestingly hinges on a scene of potential confession as potentially cleansing for the soul, but Ernest doesn’t take the opportunity.

Aren: That’s an interesting take that I honestly hadn’t thought out. But I think it’s appropriate, and does make the confession scene even more central, thematically and spiritually.

Anders: What else about the thematic elements of the film worked for you? It seems that many of the formal choices you guys didn’t love come out of Marty’s interest in making this as moral and ethical a film as he could, but unlike most of his film’s he’s asking the audience themselves where we fit into this story that itself can be read as a kind of microcosm of the overall relationship between European settlers and Indigenous North Americans with initial promises broken and the potential for something new and great to grow out of the situation dashed against human greed.

I think it’s also a fairly nuanced portrayal in other areas. Not every white character is despicable. Not every Indigenous character is pure of motive or vice. It’s more: this is what happened.

Anton: But what is the film a microcosm of? Many viewers and critics seem to want to describe this as a microcosm of the issues between the First Nations of North America and the white settlers, but the actual specifics of the situation are only applicable in broad strokes. I think some viewers who don’t know a lot about history might say, oh yeah, this is just the essential story of America, or Canada. Indigenous people had land and resources, and then white people came and killed them off to get the land and resources. And frankly, that’s actually a pretty simplistic version of 500 years of interactions, some of which were mutually beneficial and some of which involved European betrayals and exploitation and raw power grabs. For instance, this film really doesn’t reflect the original interactions in the sixteenth and seventeenth century.

This is a very late tale of the American frontier and of the American West. It’s the 1920s. There is no more land west for tribes or settlers to just move to (remember, the Osage settled in Oklahoma after being driven west at various points). And it shows how in this very specific time and place Hale manipulates and conspires to steal their property rights and resource wealth. In some ways, it speaks more to the current situation, and how Indigenous land rights and resources are disputed and appropriated by others. Hale so often remarks that they are a dying people, it’s their end. There was some of the same rhetoric a bit earlier, when the buffalo were dying off, and the Federal Governments of the US and Canada were trying to figure out where the First Nations, especially ones out west, fit into a newly, totally settled North America. So, in my reading, this is a movie about a First Nation and where it fits in the 20th century. It reflects back at times over the longer history, but it’s also a highly specific and strange particular tale.

For instance, there’s certainly a richness in the attention to the Indigenous culture, and that allows them to both have their traditions and then also be people who want, say, a new sports car, to both have dreams and traditions about those dreams while also being Roman Catholic for, what, hundreds of years at this point. Its portrayal of a specific time and place on screen is very good, and that early newsreel is helpful.

Aren: Yeah, I think this movie is more about Indigenous people today than being an encapsulation of the entire history of Indigenous-settler relations. The history is too complicated, and changes too much once we enter the 18th century, for this to capture the whole of it. It speaks more to our current moment and what got us here over the past century.

Anders: I can get behind a lot of that reading. I agree that it’s a very late tale, as is the potential archetypal relationship between settlers and Indigenous people I mentioned. I think that’s important. There were earlier successes at moments in interactions. A lot of the worst excesses of colonial greed are fairly recent ones, tied, as you note, to the end of Western expansion and the shift to resource exploitation and new waves of settlement. In storytelling I tend to favour the specific as a way to really get at the universal. You dive into the particular, and by doing so can touch on larger human elements.

Killers of the Flower Moon (2023, USA)

Directed by Martin Scorsese; written by Eric Roth and Martin Scorsese, based on the book by David Grann; starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Robert De Niro, Lily Gladstone, Jesse Plemons, Tantoo Cardinal, John Lithgow, Brendan Fraser, Cara Jade Myers, JaNae Collins, Jillian Dion, Jason Isbell.

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