Weekend Read: Killers of the Flower Moon
A comprehensive conversation about Martin Scorsese's new epic
I saw Killers of the Flower Moon on Thursday night, and it's been daunting thinking about how I want to approach it and write about it. It seemed to immediately possess a weightiness of expectations in terms of its critical appraisal.
A lot of words are being bandied about, like “epic,” “irrefutable,” and “masterwork.” I feel some of those feelings, surely, but I'm not without my own questions or hangups.
It's a bear of a movie—you try and wrap your arms around it, and you're barely reaching.
So I brought big-brain Ryan Michaels in to break it down with me. Two heads are better than one, so here's our conversation. Spoilers ahead.
The Schmear Hunter: One of my big takeaways from Killers is that it is a late-stage corrective for Scorsese.
If you think about Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul, Vince Gilligan made Saul in order to fix some of the problems and misconceptions related to Breaking Bad, trying to dispel the bad fans who romanticize “Walter White's” rise to power.
I feel the same thing happening here. This is a gangster movie, for sure, but it is devoid of glamour. The violence is random, ugly, and casual—no sweeping pop songs underscoring what's going down.
This white male perpetration of violence, abuse, and greed is so unvarnished, naked, and unabashed. That's a bold and moving choice. It certainly hamstrings Killers’ rewatchability, but I think that is the point. What do you think, and how did you perceive this in relation to Marty's work?
Ryan Michaels: What we’ve been seeing in Scorsese’s last decade is a sort of structural unshackling. It’s worth remembering that, in addition to his scripted films, he has been making excellent documentaries for 50 years. These often follow musicians (George Harrison, Bob Dylan, New York Dolls) in a manner as free-associative as their songs. And I think Scorsese's recent quartet—Wolf of Wall Street, Silence, The Irishman, and now Flower Moon—is so potent because he has started treating his epics like his side projects.
It’s amazing to me—a new rhythm of storytelling. Two guys look at a gas station, and suddenly it’s the same point in space, but 40 years before. Jolt. A man tells a woman a lie, and suddenly we leap to what actually happened. Jolt. Jordan Belfort gets his friend out of prison, but the friend dies young anyway, and the film just lets his mind wander, making the connection that he died the “same age as Mozart.” Jolt. It’s a looseness of approach that feels conversational, a signal to the audience that we can go “there”, wherever “there is." Digressive, omnivorous. It feels free, like music.
So then, we have the heaviest possible subject matter, and we have a director who is in no rush to get us to the finish line. But of course, the longer the film cooks, the more unbearable the suspense.
I personally could have watched four more hours of this. Where are you on the length?
SH: The genocide of the indigenous population took 350 years; I think we can spare the topic 3.5 hours. I’m being a little flippant, but I do mean it, and I think Marty does too.
It’s a canny and fascinating decision to make us immediately aware of who the bad guy is. This is a major departure from David Grann’s book, but I think it is a clever one. The fox is in the henhouse from the outset, and it’s like watching a painful car crash in slo-mo—an excruciating amount of dramatic irony. I felt so frustrated by the obviousness of the evil and the helplessness in the face of it. This seems entirely intended, but that doesn’t make it any easier to watch.
De Niro is so sickly and sweetly avuncular, reminding me of John Huston’s “Noah Cross” in Chinatown. It was stomach-churning to see him in the powwow offering up a reward for the capture of the murderer of the Osage. I wanted to reach through the screen and punch him out.
I was hung up on his lack of character psychology. Was it pure greed, or were there deeper-seated feelings? And does it matter? It seems deliberate that we don’t learn this, perhaps to ensure we don’t have a chance to empathize with the villain. What do you think, and do you feel the same about Leo as “Ernest Burkhardt?”
RM: Leonardo DiCaprio matches his Wolf of Wall Street work here, playing someone far more dim and impressionable. He is devoid of vanity and heavily laden with guilt. He slowly and physically retreats into himself. By the end, his jaw is twisted, his body is stooped, and his speech is nearly unintelligible from booze. The last such impressively mangled performance was Joaquin Phoenix’s in The Master.
These two films share a key talent, production designer Jack Fisk. Fisk’s whole bag—through The Revenant, There Will Be Blood, etc.—is full-tilt immersion into the physicality and emotion of American history. It cannot be overstated how beautiful and immersive this movie is, balancing passages of spiritual serenity with pitch-black sadism—a darkness that enters the story very literally via syringe.
People seem to have Killers pegged categorically as a Western, but I think it’s an utterly Gothic horror movie. It enters through the side door, like Phantom Thread and Oppenheimer. Even the wood varnish carries an imprint of evil. The lair where De Niro punishes Leo is immaculate—a dark recess that looks like it has existed for bad bidding time immemorial.
I’m still impressed with how these legends dive into such ugly and unpolished roles with such gusto. How do you feel they balance against the unbelievable Lily Gladstone?
SH: I couldn’t look away from Lily Gladstone. I haven't felt so possessed by an actress in a while. Her expressive eyes drilled me to my seat. She looks like she stepped out of a 1922 daguerreotype. We hang on her every word, uttered with such a bewitching, tonally flattened accent.
She has Leo's “Ernest” in her thrall. She knows he’s a coyote, a dimwitted opportunist, yet she lets him in—just as her sisters do for other white men with mostly nefarious intentions. It was infuriating and confusing. I found the experience hard to reconcile, knowing this is the true retelling of the story, but finding the courtship and their love so clearly fraudulent and tragic. When I rewatch the film, I think this is the aspect I’d try to look at more closely: this poisoned love full of complicity.
Again, it’s tricky to reconcile what I wanted to see with what the reality of the story calls for. Laying up Gladstone’s “Mollie” in bed for a solid hour in the back third was excruciating. Not just because she’s experiencing intense, deliberate, literal, and metaphorical pain and torture—but because she is a light of grace and goodness in this dark, cruel West. I don’t know what else could’ve been done—I understood Scorsese’s decision in terms of theme and narrative (the annihilation of the indigenous population has been a slow, deliberate poisoning), but it also snuffed out a certain magic Killers was theretofore cooking with.
What did you make of their anti-romance romance?
RM: The romance is the core of the movie. In its tenderness, it becomes unthinkably perverse. It elevates the film to a different level. Flower Moon's largest provocation is probably its conflation of horror and interracial marriage—the wildly loaded gestures, tones, and side comments that are rich with meaning and cultural observation.
God bless Malick and Iñárritu for their gorgeous visions of indigenous North American life, but there’s a self-conscious poeticism that Scorsese strips away here. “Mollie,” an Osage woman, is not “An Osage Woman”, if you follow. People are allowed to exist and not signify. That is the poetry and the brutality of the movie. “Mollie” feels real and earthy, so the poison that slowly enters her body seems to enter our own. There is a mysterious and potent physicality here.
Any final thoughts here?
SH: I think it’s worth discussing the ending.
We cut to at least a couple decades after the film’s events. A FBI-sponsored radio broadcast is being performed for a monied audience. It’s a complete cheapening and sensationalizing of all the depth, pain, feeling, and nuance of the past 3 hours. It’s a winking tongue-in-cheek touch—a variation on the “sell me this pen” ending of Wolf of Wall Street.
We, the audience, are already feeling complicit; now Scorsese really twists the knife and puts the onus on us—our addiction to disposable thrills, whiz-bang action, and melodrama. To be honest, I’ve seen quite a few films and shows with a similar ending this year, so this didn’t feel so fresh. But I will say that how the radio broadcast was recreated with such fidelity was extraordinary.
Marty's cameo also moved me. It’s distracting, sure, but it’s an intentional fourth-wall break, bringing us back to the murky present, an America built on genocide, blood, and secrets. I think the telling of this story means so much to him. He is genuinely and earnestly stamping and standing by this work—all of its slowness, darkness, pain, confusion, conspiracy, and death. For a nation that obfuscates, sweeps under the rug, demeans, and belittles, he is refusing to hide.
What did you think of how this wrapped up? What do you think the legacy of this movie will be?
RM: I mentioned earlier that Scorsese’s last decade of films exist in a kind of quartet. These films are united by how they end, with radical gestures that open the movie up to almost spectral dimensions. Wolf of Wall Street’s “sell me this pen” is more than an implication of its audience. It is an implication of the filmmaker and the whole enterprise of the story. Jordan Belfort is selling the poor schmucks on screen the pleasures of the flesh and of the bank account. Only at the end do we realize our voyeurism has made us that schmuck. The film’s whole moral calculus is upended with seconds to go. The Irishman does much the same by leaving its protagonist in a state worse than death. It’s a numbing effect that leaves the audience, regardless of age, staring down vivid mortality.
When Scorsese steps into Killers of the Flower Moon, he is showing us the outer reaches of storytelling. The film’s endurance-test length warps us into feeling like we lived through an era and through time itself. Killers of the Flower Moon will be remembered for its sense of summation. It dared to stare down the unthinkable with fervent passion and genuine rigor.