There’s a perennial fascination in the films of Martin Scorsese with the notion of power – the structures of it, the layers to it, the flow of it. But it’s not so much the individual at the top of the ladder who seems to intrigue the director, but rather those a couple of rungs down. Characters such as dogged journeyman contract killer Frank Sheeran in The Irishman, or foot soldier Henry Hill in Goodfellas, clinging by his fingernails to the edge of the mob’s inner circle. And now, in Scorsese’s masterful adaptation of David Grann’s 2017 nonfiction book Killers of the Flower Moon, there’s hapless Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio), the dull-edged nephew of machiavellian cattle rancher William Hale (a towering, treacherous Robert De Niro), the mastermind behind an epidemic of murders and a wholesale grab of land, resources and money.
The early 1920s, in the town of Gray Horse, in Osage County, Oklahoma, is like any other period or place in the US, in that money and power are inextricably linked. What’s different here is, owing to a quirk of geological fate, the money is not concentrated in the pockets of the white community, but rather within the Osage Native Americans after the discovery of vast reserves of oil in their reservation. There’s a frenzied gold rush atmosphere in the town; the camera whirls in a madcap waltz past brawling oil workers jostling for employment, and cynical operators looking to prise the Osage from their wealth. And then there’s Ernest. Fresh out of the army and not fit for any job that requires physical exertion – or mental, for that matter – he washes up at the door of his prosperous uncle (“You can call me king,” says Hale, in a tone that suggests that there’s little choice in the matter). Hale realises that he can make use of his pliable, docile nephew. He puts him to work in a moneymaking scheme that soon amasses a considerable body count within the Osage people.
DiCaprio has played dumb before, but not quite to this plank-thick extent. He blinks, effortful and uncomprehending, and repeats his uncle’s words back to him, as if he’s trying to tease out their meaning. With his furrowed brow and downturned horseshoe of a mouth, he looks like a bulldog slowly grasping the fact that he’s been bilked out of a biscuit. A fair proportion of the film’s 206-minute running time is taken up by reaction shots of Ernest, guileless as he is, struggling to work out just what is being asked of him. It’s a glorious performance, stumbling cluelessly around the edge of tragicomedy, and an intriguing change of gear for the usually whiplash-witted DiCaprio.
It’s also, however, one of the few niggling sticking points of this engrossing, far-reaching opus. In part due to the gentle prodding of his uncle, who would prefer to see all the oil money “flowing the right way”, Ernest marries Mollie (a magnetic Lily Gladstone), a “full-blood” Osage woman who holds a share of the “headrights” to the oil deposits on her family’s land. Gladstone, hitherto best known for her superb breakout performance in Kelly Reichardt’s drama Certain Women, is magnificent here. Mollie is a point of stillness in a frame bursting with swagger and noise. Her serene composure draws the eye; her quiet strength holds it. It is, it has to be said, something of a stretch to believe that this regal woman would be drawn to a dullard such as Ernest, but Gladstone and DiCaprio manage to convince us that this is more than a partnership of expediency – it’s a marriage of real love.
Mollie is the heart of a film that is populated by the heartless – or at the very least the clueless. When, in the third hour, her character is diminished by ill health, the movie responds in kind – the pulsing bass in a score that blends bluegrass and Native American rhythms weakens into a fluttering musical arrhythmia. The temporary sidelining of Mollie as a character and a power source is a contributing factor to one of the very few segments of this crisply edited film in which the momentum flags.
But just when you think it’s about to settle into the familiar tropes of the crime investigation procedural, Scorsese pulls a final sleight of hand. A bracingly audacious scene, featuring a brief cameo from the director himself, makes the point that it’s not just the land and its resources that were pillaged from the Native American people, but the culture and their stories as well. Including this one.
