Killers of the Flower Moon (2023 | USA | 206 minutes | Martin Scorsese)

There is a point that Martin Scorsese makes early in his new film Killers of the Flower Moon (and the outstanding journalist David Grann makes in his great book of the same name, of which this movie is based) that is extremely important: the Osage Nation, after being expelled and moved across the country a few times already, without choice, became the richest people per capita in the world when oil was found on their land. And it leads to one of the oldest and most American of stories: the white man’s coveting of anything of value that belongs to people they see as lesser. That includes wealth, recognition, or a handsome hotel employee in season one of The White Lotus.

With the abundance of wealth distributed to members of the Osage Nation, and strict rules about how that money can be transferred so that it remains in the hands of members of the tribe until all Native family members are gone, it requires a bit of innovation for non-Native people to get their hands on such money. Inflation is through the roof and most Osage people have white conservators who must approve expenses. Grann’s book notes that scrutiny was paid to brands of toothpaste.

That is where William “King” Hale comes in. Played by Robert DeNiro in one of his best roles in a long time, Hale is a cattle baron who outwardly presents as a friend and brethren to Osage Nation but is also working to consolidate his power and wealth by any means necessary. I’ve been reading Jonathan Eig’s new epic biography of Martin Luther King, Jr. and I couldn’t help but notice a parallel with Robert Kennedy, who was outwardly and personally friendly to Dr. King and gave the appearance of support from his brother’s administration but also had no qualms about approving and ordering the wiretapping and 24/7 surveillance of King at the behest of FBI director J. Edgar Hoover (another figure how looms large in Killers, but I’ll get to that shortly).

Hale’s nephew Ernest Burkhardt (Leonardo DiCaprio) comes to Oklahoma to live with his uncle and is encouraged to find a pretty, indigenous woman to make his wife. As a chauffeur, he meets and charms Mollie (Lily Gladstone in a remarkable breakout performance) with his piercing blue eyes and little else, and soon they are wed. It doesn’t take long before weird things start happening in Mollie’s family: people start dying, and in quick succession. This includes a tribal member who goes to Washington to lobby for an investigation and a private investigator hired using Mollie’s money. Mollie’s sister Anna (Cara Jade Myers) is a bit of a hot mess and loose cannon when she’s been drinking, and she’s found murdered by a creek. Coincidentally, she’s married to Ernest’s brother Byron (Scott Shepherd). Mollie’s mother Lizzie Q (Tantoo Cardinal) isn’t long for this world, either. And Mollie is revealed to be a diabetic who is bedridden and at the mercy of the malevolent Shoun brothers, a pair of quacks who present as doctors because they know extremely little about medicine but more than anyone else, and her husband. When her diabetes leads to hospitalization, her turnaround time is remarkable because she’s no longer being injected with drugs meant to hasten her death.

Soon, Mollie makes her own trip to Washington and meets with President Coolidge, and soon the FBI is on the case. Hoover dispatches Tom White, an ambitious agent played by the great Jesse Plemons, who discovers something really is rotten in Denmark and he’s unlike local law enforcement in that he doesn’t do anything at the behest of King Hale and is impervious to his wealth.

In Grann’s book, he spends a lot of time noting how this was a big case at burnishing Hoover’s reputation as a lawman because of how forensics were used to solve the case. The subtitle is The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI. While I wish there was maybe a little more time spent on that aspect of the story, I’m not sure how it would’ve fit in. Moreover, second-guessing Scorsese is not something I do often.

Having already read Grann’s book, I knew roughly how the movie would end so I didn’t have the anxiety about the delivery of justice to King and Ernest and family. That helped me enjoy watching the movie unfold, which is wondrous in its scenery, acting, pacing, and storytelling.

As a former music blogger, I was delighted to see cameos from many musicians, like Jack White, Jason Isbell, Sturgill Simpson, Pete Yorn, and Charlie Musselwhite. That’s not even mentioning the brilliance of Native Canadian Robbie Robertson’s score, which is perfect in its deployment here.

At three and a half hours, Killers of the Flower Moon is long, but it’s a brisk three and a half hours that never finds itself in a lull. I joked with a few people that the last movie I saw in a theater before Killers was the new Pedro Almodovar short film Strange Way of Life, which was only 31 minutes long, so I’m still averaging under two hours per film.

But not a moment is wasted by Scorsese and his long-time editor Thelma Schoonmaker. Even though I wish that there was a little more storytelling on the groundbreaking use of forensics to solve this case and more on the quackery of the Shoun brothers, that’s minor quibbling.

Martin Scorsese was for me, I assume like a lot of people my age who became film critics, a larger-than-life icon whose films helped inspire my love of cinema. It’s remarkable to realize he’s made brilliant movies in each of the past six decades. Seriously. Sixties: Whose That Knocking at My Door; seventies: Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, Taxi Driver, The Last Waltz; eighties: Raging Bull, After Hours, The Last Temptation of Christ; nineties: Goodfellas, The Age of Innocence, Casino; aughts: Gangs of New York, The Aviator, The Departed; twenty-tens: The Irishman, and now Killers of the Flower Moon in the twenty-twenties. I’m in awe of the eighty-year-old man who can still churn out movies better than almost all his peers.

Killers of the Flower Moon is one of the best movies of 2023 (in a year that’s already seen a lot of great movies). It’s a masterpiece and I want to see it again because I’m certain I’ll notice more things I didn’t the first time. And I want to see it again soon.

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Killers of the Flower Moon opens in theaters everywhere today.