David Grann’s riveting book about the 1920s murders of dozens of Osage Native Americans who had become rich due to their forced exile to an Oklahoma reservation, which turned out to be prime oil country, might take a few hours to read.
Killers of the Flower Moon is a page-turner that packs a lot in. From how the killings became a showcase for the nascent FBI to how the so-called “Reign of Terror” resonates with the Osage today.
Watching Killers of the Flower Moon – Martin Scorsese’s less-riveting adaptation of the book starring Robert De Niro and Leonardo DiCaprio – also takes a few hours. Some three hours and 26 minutes. That’s a few minutes less than The Irishman, Scorsese’s 2019 mob movie which became possibly the most watched-but-didn’t-get-to-the-end film in Netflix history. Here, another streamer, Apple TV+, will show the film after its cinema run.
It might be historical non-fiction, but Scorsese knows a good gangster when he sees one. His chief focus is on the real-life figures of William Hale (De Niro) and his nephew Ernest Burkhart (DiCaprio), the godfather and stooge who posed as sympathetic friends of the Osage – Burkhart marrying one of them – while plotting against them in such a way that they could acquire through inheritance their tribal oil-royalty headrights. Essentially, they were evil monsters and Scorsese concentrates much of his film on their monstrosity and that of their cronies in cahoots.
Yes, there are occasional tribal councils, and an Osage delegation to Washington to implore President Hoover to deliver the justice they can’t get in a state where they are essentially non-citizens with their fortunes administered by white guardians.
But while it might look like a topsy-turvy Western, it’s essentially a mob movie and a less-than-thrilling one. De Niro chews up the prairie scenery then lords over the federal investigators who eventually arrive – one scene has him doing that from a barber’s chair, much like he did as Al Capone in The Untouchables.
DiCaprio has a tougher job as Burkhart, the dim and gullible lackey who woos Mollie Kyle (Lily Gladstone), a well-to-do Osage woman whose extended family seems cursed by disease and tragedy. There’s something forced about DiCaprio’s perma-frowning performance, and something inevitable about De Niro’s.
In a scene in a Masonic lodge where an aggrieved Hale takes a paddle to Burkhart’s behind – in one of film’s where-did-that-come-from moments – the thought arrives that, actually, both actors could do with a kick up the rear about now. Nevertheless, Scorsese has them driving his sluggish film. Gladstone, with her Mona Lisa countenance, is the only significant Osage character and one who is absent for much of the second half.
Meanwhile, many well-known palefaces turn up in supporting roles. Jesse Plemons as the imperturbable bureau investigator; Brendan Fraser and John Lithgow as blustery trial lawyers; musicians Jason Isbell and Jack White, too.
Scorsese himself turns up in a coda that involves a telling of the Osage true-crime story as an FBI-endorsed radio play a decade or two later. That procedural treatment, the scene seems to say, wasn’t the story he wanted to tell. The one he has, though, takes a patience-demanding age. As another Scorsese portrait of the evil that men do, it has its moments. But as a saga of American greed, racism, colonialism and gangsterism, well, there’s a very good book that does it better.
Killers of the Flower Moon, directed by Martin Scorsese, is in cinemas now, then on Apple TV+
