The Medicine of Modernity

'Killers of the Flower Moon' is a modern classic, a brilliant coda to Scorsese's career, and a master class in how to adapt historical non-fiction.

As promised, here’s my review of Killers Of The Flower Moon. It’s a little easier to be comprehensive without trying to hit the day-of-release deadline. I don’t consider it spoilery, but it’s informed by the idea that a lot of my readers like to see the movie and then read the review. I don’t think that’s required, but I understand the impulse. This one is free again, but as ever, if you like it, please consider a paid subscription. Paid subscriptions make thoughtful #Content possible.

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Killers of the Flower Moon isn’t Scorsese’s first adaptation of a book, but it’s his first adaptation of a book I had a prior attachment to. That’s a tall task, and Killers of the Flower Moon (the book) isn’t just a straightforward novel or memoir (a la The Wolf Of Wall Street, The Irishman, Goodfellas to a large extent) — it’s a multi-part, heavily researched historical non-fiction bestseller with a story spanning a century. It’s the kind of book great filmmakers attempt and fail to wrestle into movie form all the time.

Acknowledging the difficulty here, Scorsese has not only made one of the most successful adaptations of non-fiction bestsellers ever, he’s made something worthy of his own acclaim. Killers of the Flower Moon is three hours and 26 minutes with, if you can believe it, hardly any fat. The Irishman was too long. Silence was arguably too long. Killers of the Flower Moon is just right.

Scorsese’s best films have always been about the frontier to some extent, where “the wild west” is generally a metaphor, for the kind of lawlessness that accompanies a new industry or paradigm, whether it’s a mafia racket, the building of Las Vegas, or boiler room stocks. Killers of the Flower Moon is about as close as Marty’s ever gotten to depicting the literal wild west, but it’s more about the closing of the American frontier than the opening of one; it’s about what happens when all the “free land” is finally gone and we’re left to prey on each other. Leonardo Di Caprio’s Ernest Burkhart is a tidy metaphor for America’s split personality, in which the highest ideals of egalitarianism share space with the most ruthless greed, or maybe pretensions to the former are just part of a scheme for the latter, or maybe it’s neither and he’s actually just kind of dumb — gullible enough to be led one way or the other, depending whom he talks to last.

The Irishman was best viewed as Scorsese’s requiem for the heyday of organized labor, which of course was also the heyday of the American mafia that infiltrated it. There were aspects of it that felt like maybe the Great Master was losing his fastball. It sprawled, it rambled, there were technological innovations that felt maybe like failed experiments (De Niro’s movements looked old in ways his CGI de-aged face couldn’t disguise), and odd non-sequiturs, like the original title of the book on which it was based left in as a title card at the beginning. But you can forgive a little rambling in what’s essentially a eulogy. Grief and nostalgia are supposed to be a little messy.

Killers of the Flower Moon isn’t necessarily tidy, but it’s shockingly tight. There’s an intentionality to every scene that never feels like noodling around, like Scorsese and screenwriter Eric Roth knew exactly what their themes were. And with a book like this, that’s imperative. The last time Scorsese adapted a book this research-heavy was probably Gangs of New York, and as much as I dearly love that one (it succeeds on production design and Bill the Butcher alone), it’s kind of a shaggy mess.

By contrast, Scorsese and Roth fit Flower Moon squarely into the Scorsese oeuvre. Flower Moon the book is a lot of things, but mostly it’s the story of a genocide told through the structure of a true crime tale. Author David Grann delivers a barn burner of a murder mystery about a greedy landowner, his cat’s-paw nephew, his nephew’s Osage wife, and the FBI agent who uncovers it all, before zooming out to reveal that it was all part of a larger-scale plan of dispossession and erasure in which virtually the entire state of Oklahoma was complicit.

By a strange stroke of “luck,” the land the Osage Indians were forced onto after being chased out of their traditional homelands by the vanguard of Manifest Destiny turned out to have massive reservoirs of oil beneath it — sort of like having your priceless vase smashed by a golden egg. The Osage made some smart negotiations for the mineral rights, such that by the early 20th century, they were the richest people per capita on Earth. The movie begins in the 1920s, when places like Pawhuska and Fairfax had become unlikely boom towns, attracting strivers and hucksters from all over who came to extract wealth from the newly-rich (and presumably unsophisticated) Osage.

Whereas the book focused heavily on FBI agent Tom White (played by Jesse Plemons in the film), one of the many law men sent to investigate the large and growing pile of Osage corpses, Scorsese, De Niro, and DiCaprio told the press early on that they “didn’t want to make a white savior movie.”

That’s probably more than enough ammo for rightwing radio hosts to bitch about the movie for months, but maybe in simpler, less sociology-major terms, Scorsese just realized that he’s better at villains and anti-heroes than he is at white hats. And even in the book, Tom White’s upright incorruptibility (almost all of the other law men sent to Osage country either died investigating or became criminals themselves) gets quickly co-opted by J. Edgar Hoover in Hoover’s “Mission Accomplished” moment.

Whatever the case, Scorsese and Roth focus instead on William Hale, a wealthy rancher who speaks fluent Osage and styles himself as a “friend to the Indian,” and Hale’s nephew, Ernest Burkhart, fresh out of the Army and a young man on the make. As Hale, De Niro seems to have synthesized every one of his crappy paycheck roles in shitty comedies into a hideous mask, smiling in the Osage’s face, kissing their babies and officiating their weddings, all while he orders them poisoned, shot, and bombed. He’s not shy with how he justifies it. In Hale’s mind, the Osage are doomed, their epitaphs already written by the inexorable forces of “progress.” Someone’s going to inherit their riches; it might as well be him.

His disguise and his rationalizations are so good, in fact, that even Hale himself seems to come to believe them, even as he becomes something like capitalism’s Ted Bundy, getting so drunk on his early, carefully-planned plots that eventually he’s hopping metaphorical fences at sorority houses to bash sleeping co-eds with a piece of wood. At a certain point he has enough money that he’s clearly doing it just for the thrill.

DiCaprio, meanwhile, plays Ernest Burkhart with a scowly, chubby-gummed underbite, like he prepared for the role by dipping Skoal and staring at a bulldog. At 48, he’s not particularly convincing as a kid fresh out of the Army (with the added comedy of 35-year-old Plemons repeatedly calling him “son”), but at everything else, he’s perfect. Ernest is a key part of carrying out many of his uncle’s schemes (along with his eviler, redheaded brother, Byron, played by Scott Shepherd), even as he shares a bed with his Osage wife, Mollie (Lily Gladstone), whom he genuinely seems to love. (Gladstone and the actress who plays her brassy sister, Cara Jade Myers, are both fantastic).

Ernest’s split personality is the essential focus of the film, and that comes largely from Scorsese and Roth. Has Ernest merely compartmentalized so successfully that one half of his personality barely knows the other? Is money like a drug addiction he can’t control? Does he just follow his uncle unquestioningly? Are women and Indians just so dehumanized in his mind that he can love one while murdering her whole family without seeing the contradiction? Or is he just kind of stupid? Possibly all of the above. He’s sort of Manifest Destiny personified.

The ending of Killers of the Flower Moon the book is sort of like the ending of From Dusk Till Dawn, when the camera zooms out and the vampire bar is revealed as merely the top layer of a giant Aztec pyramid full of vampires. Grann likewise flashes forward to the present, revealing that the Hale/Burkhart plot, upon whose foiling J. Edgar Hoover largely built the reputation of the modern FBI, was merely one small part of a massive genocide and dispossession campaign against the Osage that virtually everyone around them was in on.

Scorsese and Roth know that that level of exposition is far too much for one movie (it was almost too much for one book), but they brilliantly evoke the same themes without spelling it out. Mollie is a diabetic, at a time when insulin shots have just been invented. Hale proudly tells her that the injections he’s arranged for her are available to only “four people in the whole country.” Of course, Mollie’s injections, which Ernest administers directly, also have a little something extra in them “just to slow her down” (in Hale’s words).

The shots are slowly killing her, but then so was the diabetes. And moreover, where is she supposed to turn when every person she comes into contact with, down to her own husband, is complicit in this snow job? The film conveys the emotional truth of Mollie’s situation so redolently that she becomes emblematic of the larger plot with no need for all the details. In a broader, more symbolic way (and I’m honestly sorry to put it in such film criticky terms), Mollie’s tainted insulin shots are sort of like the Osage receiving the medicine of modernity.

Scorsese and Roth dispense with Tom White’s backstory (which is pretty interesting, going from the son of a prison warden to incorruptible G-Man to warden himself, at one point surviving a shotgun blast during a prison riot), along with the story of how J. Edgar Hoover quickly declared the Osage murders case closed! and used the story’s popularity to justify his agency’s growing power. The subtitle of David Grann’s book is, after all, “The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI.”

The movie replaces this with a time jump to a 60s radio show, during which Martin Scorsese himself (whom exactly he’s playing is never specified) reads Mollie Burkhart’s obituary. In just this one simple innovation, Scorsese and Roth hint at the way the Osage’s plight in these events was largely forgotten about even as they were commodified*, using Scorsese’s popular persona as the aging master now acutely aware of his own mortality to give it added heft.

This ending was a huge risk, of seeming too facile in the face of a modern day genocide. Yet even as someone who read the book twice, the Scorsese version hit me right in the chest, and in a way that maybe even the book didn’t. At the risk of appearing facile myself… THAT is how you fucking do it.

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*Hat tip to Twitter folks Ben L. and @sarkasticlovah for helping me work through this one.