Late-in-life interviews with master filmmakers are often bummers. All too often, artists who revitalized the form and produced masterpieces in their prime find themselves diminished toward the end of their story, whether due to difficulties with the industry, outmoded personal beliefs, or simply no longer possessing the “it” that made their earlier works so essential. Recent interviews with Martin Scorsese are bittersweet as well, but for largely opposite reasons. The director, who will turn 81 in just under a month, is still more or less at the peak of his powers. Over the past decade alone, he has directed The Wolf of Wall Street, Silence, and The Irishman, plus the genre-bending Bob Dylan “documentary” Rolling Thunder Revue– all wildly ambitious and incredibly varied films which are also, crucially, very, very good. Martin Scorsese is on a hot streak, and he knows it, but he also knows that, by sheer mathematics, he’s only got a few more films left in him. Many filmmakers outlive their relevance; at this point, it’s safe to say Scorsese’s relevance will long outlast him.
Scorsese’s latest film, Killers of the Flower Moon, certainly doesn’t feel like a twilight work (as The Irishman, for all its ambition, often did). On the contrary, it plays like a fresh start to an entirely new chapter. Sprawling in scope and surgical in characterization, Flower Moon takes the political undertones which have always been present in Scorsese’s work and brings them to the surface with rare, overt fury. Even more remarkably, it finds Scorsese adding brand new narrative tricks to his fifty-plus-year playbook. Even minor work from this master of the form is worth watching and studying, but make no mistake: this is a major work.
Class politics have always run as an undercurrent to Scorsese’s work, from the seething outsiders of Mean Streets and Taxi Driver to the unchecked capitalist excess of The Wolf of Wall Street. Here, they take center stage. The setting is Osage County, Oklahoma, in the 1920s, a rare hotbed of Indigenous prosperity thanks to the region’s vast oilfields. Naturally, this being America, white interests– chief among them millionaire cattle rancher William King Hale (Robert De Niro)– view the Osage Nation’s ownership of this wealth a temporary setback, to be dealt with as violently and unscrupulously as necessary. Hale manipulates his dimwitted nephew, Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio), into marrying Mollie Kyle (Lily Gladstone), a young Osage woman who stands to inherit her mother’s vast estate and fortune. Meanwhile, various Osage citizens of means are quietly meeting mysterious and violent ends (each “uninvestigated,” as Mollie dryly narrates in an early interlude), and Mollie begins to suspect a trap has already been sprung.
In scope and in execution, Flower Moon is recognizably a Scorsese film, aided once again by the masterful editor Thelma Schoonmaker and composer/music supervisor Robbie Robertson (Robertson, famously one of Scorsese’s oldest and dearest friends, passed away in August; this film is dedicated to his memory). But there is a fury and a directness here which feel like something new; where Goodfellas and The Irishman cast a wry eye toward historic events, Scorsese here appears to be on the verge of screaming. Hale unemotionally watches newsreel footage– conspicuously, Fox Movietone News– of the Tulsa Race Massacre; later, as a shocking act of violence rocks their neighborhood, Mollie screams, “This is just like Tulsa!” The villains of the piece, fueled as they are by racial malevolence and manifest destiny, are far more cocky than Scorsese’s gangsters, or even Jordan Belfort and his cronies; there is a sense, as Hale and his associates casually plot their reign of terror, that each murder is something of an inside joke to them. An artist might be forgiven for checking out politically late in their careers; Scorsese, on the contrary, is more engaged than ever before.
Nor is he resting on his laurels artistically. There are beats here which will be familiar to those familiar with Scorsese’s work– montages of murder, intermittent narration, an immaculately curated soundtrack (this time drawing extensively from Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music and the field recordings of Alan Lomax)– but there are also tricks we haven’t seen before. The film’s opening moments, in which we witness an Osage funeral ceremony, is serenely beautiful (Scorsese consulted heavily with Native American voices to ensure accuracy and sensitivity, and reportedly reworked much of the film accordingly). Later, in a courtroom scene, the sound modulates subtly, dropping us into the confused headspace of poor, dumb Ernest. Then there is the film’s epilogue, which I will not spoil, but is as formally daring as anything in any of the director’s films. The final moments of this segment would likely be a bridge too indulgent in the hands of any other filmmaker, but Scorsese pulls it off. He sells it, and he’s earned it, and he means it.
Flower Moon is immediately notable within Scorsese’s filmography as the first time he has brought together his two most trusted leading men (individually, De Niro and DiCaprio have starred in well over half of the director’s films). The brilliance of Scorsese’s collaboration with DiCaprio is his ability to cast one of Hollywood’s most famous movie star heartthrobs almost exclusively in Brad Dourif roles; a far cry from the teenage pinup of Titanic, Scorsese’s DiCaprio is often weaselly and untrustworthy, with hair and makeup choices seemingly designed to play up his most rodentlike features. Ernest Buckridge is, by a wide margin, the biggest fink of DiCaprio’s career, transposing the insecurity of Rick Dalton onto a character who is too flatly stupid to have any sort of moral code, which makes him by turns charming and utterly terrifying. De Niro, meanwhile, is more engaged than he has been in ages (he’s great in The Irishman, of course, but that is a film that effectively weaponizes the actor’s laconic late style). Not even when playing the literal devil have we seen De Niro so purely diabolical. Hale was a real person, but what makes the character so terrifying is how recognizable his brand of evil is in the modern world. There are moments in which De Niro appears to be channeling a certain ex-president; I’m going to go out on a limb and say that any resemblance to persons living or dead is something more than coincidental.
The heart of the film, however, is Lily Gladstone. “Sometimes the hate boils up in my heart and comes out my eyes,” Mollie narrates some time after we’ve met her, and one knows exactly what she means. We can see in her eyes, in her arched eyebrows and pursed smirk, that she is keenly aware of what kind of “wolves” she’s dealing with when negotiating with the town’s white bankers and doctors. She does love Ernest (to a fault), but she knows full well that he will never understand the whole of her existence, and frequently speaks past him in her native tongue. Gladstone communicates Mollie’s weariness and wiliness with every aspect of her performance, from the tone of her voice to the smallest gestures. Scorsese is not the first master filmmaker to recognize Gladstone’s talents (she’s worked twice with Kelly Reichardt), but he almost certainly will not be the last.
Much has been made of Flower Moon’s three-and-a-half-hour running time, but, as is usually the case with Scorsese, this is a non-issue; the film is sufficiently fleet and thrilling that watching it never feels like a chore, and to trim it down would be to shortchange a truly important story. And in any event, if there’s any filmmaker from whom I would wish less, not more, it’s certainly not Martin Scorsese. Scorsese is the sort of artist who comes along once in a lifetime– if not once in the lifetime of their chosen field– and every minute spent immersed in one of his films is a minute to be cherished. Martin Scorsese hasn’t slowed down in his old age; on the contrary, it’s on us to keep up with him.
Killers of the Flower Moon
2023
dir. Martin Scorsese
206 min.
Opens Friday, 10/20 @ Coolidge Corner Theatre, Somerville Theatre, and theaters everywhere
