Martin Scorsese is eighty years old and he has made a film about American guilt that is three and a half hours long and does not offer the audience a single comfortable place to rest. Killers of the Flower Moon is not the film the trailer suggested. It is not a thriller about the FBI solving a murder. It is a film about the murders themselves — slow, systematic, almost bureaucratic — and about the men who committed them and called it love.
The Osage Nation, having struck oil on their reservation in 1920s Oklahoma, became briefly the wealthiest people per capita in the United States. The response of white America was to marry into Osage families, wait for guardianship rights, and kill them. This is not a metaphor. It happened. David Grann's book documented it. Scorsese and co-writer Eric Roth have taken the book's structure and inverted it — instead of following the FBI investigation, they follow Ernest Burkhart, the nephew of a cattle baron named William Hale, as he courts and marries and gradually, inexorably participates in the murder of his wife's family.
Leonardo DiCaprio plays Ernest as a man of limited intelligence and almost infinite capacity for self-deception. He loves Mollie, genuinely. He also helps kill her family. The film does not resolve this contradiction because it cannot — because that contradiction is the whole American story, or a significant part of it. Robert De Niro's Hale is the film's darkest creation: paternalistic, charming, monstrous, entirely convinced of his own beneficence.
Lily Gladstone is the film's moral centre and its finest performance. Mollie watches and knows and endures, and Gladstone conveys this without a word of exposition. This is cinema doing what only cinema can do.
This is Cinema.