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Killers of the Flower Moon Turns Out to Be the Simplest, Slipperiest of Things
It’s not Martin Scorsese’s western, and it’s not another gangster epic. It’s his marriage story.
It’s a somber historical accounting, but it also happens to be a familiar western-movie trope: One is reminded of Charles Bronson’s Harmonica hauntingly reciting the many victims of Henry Fonda’s aspiring-capitalist gunslinger Frank in Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West. But in adapting David Grann’s acclaimed 2017 nonfiction history, whose subtitle is The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI, Scorsese and screenwriter Eric Roth have shifted the scope of the story, pulling the timeline further back to show the growing relationship between Mollie Brown (Lily Gladstone), a member of a large and wealthy Osage family, and Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio), a WWI veteran who arrives in town to work for his uncle, William Hale (Robert De Niro), a local godfather type. By the time Scorsese himself comes onscreen to deliver the picture’s final lines — in an incredibly moving cameo, placing himself alongside the showmen and sensationalists who’ve told the story of the Osage murders over the decades — we may actually find ourselves surprised that the movie is over.
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