Martin Scorsese completed a long-awaited project called "Silence" two years ago, and it's no coincidence that the central theme of his new picture, "Killers of the Flower Moon," is silence. To be sure, "Killers" is packed with dialogue; when I interviewed Scorsese about the picture, he said that its actor, his longtime associate Leonardo DiCaprio, "likes to speak in films," and Scorsese certainly offers him that wish. Nonetheless, the film is built around one of the great wordless gestures in contemporary cinema—in fact, silence flows through the action like poison and serves as its own medicine. There is a way to look at this film, a massive tale of American sociopathy, that involves listening to what is said and not stated.
Scorsese's path to making Flower Moon is well documented: he agreed to make the film adaptation of David Grann's 2017 book, Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI, the same year it was published. Scorsese created the script from the Bureau of Investigation's point of view until, as the director has stated, DiCaprio indicated the core of the tale was Mollie Burkhart (Lily Gladstone), an Osage woman who fell in love with Ernest, a man controlled by his uncle, William Hale (Robert De Niro). The director then had several talks with Osage chiefs, aware that Flower Moon was not his story to tell. Scorsese immediately understood that the only way to direct this picture.
As someone who believed The Irishman would have gone to gangster film paradise if a dedicated editor had cut roughly 90 minutes off, I expected to feel the same way about Flower Moon, which is slightly longer. (I peed exactly four times in the 20 minutes before the opening titles.) Then I witnessed the death of Mollie's mother, Lizzie, which Scorsese transforms into one of his most moving and strange scenes. Lizzie dies in the arms of her daughters in virtually complete silence, only to awaken in the same bed but in a different place—the hereafter, where she is greeted by Osage ancestors and tenderly escorted away. I observed the burial of Mollie's sister, Anna Kyl"The world's wealthiest people per capita were also the most murdered. The deaths were later regarded by the press as 'dark and nasty as any murder narrative of the century' and the 'bloodiest chapter in American crime history." — Killers of the Flower Moon by David Grann
Despite my reservations about the film, I believe Martin Scorsese treated the source material credit and paid tribute to the enormity of this catastrophe. While he is not a Native American director, I believe he portrayed the narrative as effectively as he could and made the correct decision to narrow the breadth of the screenplay to focus on the three players' key connections. Killers of the Flower Moon is as cruel as it gets. It covers dozens of killings over several years in a grueling 206 minutes, allowing you to dwell on their cruelty in a manner that few films ever do. Martin Scorsese and screenwriter Eric Roth transform the myriad details of David Grann's journalistic nonfiction novel into textures and background tapestries, while remaining focused on a toxic love story set against a horrific image of Native American extermination.
Scorsese's two most notable on-screen partners, Robert De Niro and Leonardo DiCaprio, finally work together in one of his films, giving it unrivaled star power.
