Just Be Still
Scorsese’s latest asks us to stop and look not just at the horrible crimes it depicts, but at what those crimes really cost.
Review by Joseph Collum
I saw Killers of the Flower Moon in a dingy two-screen theater on a Thursday night. On the marquee outside, the title had been spelled out by hand, like the visiting team on the scoreboard at Fenway Park. The bar offered a Thirsty Thursday, four-dollar draft beer special, and ticketing didn’t have a way to scan my digital barcode. It all felt local, and deeply American, and I thought to myself that I was right where Scorsese wanted me to watch his latest self-consciously American epic.
That is, until I realized what was playing on the other screen. A quarter of an hour into the hushed first act of the film, Robert de Niro and Leonardo DiCaprio are having a sinister conversation about the beauty, sickliness and, most importantly, wealth, of Osage women. As de Niro hints at a genocidal plot, I hear a bass-boom and the words “Romeo take me somewhere we can be alone” from the other side of the wall. That’s when I remember the second title listed on the old-timey marquee outside: Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour.
For fear of the Swifties, it should be noted that Taylor Swift is indeed a deeply American figure. She represents America as it truly is. If, here, the corporations are people, Swift proves that a person can also be a corporation, a profit-maximizing machine, with no politics beyond pleasing her consumer. In Killers of the Flower Moon, Martin Scorsese cares little for the pleasure of the consumer. He cares about America, about the state of American art and what that art says about the soul of the nation.
In its own twisted way, Flower Moon is a love story.
With a three-and-a-half hour runtime, Scorsese asks for investment from his viewers before they set foot in the theater. He wants to challenge, something he feels is lacking from modern Hollywood. The first half of the film, which details the events leading up to the systematic murders of oil-rich Native families in the 1920s, unfolds in whispered conversations and wide-shots of Oklahoman hill country. In a recurring image from the film, an Osage woman stands on the banks of a creek at dawn, reciting prayers in her native tongue. These shots do not seem to belong to the same director known for the frantic-paced, cocaine-infused Goodfellas and The Wolf of Wall Street. They would feel more at home in Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven. When Apple TV signed on to fund the project, the executives likely hoped for a Scorsese shoot-‘em-up Western. Almost certainly, some suit mouth-wateringly declared the project “The Departed with Stetsons.” While the second half of the film does explode with the high-intensity drama that studios expect from Scorsese, the quiet of the first act, simultaneously peaceful and sinister, grounds the film in the fullness of the lives about to be destroyed.
Early on in Flower Moon, the white man Ernest Burkhart, played by Leonardo DiCaprio, visits the house of Mollie Kyle, the central Osage character of the film, played by the remarkable Lily Gladstone. It starts to rain, and Ernest goes to close the windows. Mollie stops him and has him take a seat. He fidgets and tries to pour a glass of whiskey. Once again, Mollie stops him. “Just be still,” she says, sitting in her traditional Osage blanket, listening to the late summer, Oklahoma rain. Mollie’s words are Scorsese’s command to his audience. Just be still—experience the peace of a beautiful people in a beautiful place. Only then will you fully appreciate the horrors to come.
Mollie Kyle becomes Mollie Burkhart a few scenes later. In its own twisted way, Flower Moon is a love story. Our Romeo, Ernest, seems genuinely in love with his wife, but, in his own words, he does “love that money, sir,” money that will come to him if Mollie dies—naturally or unnaturally. This relationship is Scorsese’s great challenge to his audience. He could easily cast Ernest as a villain or, at the very least, a villain’s stooge. But that would be the easy choice, the choice Scorsese could have made for the movie Apple TV likely was expecting. Instead, Scorsese wanted to tell a harder story. Ernest Burkhart loved Mollie Burkhart. Ernest Burkhart also was complicit in the death of her entire family. Both things are true.
Scorsese wants America to encounter her sins and name them as her own.
America wants a simple villain. We see it in Marvel movies, political campaign ads, even Taylor Swift’s songs to her exes. Having someone or something to blame for our national sins is much easier than facing the root cause, possibly finding fault with ourselves. Scorsese refuses to offer up Ernest Burkhart for America’s self-satisfied condemnation, even though Ernest might come as close to deserving it as anyone. Instead, Scorsese wants America to encounter her sins and name them as her own.
The film ends with a staging of a true crime radio play, an antique piece of the old, weird America which fits perfectly into the film’s aesthetic. Scorsese joins the cast as the narrator of the play, giving an epilogue to each of the character’s lives. It’s an unfeeling treatment of tragedy, feeding the American obsession with violence while not getting close enough to smell the blood or hear the heartbreak behind the screams. The play even finds the time to advertise for Lucky Strike cigarettes. Just when you start to forget the real lives affected by the horrors witnessed thirty minutes earlier, the screen flips to a drone-shot of an Oklahoma field. Osage women in colorful, traditional garb dance and twirl in a circle, a rainbow pinwheel spinning round and round in the summer sun. These are the American lives, this is the American beauty almost destroyed by American horror. Scorsese challenges us not to look away—not from the gruesome violence and betrayal, but especially not from the beauty.
Joseph Collum is a 2022 graduate of Dartmouth College with a B.A. in English and Creative Writing. Born in Mississippi and raised in Kentucky, he now lives in Philadelphia where he is teaching high school English. He is also working towards his Master’s of Education as a member of the Alliance for Catholic Education at St. Joseph’s University.
Killers of the Flower Moon was written by Eric Roth and Martin Scorsese and directed by Martin Scorsese. It is based upon the book of the same name by David Grann. It was released in theaters on October 20, 2023, and will be released for streaming by Apple TV+.
