Review: Killers of the Flower Moon (Patreon)

Killers of the Flower Moon is as Catholic a movie you could get away with making about the Osage murders. Scorsese's obsession with diaspora and shared guilt hasn't waned for a second in 50 years. With Killers of the Flower Moon, he has made a movie that's keenly aware of the disgracefulness of its own existence. Folks pointing out the shamefulness that only Scorsese has gotten to shoot this story are eminently right (and critiquing Hollywood more than Flower Moon itself). And it's a critique Killers of the Flower Moon concurs with. 

50 years ago, Scorsese’s Mean Streets began with Harvey Keitel intoning “You don’t make up for your sins in church. You do it on the streets. The rest is bullshit and you know it.” The film then cuts to a montage of Super 8 footage accompanied by Ronnie Spector’s “Be My Baby,” the most sublime love song written by an abuser for his victim to sing. Keitel spends Mean Streets wrestling with the question of “am I my brother’s keeper?” and ultimately deciding the answer is “yes, and it sucks.” Scorsese presents humanity as a contiguous organism; violence destroys not only the victim but the murders.

Killers of the Flower Moon opens so similarly that one wonders if Scorsese is inviting comparisons to his first great movie. Flower Moon’s opening credits similarly use a reel, showing a period of tranquility before the long lynching of the Osage.

Like many of Scorsese’s movies, Killers of the Flower Moon has a protagonist who is born into a culture of violence, lives high off the privileges of that culture, and gets slowly consumed and spat out by it. Original sin lurks behind every corner of Scorsese’s world.

Lily Gladstone is the heart of the film. There comes a point in the movie where it switches to her perspective; Burkhart slowly transforms into an object of horror. There's not a scene where Gladstone fails to injects nuance with the simple raise of an eyebrow. She emphasizes the warmth of one of the most painful films of recent years. Some of the best work of anyone involved.