Killers of the Flower Moon review: Exquisitely mounted, impeccably finished and just a little worthy

Writers are sometimes advised, for reasons of narrative economy, to begin their stories in media res. Dumping your character amid already ongoing drama is supposed to kick things along a bit. That doesn’t quite work in Martin Scorsese’s latest exquisitely mounted, eminently responsible engagement with American capitalism. The audience will be immersed in this fetid water until it soaks into its marrow. It’s a worthy ambition. A surprising coda aside, you couldn’t exactly call Killers of the Flower Moon fun, but it is notable in its desire to do you some good. Listen, learn and improve.

Following a zippy prologue that finds the Osage people of Oklahoma dancing amid gushing oil, the film brings Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio) home from the first World War to a town already transformed by that discovery. The Native American people of Fairfax are loaded, and greedy white folks are here to carve out their undeserved share. Unconvincingly snaggletoothed and hick-voiced, Burkhart arrives as a murderous conspiracy is already afoot. Osage are dying young in suspicious numbers. William King Hale (Robert De Niro), local boss and Burkhart’s awful uncle, pretends to concern, but it doesn’t take much for his Malthusian cynicism to show through. “I love them, but in the turning of the earth they will be gone,” he says. Burkhart hitches himself to Mollie (Lily Gladstone), one of the Osage heiresses, and, with deadening inevitability, she too begins to weaken.

And there the story sits for two of the film’s 3½ hours. Faster than is the case in David Grann’s fine nonfiction source, the audience is made aware that Hale is masterminding the slaughter. Scored to rhythmical pounding from the late Robbie Robertson that alludes to Native American percussion, the deaths mount up as the two growling antagonists – DiCaprio and De Niro clearly enjoy grating against one another – indulge in ever more creative rationalisation.

One strain of Scorsese’s art has enjoyed tempting the audience into guilty excitement at the immorality, indeed psychopathy, of his protagonists. You had that in Taxi Driver. You certainly had it in The Wolf of Wall Street. Who would pretend not to enjoy the early larcenous mayhem in Goodfellas? There is none of that here. Killers of the Flower Moon is taken up with the grubby schemes of men with no wit or glamour. Holding off the arrival of Jesse Plemons’s compelling federal agent until the last act nudges aside suggestions of white-saviour mythology, but it leaves us in drearily squalid company for longer than is comfortable. (It is worth noting that Grann’s book is subtitled “and the birth of the FBI”).

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In theory that shift also gives us more time with the Osage. Representatives of that community have expressed approval of the film. But Gladstone’s superb performance – she works 100 shades of nuance from an increasingly flattened personality – cannot wholly distract from our awareness that the Native Americans register here largely as victims. One beat from Robbie Robertson. One note from the film’s long, long inclination towards delayed retribution.

For all that, Killers of the Flower Moon is so draped in artisanal quality that one can’t help but bow down before it. The cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto, a Scorsese regular, shoots in a mouldy chocolate that dispels any suggestions of nostalgia. Thelma Schoonmaker, who first edited for Scorsese more than half a century ago, continues to accentuate the musical rhythms in her collaborator’s montage. All the actors are strong. Gladstone and Plemons are next-level.

Scorsese was, when discussing the new film, happy to again mention John Ford’s The Searchers. But one thinks also of the same director’s late Cheyenne Autumn. It is more sober than the early work. It makes less play with the audience’s baser instincts. It is impeccably finished. It is just a little worthy.

Killers of the Flower Moon is in cinemas from Thursday, October 19th