Why Martin Scorsese's 'Killers of the Flower Moon' is a Masterpiece
This striking fresco, where Leonardo DiCaprio, Lily Gladstone, and Robert De Niro shine, certainly bears the signature of an immense filmmaker.
After so many exceptional films, inscribed forever in our memory, it would not have been indecent that at 80 years old, Martin Scorsese lacked inspiration. And yet: by discovering Killers of the Flower Moon, its plastic force, its dull anger, the burning fire that fuels its story unfolding without hurrying, taking the time to capture a monstrous machination, swallowing its protagonists, it is obvious that the great filmmaker has lost none of his genius.
A total genius, where everything, from the direction of the actors (Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro are extraordinary, playing on the whole palette of ambiguity—Lily Gladstone is an indisputable revelation), to the direction, hypnotic, almost experimental in a certain radicality in its narrative choices. Where the word is worth as much as the action, through the setting of music (signed by Robbie Robertson, who died last summer) contributes to the absolute cinematographic experience.
We imagine that the subject, inspired by real events, told by the journalist David Grann, who devoted a book to them adapted here, blew over the embers: in the 1920s, on the lands allocated by the American government to the Osage Native American tribes, oil wells are discovered, considerably enriching its inhabitants. Over the months and years, murders and suspicious deaths increased, and the rights to exploit the wells returned to the Whites, who felt great bitterness at seeing their neighbors gain a status of which they considered them unworthy.
The indifference to their fate will be broken—belatedly—by the arrival of FBI inspectors. It is a story of murderous greed and injustice, of racism and lies, a story of manipulation and betrayal, a story of troubled love, to which Scorsese gives an incredible form of beauty, establishing a toxic, uncomfortable climate, which plunges us into a corrosive acid, where the slow tempo takes on its full meaning.
Convincing his nephew Ernest (DiCaprio) to marry Mollie (Gladstone), Andrew Hale (De Niro) does not have Ernest's personal fulfillment at heart, obsessed only with his wife's fortune, which he will use to methodically extort. It is as much the picture of a country that the filmmaker paints as it is portraits of men and women, powerful or vulnerable, trapped by their appetite for power, their stupidity (DiCaprio composes a fascinatingly complex character ), their blindness, their fragility.
The attentive delicacy with which he films the Osage tactfully testifies to the respect which has been so long denied to them, and which this film, in reparation, finally offers them. Shockingly, the denouement, staged with totally unexpected emotional power, will leave a bitter taste in the mouth for a long time, only softened by the certainty that Scorsese is still an immense artist.
