Killers of the Flower Moon, Martin Scorsese’s impressive dirge (review)
Against the backdrop of crimes against the Osage Indians in Oklahoma in the 1920s, the director of Goodfellas creates a twilight and majestic film (although a little long).
Ten years ago, in 2013, we were delighted that Martin Scorsese could sign a film as vigorous as The wolf of Wall Street – proof that at the age of 70, the Master still had it under his belt, after several stiff opuses. In 2023, time has flown, and we are impressed by the wise old manners that he displays in Killers of the Flower Moon, his 26th feature film, which he showed yesterday out of competition at Cannes. Its first time with a new film screened exclusively on the Croisette since After Hours (in 1986!), his sixth film with Leonardo DiCaprio, his tenth with Robert De Niro.
A film which confirms, after the very majestic, very slow, very imperious, Silence And The Irishman, that Scorsese has entered a new phase of his career. A new tempo. The films unfold at a new, languid rhythm, they assume their flowing forms – 3h26 on the clock in the case of Killers of the Flower Moon, a duration of which we are obliged to say that we feel it passing. But this is undoubtedly the price to pay to enter into the great process of hypnosis that the filmmaker intends to practice here.
At the beginning of Killers of the Flower Moonthere is a book of narrative non-fiction by David Grann, The American Notea bestseller which looked back on the tragedy of the Osage Indians, an American nightmare now forgotten: at the beginning of the 1920s, when they had made their fortune thanks to the oil which had suddenly started to flow from their arid lands of Oklahoma, the Osages became the targets of the greed of unscrupulous whites, attracted by black gold.
The plot, as remodeled for the cinema by Scorsese and screenwriter Eric Roth, revolves here around a rich landowner, the “King of the Osage Hills”, a sort of Godfather of Oklahoma (De Niro, chilling with creaminess paternalistic), who welcomes his nephew back from the war (DiCaprio), and will make him one of his henchmen in his vast project of appropriation of the wealth of the “Natives”. As in Grann’s book, there is here the desire to confront the original sin of the American nation in a late western setting, where the last traces of the Old West mingle with soon-to-be triumphant capitalist modernity. Like a barbaric postscript to the Indian wars.
Scorsese returns to themes that already obsessed him at the time of Gangs of New York : the flawed foundations of America, the construction of the nation at the cost of the right of the strongest, the deadly conflict between communities, where the victory of one requires the annihilation of the other. But the most “mafia” material, film noir, of this story (although loaded on paper: waves of merciless murders, poisonings, innocent victims shot at point blank range, FBI investigation, trials, etc.) does not give has Killers of the Flower Moon the appearance of an operatic crime fresco – Scorsese no longer needs to prove that he knows how to do that.
He prefers to observe the moral dilemma of Ernest Burkhart (DiCaprio), the weak-minded, spineless veteran, manipulated by a De Niro whose character somewhat evokes that of Jack Nicholson in Infiltrators – foster father always on the verge of devouring his children. In love with an Osage woman, Mollie (great Lily Gladstone, seen in the Some women by Kelly Reichardt), Ernest will find himself trying to love and protect her, while slowly killing her, and participating in the destruction of his family and his entire community.
The most impressive scenes in the film are tense face-to-face confrontations, stormy domestic or intimate confrontations, sometimes streaked with bad omens, in which Scorsese observes death at work, the slow rotting of a certain idea of America. , helped by the heady soundtrack of the faithful Robbie Robertson. Turning his back on baroque fever, the filmmaker now seeks a form of twilight serenity in the midst of chaos.
By Martin Scorsese, with Leonardo DiCaprio, Robert De Niro, Lily Gladstone… Duration: 3h26. Released October 18, 2023.
