This weekend, in a squall of rain and a first breath of the cold months to come, we went to the Galewood Crossings AMC to see a movie. It was movie weather; the kind of weather that makes you want to spend a few hours in a warm, plush seat doing nothing but surrendering to America’s most magical art form. So it was entirely appropriate that we got tickets to the latest film by the greatest living practitioner of that art form: Martin Scorsese, who, at age 80 and facing down the end of an impressive, surprising, difficult, frustrating, and forever fascinating career as one of the great moviemakers of all time, was finally able to complete his long-simmering adaptation of Killers of the Flower Moon.
At a time when movie studios are reeling from public disinterest, labor struggles, COVID-induced declines in theater attendance, and a creeping sameness of form and content borne of their own risk aversion, it was something of a relief simply to see a good old-fashioned epic on the big screen. (While I don’t want to re-litigate the debate over superhero movies, or especially to once again drag Scorsese into it, there was some irony in the fact that most of the previews before Killers were for exactly this kind of noisy, overstuffed CGI shoot-’em-up picture.) It’s a sprawling, complicated, crowded movie, suffused with Scorsese’s reliable ability to film busy naturalistic crowd scenes. Its much-discussed running time of over three hours was not a factor; unlike so many movies in this era of bloat, there seemed to be, in retrospect, not a single scene that was padded or inessential, nothing that could have been removed without harming the whole.
That a director can produce a picture of this stature, let alone in this day and at Scorsese’s age, is something of a miracle, and it’s hard to shake the feeling that we won’t see anything like it again for a long time. Killers of the Flower Moon is magnificent. It’s not his greatest, at least to me — I think he’s at his best when making films with a tighter focus, a more smothering feel, and a background of the urban settings that heat and boil tensions in a way the wide-open spaces of Oklahoma cannot — but it’s easily in his top five, one of the best movies I’ve seen in years, and a tremendous accomplishment. Thelma Schoonmaker does her usual terrific job in editing what could easily have fallen apart because of the weight of its many elements; Robbie Robertson (with whom I’ve always had a difficult critical relationship) delivered a masterfully suspenseful score as his final encore, and there is no aspect of the film that leaves you feeling cheated or wanting more.
For one thing, it looks amazing. In an era where so many movies look cheap, small, or rushed, cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto, a lenser of great ability and versatility, takes his time and lets each scene dictate what we see and how we see it. Apple spent a lot of money on filming in Oklahoma but it was worth it (more than worth it, given that $200 million is more or less a rounding error for the company); I can’t recall the last time a movie so perfectly evoked a time and place. As is often the case in Scorsese’s movies, the set decoration, props, period music, and (especially) costumes are incredibly on point and manage to conjure memorable images that linger long after the credits fade. And, for once, the fact that everything on screen looks new rather than lived-in works in its favor, reminding us that the Osage were decidedly new money, adding to the scorn, condescension, and envy shown to them by the white power structure.
The acting is unsurprisingly superb from top to bottom. Leonardo DiCaprio is an actor I don’t normally care for, and the loyalty shown to him by Scorsese is one I have always found a bit baffling, but this is far and away the best performance he has ever put in, expertly portraying — and thus carrying on a painfully familiar theme in the director’s work — a delusional, greedy man who thinks he loves a woman but really only wants to possess and control her. De Niro can still surprise, on the downside of his own career, as an abominably monstrous individual who wreaks horrific evil while he still insists on being thought of as decent and respectable. And Lily Gladstone is revelatory, acting with her eyes and face and entire physical being to convey the full burden of a woman married to someone who will cause her unfathomable grief and woe. Other, smaller roles are also tremendous, showcasing Scorsese’s ability to get good performances out of actors who just look like they belong in his movies; these include Smoke Signals‘ Tantoo Cardinal and Cara Jade Myers as Gladstone’s doomed mother and sister, Tatanka Means as a cocky undercover agent and William Belleau as an Osage cursed with “melancholy”; and the laconic Ty Mitchell as one of De Niro’s co-conspirators.
It is incredible, considering the way that one’s knowledge and ambition increase with age just as one’s potency and energy fade, that Scorsese could direct a picture this grand and powerful and sad at 80. He was canny and kind to take the side of the Osage people, whose cooperation he sought to get Killers made, in shifting the focus from the investigation into the murders that form its story to their own pride, agony, and persistence. It made the story more human, more relatable, and more tragic, and the results are on the screen every minute of its run time, from its classic Hollywood beginning to its daring (and moving) end. He still commands intensely deep and heartfelt performances from his actors, and it is nothing short of astonishing how DiCaprio slowly transforms — mentally, spiritually, and most amazingly, physically — into De Niro over the course of the story.
But what demands one’s attention to the most, in what is a film that conveys such profound sorrow while maintaining its fidelity to the truth throughout, is how relevant Killers of the Flower Moon is to our world and our lives. It is almost unbelievably heartbreaking, given our current moment, to see entire families annihilated before our eyes because of the racism, greed, and spite shown to them by colonizers at any sign of advancement, and while Scorsese certainly couldn’t predict it and likely didn’t intend it, it’s impossible not to think of what’s happening to the Palestinian people while watching it. It pulls no punches and tells no lies about the foundations not only of the American frontier, but to the birth of modern America, and how it cannot be understood without an acknowledgement of the spilling of untold amounts of innocent blood. And while he has never been an explicitly anti-capitalist storyteller, Scorsese has always encouraged us to see the implicit message that wealth causes untold misery both to the people who have it and the people they exploit to get it.
As the marketers and money men try to salvage the film industry, this year has seen a lot of narratives build around selling movies like this as “event” pictures. But Killers of the Flower Moon is so much more than that: It is nothing less than a genuine work of great art, the way the best movies are, and we are all better for it. Its rich historicity, great depth of feeling, and timely message, all worked into a whole by artists and craftspeople at the top of their games, have allowed a master to do what masters do: create masterpieces.