As the images from Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon reach a full circle, literally and metaphorically, the camera goes up from the hands of the rightful inhabitants of the American land tapping the music out of their circular drum... the sound resonates as a reminder of their existence. The camera eventually goes to a bird’s eye view. We see the Osage community celebrating their culture, celebrating life, celebrating the right to individuality as they circle around the instrument which now looks like the pistil of a flower and its colourful petals, ‘the people’ blooming and rejoicing in its full glory and uniqueness. The flowers of survival bloom in Oklahoma hills.
The plot revolves around a time in the 1920s when the demand for oil was spreading like wildfire and the people of the Osage nation had retained their right to minerals, prompting them to generate and have ownership of great wealth, which didn’t sit well with the White coyotes of America. Out of an insatiable desire to vulture around this wealth, a part of the influential Whites insinuated the Congress into believing that the Osage people weren’t equipped to manage their newfound wealth. In 1921, the United States Congress passed a law about guardianship for each Osage of half-blood or more in ancestry, a guardian, who would manage their royalties and financial affairs until they demonstrated “competency”. Here forms the perfect crack for the infiltration of the ravenous perpetrators to set their foot firm on the land of Oklahoma. Around this time, Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio) returns from World War 1 to his uncle William King Hale’s (Robert De Niro) ranch in Oklahoma.
The unscrupulous and slippery Uncle Hale, who often loves being addressed as the King, is a true chameleon who makes the Osage believe that he is one of their own while he silently and parasitically swindles their wealth, he burns his own land or grants his partner in crime a little more right to live only for usurping his insurance money in the right time. Even the allowance to die happens through a move of chess, much like in today’s world.
Hale sets Burkhart up for marrying Molly Kyle (Lily Gladstone) because her family owns the oil rights. The nefarious uncle and nephew pair up, embarking on a frenzy to push Molly’s family into the hands of death after the demise of Molly’s mother Lizzy Q (played brilliantly by Tantoo Cardinal).
Scorsese and screenwriter Eric Roth create a sense of almost an Ibsenesque curse looming large in Molly’s family as one after the other the people associated with her are brutally murdered. But this time the cause and effect of the curse is no mystery, it’s a systematically propagated ‘curse’ generated from the dark souls of the Whites of the land. Like the dark ground oil, there are spurts of blood gushing out through the veins of the Osage land and heart.
Martin Scorsese has his own inimitable way of depicting violence on screen. In his dense, colossal and monumental filmography, Scorsese has represented the violence which he has grown up amidst in the neighbourhoods of New York. He picks it up from there and takes it way beyond, backwards and forward through characters familiar and unfamiliar to him, all eventually tethered by modern civilisation’s basic instinct, violence. But there’s been a significant shift in Scorsese’s portrayal of violence since The Irishman. With The Irishman and especially with Killers of The Flower Moon, Scorsese takes a completely different visual and philosophical take on violence on screen, which is very different from the violence depicted in Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, Gangs of New York, Goodfellas or The Wolf of Wall Street.
The violence in the film doesn’t come out through mere sequences of shock and gore. Scorsese presents the violence almost like a disease, a virus, which stealthily creeps into an entire system from a few individuals. Violence in its very foundation is firstly a mindset, a perspective, a belief which becomes contagious and unstoppable. Scorsese finds a distinctly different pacing for Killers of the Flower Moon with fewer cuts, lesser camera movements (except for a few signature Scorsese compositions where no one else apart from him can make the camera glide seamlessly capturing life in movement) and a deafening usage of silence all interspersed together to bring out a suffocating violence which leaves a lump in the throat.
In the age of Instagram reels, Scorsese makes a film which is three hours 26 minutes long and proves again that holding one’s attention isn’t about lesser duration, it’s about the craftsmanship of storytelling and honesty towards the craft. The film never becomes self-indulgent. The maestro takes the exact time which should be taken for a tragedy to unfold, settle in and leave us pale and shaken, giving the audience the exact time they need to realise the harrowing monotony of violence and the hollowness it leaves.
We are living in a time when we are slowly getting saturated with visuals. We are so consumed by our mobile phone screens, social media, digital billboards and OTT that it takes a true visionary to make his images in cinema stand out. This is exactly why cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto manoeuvred himself out of a path swiftly where many cinematographers would slip, an easy path to fall prey to the hands of the sharp, synthetic and snazzy digital images which the eyes are trained to see today.
Instead, Prieto turned to Dan Sasaki, Panavison’s senior vice president of optical engineering and lens strategy, to develop special lenses to bring the vintage texture of the period, images which will remind the viewer of John Ford or Orson Welles classics. The anamorphic widescreen format brings out the healing radiance of sunset and sunrise in Oklahoma as much as it captures the vast encompassing grief.
Scorsese’s long-term collaborator, the late Robbie Robertson, brought out an unnerving silence through his minimal yet powerful use of music. And the friend who knows Scorsese’s images at times better than him, Thelma Schoonmaker, brings out a pace which achieves something more important than ‘perfection’. It’s not only a result of a professional being the finest at her job but also about the reflection of a beautiful camaraderie between two individuals who have remained consistent with their philosophy and commitment towards cinema and life.
Each and every cast member delivers the ‘necessary’ with their best. Lily Gladstone’s presence is ethereal yet tangible; she knits the dialectics of human nature with an ocean-deep empathy and ease. Robert De Niro is simply incomparable in what he does, he wears the shades of black and grey of the human soul with an equal amount of subjectivity and objectivity, always striking a nearly impossible balance while portraying the ‘villain’. But, to me, Leonardo DiCaprio has left me baffled, prompting me to unlearn my craft entirely and start from zero again.
We have cooked up some very severe wrong notions about acting and narrowed it down to a few futile catchphrases, one of them being an ‘Oscar award-winning performance’, the meaning of which I could never understand. We’ve always set certain standards and checkboxes for actors, only by fulfilling which one can be considered worthy of the label of a ‘great’ actor. But DiCaprio breaks all these hackneyed conceptions and redefines and reminds us of the primary job of an actor, the incomparable golden rule, ‘becoming’.
In this film he responds, he behaves... he merely ‘becomes’. I think Leonardo DiCaprio is reborn as an actor like a Phoenix and this performance should mark yet another beginning of his career. His use of eyes, chin and pauses for Burkhart reminded me of a quote by the great German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche — “If you stare into the abyss long enough, the abyss stares back at you”. DiCaprio represented this through his eyes throughout the film.
In a time when history is changed, altered and re-written out loud by the ones who hold the dice worldwide, ‘hatred’ and ‘insecurity’ are simultaneously marketed and created to look delectable and are met with a staggering margin of success. Scorsese chose silence in a world full of sound and fury. He chose remembrance in a world drowning in political and social dementia. Killers of the Flower Moon to me is a protest by an individual who ‘remembers’.
In a world blinded by the ‘White man’s Americanised history’ and vehemently losing itself towards a global rise of right-wing fanaticism, Scorsese chose to tell the story of the power of individuality... and most importantly, it’s an urgent appeal to start the process of ‘healing’. The story begins with the atom of hate but eventually becomes about Molly’s healing and her ocean-deep empathy and forgiveness, forgiveness not at the cost of self-abnegation, but forgiveness as a mirror upheld in front of the beasts to make them realise what they can truly look like. In a world under the red alert of decaying climate, increasing hunger and confused identity, this film is a reminder of the true meaning of civilisation. Scorsese at 80 ‘remembers’, he is not ready to go gentle into that good night.
