killers of the flower moon (w&d martin scorsese, w. eric roth, david grann)

There’s a certain irony in Scorsese, an alpha male filmmaker, whose films so often revolve around the activities of other alpha males, making a film in his dotage which is predicated upon the strength of a woman. Lily Gladstone’s performance as Mollie brings a subtle charge to proceedings which all the grandstanding of De Niro and DiCaprio cannot compete with. She inveighs the film with a sense of that which goes beyond dialogue, the power of a look, the throwaway line. Where De Niro and DiCaprio are all surface - the latter surface emotion, surface stupidity, the former surface cunning, a typical late De Niro genial monster, Gladstone seems to be all depth, as though she has no need to speak in order to convey thought. It’s a compelling performance, which ties in with De Niro’s early observation to his nephew that the Osage say that the white person’s speech is like the chirp of a blackbird, and they will use silence to counter this, examining the weakness of their white interlocutor.

Around the midpoint of the film, Mollie gets sick. She drops out of the narrative to a certain extent, and the film shifts to more familiar Scorsese tropes of the family and its corrupting influence. It descends into a meta drama about the relationship between DiCaprio’s Ernest and his uncle, William Hale, played by De Niro. Their interaction feels predictable and follows a vein that runs through Scorsese’s work of the seductive but malevolent power of the family. There is a fearsome attempt to depict DiCaprio’s Ernest in a not altogether unsympathetic light, in spite of the fact that he is responsible for the killing of two of his wife’s sisters, amongst other crimes. This feels a lot like the exec producer actor interfering with narrative logic.

Having said which, the first half of Killers of the Flower Moon, until Mollie becomes bedridden, is almost vintage Scorsese.  At his best, he is a master of making big issues fit the screen, as though they have been waiting for him to boil them down into 120 minutes. The intercutting of archive footage, the grand set pieces, the swooping camera, the rhythmic edit, the sense of the narrative being driven through the use of music and edit, the ellipsing of time, all these are present in the opening hour. Then, like a marathon runner spotting the tape and slowing down, the second half of the film, robbed of Gladstone’s ludic energy, seems to run out of gas. (Or oil.)