Killers of the Flower Moon

➤Rated R
➤Theaters

Legendary filmmaker Martin Scorsese returns to his familiar themes of greed, power, and violence in his latest picture, Killers of the Flower Moon. As in his other recent work, Scorsese strives for grandeur with sweeping cinema­tography and an epic runtime, but this time he trades the gritty streets of the city’s criminal world for a ­true-crime Western set in 1920s Oklahoma. Killers of the Flower Moon adapts David Grann’s 2017 nonfiction book of the same name, which chronicles the string of murders that plagued the wealthy Osage Indians and the fledgling FBI’s investigation into those murders.

In the 19th century, the federal government pushed the Osage from their land in Missouri and settled them in Kansas, only to forcibly remove them again to a reservation in Oklahoma a generation later. But the seemingly worthless land in Oklahoma proved exceedingly valuable when the Osage discovered oil in the early 20th century. Money flowed freely among the Osage, and the formerly impoverished nation became the richest people per capita in the world. But the white man’s money brought new dangers.

Killers of the Flower Moon begins with Ernest Burkhart, played by longtime Scorsese collaborator Leonardo DiCaprio, arriving in Osage country after serving in the First World War. Ernest is an aimless ne’er-do-well who hopes his uncle, Bill Hale, played by Robert De Niro, might provide him with an opportunity. Hale is an enterprising businessman and benefactor to the Osage people who has learned their language and culture.

With some prompting from his uncle, Ernest falls in love with and marries an Osage woman named Mollie, played by Lily Gladstone. Mollie knows Ernest isn’t bright, but she thinks he’s good-looking and devoted. What she doesn’t know is how far his seemingly supportive uncle will go to secure her family’s mineral rights for himself.

DiCaprio plays Ernest as a man who’s not quite able to see things as they are, and De Niro’s Hale blends sincerity with unscrupulousness. Gladstone gives a powerful performance as the reserved Mollie, providing the film’s emotional core as well as its narrative throughline.

Killers of the Flower Moon is rated R, but the movie contains no nudity, and strong language is infrequent. The violence is brutal, but it’s not pervasive. Scorsese uses it to punctuate the slow-moving storyline, lingering on the grisly aftermath of the murders. Some viewers will find the gore unsettling.

Other viewers will undoubtedly find the 3-hour-and-26-minute runtime as punishing as the gruesome bloodletting. The movie could have been shorter, but the story doesn’t drag. Conversations feature pregnant pauses, giving this film about laconic Indians and uneducated white men a sense of reality. We get lingering shots of Oklahoma’s countryside and patient scenes in which the community tries to dismiss the grotesque as ordinary. Jesse Plemons, who plays the federal investigator, doesn’t even show up until two hours have elapsed. Perhaps the long runtime serves as a metaphor for delayed justice.

The film contains numerous Biblical allusions, and with this movie Scorsese sets himself up as an Old Testament prophet decrying the exploitation of the weak. The Osage had simple lives, neglected by the federal government, but when they finally experience some prosperity, the white man swoops in to take it away. During my screening, I was reminded of Nathan the prophet telling King David, “You are the man.” The Tulsa race massacre and the Ku Klux Klan make brief appearances, serving to remind us that the Osage murders were only one piece of much broader racial tensions in America.

But this film isn’t merely about the destructive nature of racial ­prejudice. Scorsese warns us against resentment and envy of other people’s blessings, and he offers examples of characters who misconstrue an idealized “fairness” into a sense of entitlement. In Killers of the Flower Moon, we see this sense of entitlement destroy individuals and the fabric of society.