Martin Scorsese
The Killers of The Flower Moon

"You know it's easier to be convicted here for kicking a dog than for killing an Indian"

The Osage Nation are Native Americans not belonging to the so-called five "civilized" tribes, where the term implies the adoption of Western customs and those of the white man. However, this choice did not spare these tribes further atrocities and crimes over time, such as the forced deportation from the Southern States (especially Georgia, South and North Carolina, and Tennessee) to Oklahoma, a deportation known in history as the Trail of Tears, resulting in thousands of deaths due to the relentless journey with very few supplies. But to Oklahoma, the Osage, too, had been deported from the Great Plains region (particularly Missouri), and in those undesired and inhospitable lands (intended for Indian segregation before being annexed to the Union) they were forced to emigrate to, they found the blessing/curse of oil.

From this premise begins the 206-minute journey of Martin Scorsese's latest and eagerly awaited film, four years after a masterpiece like The Irishman.

Throughout a career marked by different phases and experiments, Scorsese has always talked about greed, crime, and money, united by the red source of blood; of family relationships tied to kinship or mafia affiliation.
The story told in The Killers of The Flower Moon, however, has something different and explores a relatively uncharted territory in Scorsese's journey along the human being's abominations and horrors.

In the past, the Italian-American director delved especially into the crime of underworld settings ("In Little Italy you could either become a gangster or a priest," somewhat like in the world of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, Scorsese himself recalled) or big capitalism, here we face, for the first time, a different kind of abomination and cruelty, as it is perpetrated against a helpless and powerless part. Making the viewer experience the same sensations, in turn.

Because it's one thing to show deaths and horrors in contexts where all the characters are criminals or otherwise corrupt (see the nevertheless heartrending case of Jimmy Hoffa in The Irishman) or who rummaged in the murky getting their hands dirty like the undercover agent played by DiCaprio in The Departed. It's another thing entirely if these atrocities are unilateral and committed with an inconceivable cynicism and a malice unknown even to the worst characters of Goodfellas and Casino.

Of course, it's true that certain dynamics are recurring, and especially that the narrative arc of Scorsese's characters (always taken or inspired by reality — after all, reality always surpasses fiction, not vice versa) — crimes, killings, a sort of rise followed by a fall and imprisonment — is always the same. But it is once again in the nuances that the evolution of an artist and the completion of a journey should be sought. At the end of The Killers of The Flower Moon, one inevitably asks: what does this film add to the filmography of one of the greatest film masters still – fortunately for us – active? A lot, is the answer. Even though it might not seem so at first glance.

This movie experience is challenging and not trivial. It's not because of the duration and especially because of the themes addressed, indeed. America is shown for what it is, despite the continuous idealizations that, unfortunately, do not account for the immense bloodshed upon which this great democracy, so admired and revered, has been built over the centuries.

There are many cinematic and literary works about the massacres of the natives, indeed, the same great Evil of the Overlook Hotel stems from this. And I always carry in my heart Arthur Penn's Little Big Man, one of the very first films to show a different perspective on the matter. One that wasn't Fordian and that of the white cowboys.

The Killers of The Flower Moon has the merit of telling a story that very few people know, and in doing so, Scorsese, aware of the great delicacy and, as mentioned above, the difference compared to his other criminal stories, puts in a lot of restraint. If in films like the aforementioned Goodfellas and Casino, he could give more display of violent details, even for greater entertainment and black humor, in this new work, he uses a subdued and respectful tone, precisely because he is aware of the enormity of what he has brought back to the big screen. There is no showmanship nor pornography, and after a work like The Irishman, a true funeral eulogy to a genre and an era, he makes a film if possible even gloomier.

In the end, it's no coincidence if there's no redemption for anyone involved in the crimes, nor even a kind of lifeline. There isn't, for the protagonist - the usual exceptional DiCaprio - a bourgeois life, however shabby, waiting for him at some random location chosen by the feds. No newspaper to read in the morning after having picked it up from the doorstep. No memoir to write, not even the refuge of omertà, the code of silence, and loyalty to the family (mafioso or blood) even after the death of all other members. And his soul will not be cleaned and freed at all as he perhaps believed in his last dialogue with his wife Mollie.

The Killers of The Flower Moon manages to be a love story nonetheless sincere, and in this, it reaches very high moments despite their extreme brevity. Like those that could have been the fleeting and only dreamed glances between Daniel Day Lewis and Michelle Pfeiffer, between Newland and Countess Olenska.

Scorsese is, of course, also an author connected to the relationship with spirituality, a child of the Catholic civilization that permeates his work since the times of Mean Streets and has found fulfillment in Silence. And the relationship with spirituality returns, now from a different perspective like that of the natives, in this new film, with visions, omens, and an ancestral relationship with Nature hinted at only (we are not in Malick's The New World territory) but of great impact.

The Killers of The Flower Moon also features a De Niro (in his tenth collaboration with Scorsese in fifty years, a unique pairing in history) who perhaps plays the most abject character of his career, and especially a tremendous Lily Gladstone, for the role of Mollie, I hope she wins the 2024 Oscar.