FLOWER MOON SHADOW

Opening this weekend:

Killers of the Flower Moon--In the 1870s the Osage Nation settled on a large reservation in northeastern Oklahoma consisting of land thought to be of little value. But in the late 1890s, it was discovered to be sitting on an ocean of oil. Because the Osage had retained mineral rights to the land, by the early '20s they found themselves to be the wealthiest people, per capita, on the planet.

It need hardly be said that opportunistic white folks moved in fast to snatch this bounty through a variety of schemes, perhaps the vilest being the practice of marrying into an Osage family and then murdering the spouses and other heirs. Because the case was eventually broken by the nascent FBI, the story was briefly dramatized as one episode in The FBI Story, Mervyn LeRoy's 1959 chronicle (and whitewash) of the Bureau, starring James Stewart.

Martin Scorsese's account is not so brief. Scripted by Eric Roth and Scorsese from David Grann's 2017 book, the director's three-hour-plus Killers of the Flower Moon is an epic nightmare, solemn and heartbroken yet charged up with a fierce and sweeping vitality. The style feels different from his previous work, yet somehow it's still unmistakably a Scorsese picture.

The focus here is on Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio), a WWI vet who arrives in Osage country to work for his uncle, the cattle rancher William King Hale (Robert DeNiro). Ernest soon marries an Osage woman named Mollie Kyle (Lily Gladstone) and starts a family with her. A dull, malleable sort, Ernest seems to genuinely love Mollie, yet all the while they're married he's secretly serving as a thuggish henchman for the sanctimonious Bill Hale, who condescendingly professes love for the Osage while conspiring in the deaths of Mollie's mother and sisters and others in the community. Eventually and inevitably, Mollie also becomes a target of Bill's plans.

Killers is shot in chilly shades of gray and sepia by Rodrigo Prieto, edited by Scorsese's longtime collaborator Thelma Schoonmaker and moved along by a brilliant, pulsing score by Robbie Robertson, to whose memory the film is dedicated. Yet despite the presence of these cronies, this isn't business as usual. Scorsese doesn't give us the kinetic flashiness of his gangster sagas here. There's no darting, antic camerawork, no wall-to-wall narration.

But this isn't a staid historical drama either; the tone is feverishly immediate and chaotic, almost hallucinatory at times, and there's a tinge, especially in the scenes between DiCaprio and DeNiro, of deeply grim comedy. Scorsese's comic edge doesn't distance us from the horror, either, as perhaps it could be accused of doing in Goodfellas or Casino. The murders and other violence are presented with an angry bluntness, as nothing but sordid, wasteful and evil.

Essentially, what Scorsese gives us here is a vision of life in hell, not just a hell of butchery and menace, though this is amply depicted, but of the fractured spirit and toxic guilt generated by racial terrorism and piracy. The agony of this life is reflected in the superb performances of DiCaprio and the serene, gravely beautiful Lily Gladstone. DeNiro is at the top of his form as the genially satanic Bill Hale, and the enormous cast includes fine turns by Tantoo Cardinal, William Belleau, Cara Jade Myers, Brendan Fraser, Scott Shepherd, Sturgill Simpson, Katherine Willis and Barry Corbin, among many others. John Lithgow appears as a prosecutor; he's always welcome but gets less of a chance than usual to flex here.

There's also a strong supporting performance by Jesse Plemons as Tom White, the Texas Ranger turned G-Man who led the BOI (later FBI) investigation. The case was an early success for the Bureau, depicted here as a largely unknown agency at the time (Grann's book is subtitled The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI), and Plemons, speaking softly and politely but firmly from under his Stetson, lightens this bleak and grueling movie's mood just enough to get us through; we at last feel a dawning of hope for justice and salvation. He shows up just in time.

One more note: I was expecting, and hoping for, the usual afterword before the end credits, explaining what ultimately became of these people. Kudos to Scorsese for coming up with a more creative and witty way to present this information. It's an ingenious coda to this great and terrible American tale.