“Can you find the wolves in this picture?” This question in a children’s book, read aloud by Leonardo DiCaprio as Ernest Burkhart in Killers of the Flower Moon, is a literal one about an illustration in its pages, but it’s also about the film itself.
There’s a simple, wrenching answer: yes. They’re everywhere. “It’s a story of complicity. It’s a story of sin by omission, silent complicity in certain cases,” director Martin Scorsese explained over Zoom at a global press conference for the film.
The movie, adapted from the David Grann book of the same name, chronicles the Osage murders that took place between 1918 and 1931, in which an estimated 60 members of the Osage Nation were killed. While Grann’s book focuses on the beginnings of the FBI investigation that the murders sparked, Scorsese knew he had to take a different approach to his film adaptation, and so decided to approach the story from inside the community.
It was a decision that took a lot of care and communication with the Osage community in Oklahoma. “They were naturally cautious. I had to explain to them, I’m just going to try and deal with them as honestly, as truthfully as possible,” Scorsese explained. “How do you really deal with that culture in a way that is respectful and also is not hagiographic?”
By focusing on the marriage between Mollie and Ernest Burkhart (Lily Gladstone and DiCaprio, respectively), Scorsese found his central tension: love coexisting with immense, unspeakable betrayal. Like the narration in Scorsese’s 1993 film, The Age of Innocence, muses, “The real thing was never said…”
Cognitive dissonance in the service of physical and emotional violence is a career-long preoccupation for Scorsese that continues in Killers. “What is that about us as human beings that allows for us to be so compartmentalized in a way?” he asked.
It’s a story that’s sold by a restrained, yet deeply emotional performance from Gladstone. “I was very impressed by her presence, her intelligence, and the emotion that’s there in her face,” he said. Gladstone’s face is a landscape unto itself in the film, and when emotions bubble up on the surface the whole terrain can change with the slightest gesture. Her grief as Mollie is deeply felt, too, with wails that will follow viewers outside of the theatre. Gladstone’s work cements the whole mournful affair with real, deeply felt emotion.
Scorsese is no stranger to telling stories of emotional and physical violence, or to using music to chart out the rhythm and pacing of his story. For Killers, the soundtrack by Robbie Robertson lends a rich, rightfully melancholic atmosphere to the film and blends well with the other selections on the soundtrack like the songs of Ma Rainey and Emmett Miller’s “Lovesick Blues.”
“A lot of the music that kept pushing me was what Robbie Robertson had put together,” Scorsese said of his longtime musical collaborator’s score, the last he’d compose before passing away in August. “I said I wanted something dangerous and fleshy and sexy, but dangerous. And that beat took us all the way through.”
Ultimately, Killers of the Flower Moon forces its audience to reckon and sit with the actions of the many wolves in the picture, and American history, and perhaps lead us to wonder who they are today. As Scorsese concluded, “What I wanted to capture, ultimately, was the very nature of the virus or the cancer that creates this sense of a kind of easygoing genocide.”
Killers of the Flower Moon is in theatres now. Read our review and find showtimes at austinchronicle.com/screens.
This article appears in October 20 • 2023.