So, how does an old Italian man—famous for his portraits of other Italian men—tell a story that is, by some lines of reasoning, not his to tell? In his unspooling of the haunting, gut-wrenching history of the Osage murders in 1920s Oklahoma, Scorsese gets out of the damn way.
In Killers of the Flower Moon, the director does everything critics said Christopher Nolan didn't in Oppenheimer—mainly, memorializing the victims of white American terror. An early montage shows the murders of multiple Osage individuals, with a narrator reminding us that there was no investigation into each crime. When an Osage home explodes in the middle of the night, someone screams, "This is just like Tulsa!" Flower Moon doesn't ask for so much of your time out of self-importance, but because a tidy, two-hour-long film is entirely incapable of showing a sliver of the pain inflicted on the Osage. At the end of Flower Moon, when that moment comes—I won't spoil it—Scorsese earns it. The words spell pure heartache, delivered in a way the director would've never risked earlier in his career. —BL
In theaters
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