Killers of the Flower Moon is Martin Scorsese's Heaven's Gate. I Mean That as High Praise!

I never thought I would write these words, but the new Martin Scorsese movie is great.

For decades if a movie went wildly over-budget and just barely survived a disastrous production it was almost invariably compared to Michael Cimino’s 1980 western Heaven Gate.

Heaven’s Gate is one of the biggest and most notorious flops in film history. It cost over forty million dollars to make yet grossed only three and a half million. Critics who revered its director’s previous film eviscerated it. 

Heaven’s Gate is widely credited with very dramatically ending not just the career of writer-director Michael Cimino but New Hollywood as a whole. 

Conventional wisdom holds that Cimino abused the freedom he won making The Deer Hunter so egregiously that he killed the Era of the Auteur and inadvertently ushered in the rise of the soulless tentpole blockbuster. 

Yet the film’s reputation has been rehabilitated to the point that calling Martin Scorsese’s two hundred million historical drama Flowers of the Killer Moon his Heaven’s Gate qualifies as high praise. 

Both epics are unrelentingly bleak and candid in their depiction of capitalism less as an economic system that lavishly rewards those on top and viciously punishes people on the bottom than as a great evil that corrupts the souls of men and turns them into monsters. 

And both films open with a glimpse of paradise that makes the inevitable descent into hell even more devastating. 

For Heaven’s Gate that means opening with an insanely expensive, elaborate prologue documenting, with great pomp and ceremony, the raucous Harvard graduation of its hero. 

It’s a vision of the lush life at the very apex of the socioeconomic ladder. It’s a golden, shimmering world of privilege that radiates infinite promise and consequently conflicts dramatically with the ugliness to follow. 

Killers of the Flower Moon similarly opens on an impossibly idyllic note by chronicling the enviable and then unenviable fate of the Osage people after oil is discovered on their land. 

The oil revenue made the Osage people wealthy individually and collectively, giving rise to an Osage upper middle class that drove expensive cars and wore fancy clothes and generally enjoyed all that capitalism had to offer. 

If history has taught us anything, and it has taught us many horrible, horrible lessons, it is that there is no paradise for non-white people so perfect and pristine that white people cannot transform it into a prison, if not a lost circle of hell. 

In Killers of the Flower Moon, as in Heaven’s Gate, the essence of capitalism is homicidal. White people want what the Osage have in terms of money, power and resources and they’re not above killing people to get their way. 

In a performance that is, quite frankly, a lot, even by the actor’s exceedingly lenient standards, Leonardo DiCaprio is all pummeling intensity and method actor twitchiness as Ernest Burkhart. He’s a grizzled veteran who returns from World War I with a busted gut and a head full of demons. It’s not a bad performance, necessarily, just a very showy one. 

DiCaprio is one of those gorgeous movie stars who seem ashamed of their extraordinary, even otherworldly beauty. So they go out of their way to hide their attractiveness behind unflattering make-up, bad haircuts and unappealing personalities. 

That’s DiCaprio as Ernest. Actors don’t get more attractive than DiCaprio but in Killers of the Flower Moon he makes himself physically as well as morally unattractive. 

Ernest comes to Osage country so that he can work with and for his powerful uncle William King Hale (Robert De Niro). The big macher posits himself as the very image of warm, avuncular benevolence. 

The quietly terrifying villain pretends to be a kindly benefactor of a people he professes to hold in the highest regard, as the best of the best. The rancher learned the Osage language and customs and befriended seemingly the entire tribe not because he wants to help them but rather because he wants to destroy them. 

Perhaps more than any film in recent memory Killers of the Flower Moon captures the complicated, contradictory, thorny and pervasive nature of racism. The film’s toxic white people marry and have children with people they nevertheless consider inferior and will murder for money. Integration doesn’t mean acceptance or understanding here. It is rather a cynical ploy to rob an entire nation of its wealth, dignity and ultimately their lives. 

At his uncle’s persistent urging Ernest begins a relationship with Mollie Burkhart (Lily Gladstone in a star-making turn), an Osage woman who is already wealthy but will become even wealthier when members of her family die, leaving her with an even bigger cut of the oil money. 

Ernest genuinely seems to love Mollie, to the extent that a man like him is capable of loving anything other than money. Yet that does not prevent him from going along with his uncle’s plan to get rich by killing off every other member of Mollie’s family and then Mollie herself. 

De Niro’s unforgettably understated villain is shameless enough to act as if he and his fellow genocidal murderers are doing the Osage people a favor by killing them. They’re all going to die eventually, particularly after being exposed to all manner of scary European diseases, so why not hurry along the process and become rich?

De Niro’s portrayal of William King Hale reminds me of Louis B. Mayer, who similarly cultivated a wholesome, patriotic image as everyone’s friend and father figure when he would happily stab his mother in the back if it benefitted him. 

DiCaprio and Gladstone are a study in complementary opposites. DiCaprio is mannered and intense in a way that never lets you forget, even for a moment, that you are watching an actor giving it his all rather than the character he’s playing. 

Gladstone, in sharp contrast, has the rare and wonderful gift of being able to seemingly just exist onscreen in a way that doesn’t feel like acting. 

DiCaprio always lets you see him sweat but there is a powerful calm at the center of Gladstone’s performance as well as an unmistakable sadness. 

What makes Gladstone’s performance so heartbreaking is the sense that she knows, consciously or subconsciously, that her husband is trying to kill her and her family for her money. She’s not a stupid or gullible woman in the least. On the contrary, she’s much smarter and sharper than her husband but that does not matter in a context where white and male is seen as inherently superior and preferable to non-white and female.  

Yet Mollie has so few options despite her ostensible wealth and power, that she has to accept an unspeakably vile compromise.

The Osage are being killed en masse and the white power structure behind the mass murders have less than zero interest in solving the crimes or bringing the perpetrators (themselves) to justice.

It doesn’t matter how wealthy or powerful or seemingly assimilated the Osage might be on paper; in a violently racist country like ours they’ll always be willfully deprived of real institutional power. 

Killers of the Flower Moon follows Ernest and William King Hale as they methodically set about murdering the Osage people, particularly the unlucky folks standing in between them and oil money. 

Like Heaven’s Gate, Killers of the Flower Moon is a masterpiece of world building that resurrects, in all of its color and vividness, a long-ago world lost to the ages. It’s a deeply sad spectacle that is wildly entertaining even as it is unrelentingly bleak. 

The FBI was at one point the focus of the film until Scorsese realized that the movie had to be about the Osage people and the unforgivable crimes committed against them, not good white people punishing bad white people. 

The FBI does not even enter the proceedings until around the third act, when Jesse Plemons’ Tom White shows up to let the people of Osage county know that killing people is still illegal even if they are Native Americans. 

Killers of the Flower Moon is, on some level, a horror movie about an entire community that came together to kill Native Americans for their money and then hide their crimes. It’s not about a single serial killer but rather a serial killer community. 

Scorsese’s melancholy epic is even more horrifying and resonant when you consider that the film’s premise—greedy white Americans of European stock killing Native Americans for their resources—is less an outlier than the toxic foundation upon which this country was built.  

Four and a Half Stars out of Five