The searing, sprawling ‘Killers,’ which premiered Saturday at Cannes, is both like and unlike anything its director has ever done.
Like more than a few Martin Scorsese epics, the searing, sprawling “Killers of the Flower Moon” recounts a horrific campaign of violence from the inside. Adapted from David Grann’s 2017 nonfiction book, the movie revisits an oil-rich, increasingly blood-soaked stretch of 1920s Oklahoma — a land whose wealthy Osage Nation owners have begun to die under brutal and mysterious circumstances. The killers’ identities aren’t obvious, at least not at first, though their motives very much are: Their aim is to right the balance in a world where their presumed racial and cultural inferiors have been granted an unworthy position of influence. To that end, the Osage must be divested of their riches by any means necessary, including oppression and extortion, marriage and murder.
The movie, which premiered out of competition at the Cannes Film Festival on Saturday, is both like and unlike anything its director has ever done.
It finds Scorsese reteaming with two of his favorite actors, though never until now have they appeared together: Robert De Niro plays William Hale, a powerful cattle rancher in Fairfax, Okla., and Leonardo DiCaprio plays Ernest Burkhart, his obedient if somewhat feckless nephew.
The larger sphere in which these two men and many others operate is, on one level, a familiar Scorsesean jumble of work and family, money and violence. And yet in its balance of Wild West expanses and intimate domestic spaces, and its focus on Indigenous men and women whose good fortune quickly turns ill, this world is also, for Scorsese, a fascinating new visual, dramatic and political frontier.
In the background of all the dense, teeming action you may hear reverberant echoes of “Goodfellas” and “The Irishman,” “Gangs of New York” and “The Wolf of Wall Street,” among other indelible American epics of organized crime and tribalist violence. But you will also hear — in the agonized cries and silences of an Osage woman named Mollie Burkhart (a superb Lily Gladstone), Ernest’s wife — a story of this nation’s original sin, here compounded to a degree of monstrosity and horror that can give even a chronicler of human evil as seasoned as Scorsese pause.
And a pause, at this juncture, is perhaps worth taking.
Since well before the movie was even completed, the anticipation around “Killers of the Flower Moon” has been especially feverish. That’s partly because every new Scorsese movie is an event, for better or worse, and partly because its arrival, for some cinephiles, would be the truest sign that the movies, at least as we knew and loved them before March 2020, are well and truly back.
Before it begins streaming on Apple TV+, “Killers” will receive an October theatrical release through Paramount Pictures, which will provide a test of how large an audience remains for a filmmaker of Scorsese’s nonindustrial bent and epic ambitions.
