‘Killers of the Flower Moon’ Is The Crown Jewel Of DiCaprio-Scorsese Collaborations

In recent interviews, filmmaker Martin Scorsese, who turns 81 in November, frequently reflects on his age, and how it’s likely to affect his career. That is, he feels he’s got many more stories to tell, but not much time. In one interview he even went so far as to lament, “It’s too late.” To which one wants to say, “Buck up! Italian auteur Marco Bellochio’s got three years on you, and he’s still doing first-rate work! Portuguese maestro Manoel de Oliveira was batting almost 1.000 at the age of 100! You can DO IT!” 

Of course, Scorsese makes films whose scale is such that they take years of prep before the first tripod is even planted. There are other factors, too, that keep Our Greatest Living Director from actually churning out the cinema. But only the most pathologically resentful MCU stan would begrudge him many more years of productive life. Which will mean that his latest picture, Killers of the Flower Moon, will not be his last. Wherever it falls in the Scorsese chronology, though, it will remain something strange and special, and it will remain especially distinctive as possibly the best of the pictures Scorsese’s made in his second great actor-director collaboration. That is, his alliance with Leonardo DiCaprio. 

It’s noteworthy, too, that Killers also continues Scorsese’s first great actor-director alliance, with Robert De Niro.

Killers is the sixth feature film Scorsese’s made with charismatic megastar DiCaprio, who himself still has yet to turn fifty. If we feel like we’ve known Leo forever, well, it’s because we’ve literally been watching him since he was a kid. His third picture, and first film of note, was 1993’s This Boy’s Life, shot when he was just 19. In that period drama, based on a memoir by Tobias Wolff, his character is step-fathered by a scary martinet played by…Robert De Niro.

De Niro was floored by the very young actor’s sensitivity and proficiency, so much so that he raved to Scorsese about the kid. That’s what led, ten years on, to Scorsese’s casting DiCaprio in the vexed 2003 epic Gangs of New York. Some accounts have DiCaprio and Scorsese struggling to learn each other’s respective languages on this set. The production had other issues, including the persistent philistine interference of producer Harvey Weinstein, who in his active years, which have mercifully concluded, would profess his ostensible reverence for great filmmakers out of one side of his mouth and insist he knew better than those filmmakers out of the other. 

Ultimately, the experience of working with Scorsese shifted DiCaprio’s career ambitions. I remember a conversation with a film producer in the early aughts, when Cameron Crowe was still struggling to cast the male lead for his ambitious follow-up to Almost Famous, the ultimately very ill-fated Elizabethtown. The producer said that Crowe had written his script with DiCaprio in mind, but the actor turned it down flat. He wasn’t interested in making comedies, not even the prestige kind that Crowe crafted; now that he’d worked with maestro Scorsese, he only wanted to make serious films, major statements. 

His subsequent work proved DiCaprio to be one of the Last Movie Stars, (White Male Division); his name above the title could make major hits out of the likes of The Revenant, Alejandro Gonzalez Iñárritu’s costly, lengthy, action/art-film hybrid. For Scorsese, he played a variety of intense roles in movies that plumbed American history and/or the dregs of American society. In 2004’s The Aviator, he was the arrogant but also increasingly phobic Howard Hughes. 2006’s The Departed, adapted from the Hong Kong Infernal Affairs pictures, was a crime picture writ very large, with visual nods all the way back to Hawks’ (and Hughes’) 1932 Scarface, with Leo as an an obsessively dedicated undercover cop playing a grisly, lethal game. Shutter Island had DiCaprio as a tormented detective unlocking the terrible secrets of his own life, in the guise of an especially lurid genre story. And then came 2013’s The Wolf of Wall Street, in which DiCaprio played the gleefully amoral real-life salesman/trader/fraud Jordan Belfort, a role in which, among other things, the actor showed some ample, yes, comedy chops. (See the legendary Quaalude Crawl scene, for which DiCaprio threw out his back something awful, apparently.) 

Just as two of Scorsese’s most distinctive pictures, Raging Bull and The King of Comedy, were urged on Scorsese by Robert De Niro (in the case of Bull, Scorsese initially demurred that he knew nothing about boxing and hence didn’t want to make a “boxing” picture; an early draft of the Comedy script has a De Niro note in which Scorsese complains over why “everything has to be so weird and violent”), the Scorsese-DiCaprio teamups were largely Leo’s ideas. I was told by another producer that Scorsese resisted The Wolf of Wall Street for quite some time, until the amount of money being pushed across the table from producer DiCaprio became quite persuasive. Even under that circumstance, Scorsese insisted that he had to “find [his own] way into” the material. He didn’t even meet with the real-life Belfort until the man was on call for a cameo in the movie. 

Killers of the Flower Moon apparently made its way to DiCaprio and Scorsese at the same time, via Rick Yorn, who’s the manager of both artistes, and saw things in David Grann’s best-selling nonfiction book that had appeal for both the actor and director. In the initial development of the film, DiCaprio was meant to play Tom White, the FBI agent who broke the early-20^th-century case of the multiple murders of Native American landowners in Oklahoma, an elaborate, venal scheme to deprive the Osage tribe of oil riches. 

One of the most confounding details of the scheme centered around Ernest Burkhart, who married the oil-land heiress Mollie Kyle and slowly poisoned her even after she had mothered their children. Mollie only divorced Ernest after he’d been convicted of conspiracy. What on earth could their story have been like?

As Scorsese and writer Eric Roth and uncredited others worked on the screenplay, with co-producer DiCaprio intimately involved in the process, it occurred to the creative team to make a switch. In The New Yorker, critic Richard Brody recently interviewed Scorsese, who told the writer that DiCaprio “came to my house one night […] and he said, ‘Where’s the heart of the film?’ I said, ‘Well, the heart is with [Mollie] and Ernest.’ He said, ‘Because no matter what, if I’m playing Tom White, we deal with the iconic nature of the Texas Ranger.’ We have seen that; it’s good. Does he need to do it? How would I do it any differently? I tried. I couldn’t find a way. So he looked at me and sat down and said, ‘Now, don’t get upset.’ He said, ‘But what if I play Ernest?’”

Ernest Burkhart is one of DiCaprio’s most unnerving creations as an actor. (White is played, very well, by Jesse Plemons.) The real-life Burkhart was in his early thirties as the events of the film began; DiCaprio is clearly a little older than that from the get-go, when he arrives in the Osage Hills fresh from World War I. That is to say, rather, not at all fresh. And slightly incapacitated by a “gut” wound he suffered Over There.  But DiCaprio’s more-than-weathered look here (his perfect movie star teeth are made crooked and yellow for the role) is perfect for this simple, instinctively venal lost soul. On reintroduction to local bigwig Uncle Willy Hale — an ever-preoccupied-looking De Niro — he unabashedly confesses a love of money and of whiskey, and the perpetual schemer who’s nicknamed “King” takes note of this. 

In his work with Scorsese, DiCaprio has played his share of mentally unbalanced characters. But here, he’s playing, not to put too fine a point on it, dumb for the first time. Even as he draws Ernest into an evil web, De Niro’s “King” encourages the younger man to study the ways of the Osage, lending him a primer about the people. Practically a children’s book, it features an illustration with the caption “Can you find the wolves in this picture?” which Ernest reads aloud to himself, haltingly. When Uncle Willy, along with Mollie’s doctors, instructs Ernest to dose Mollie’s insulin shots with morphine, just, you know, to “slow her down,” Ernest assents in a way that’s practically ovine. And yet he is a wolf, something it takes him very long to realize. 

In the movie’s last quarter, when Burkhart is near-overwhelmed by emotions and confusions that he can barely understand, let alone resolve, DiCaprio screws up his face in a way that sometimes brings to mind Brando’s Don Corleone in The Godfather. In the interview with Brody, Scorsese says of Leo, “I told him many times, I said, Your face is a cinema face. I said, You can do silent films. You don’t need to say that or this, just your eyes do it, move, whatever you do, he just has it—but I do know he likes to speak in films.”

He does, and his exchanges with De Niro — who here also does some career-high work as a villain who stubbornly insists on seeing himself as a benefactor even as he kills and robs his neighbors — are highly charged, classically shot and edited exchanges. 

Killers is a complex movie, one that’s structured in an unusual way. For the first hour and forty-five minutes, it feels much more conventional than any movie Scorsese’s made before. There are a few of his deft moving-camera shots and sequences, but a lot of the picture is very straight-ahead, its compositions even recalling such foundational film texts as D.W. Griffith’s 1912 Musketeers of Pig Alley. (That’s apt because the movie is ultimately also about cinematic storytelling and the challenges of representation.) And DiCaprio’s performance is both classical and, when the movie breaks out of its initial form and goes Full Scorsese, entirely modern. (And for those keeping count, this is DiCaprio’s fourth movie with De Niro. There’s of course This Boy’s Life. In 1996’s Marvin’s Room they are costars but have only a single interaction. And then there’s 2015’s The Audition, a short film advertising a Macau gambling resort that De Niro, DiCaprio, Brad Pitt and Scorsese did, in Mel Brooks’ immortal Federico Fettuccini phrase, “for money, yes” — apparently the stars got $13 million each for two day’s work.) 

In a TikTok video, one of the Native American consultants on the movie, Christopher Cote, expressed an ambivalence about the film’s perspective, and is at least slightly aghast at the way the relationship between Ernest and Mollie endures in the storyline. Without giving too much away, it can be argued that the movie in fact resolves this issue in a fashion that not only makes sense, but provides the picture with the most stark cinema kiss-off since — for those who know —the final shots of The Third Man. And it’s especially here that DiCaprio’s work with the spectacular Lily Gladstone, who portrays Mollie with almost breathtaking underplaying, packs the biggest wallop. As you’ve heard quite a bit by now Killers is a movie of some length. And the sheer sustain of DiCaprio’s work here is part of why it plays so powerfully. For all the skill he’s shown in the past — and there’s no doubt that even as he grew into both a movie star and a somewhat controversial celebrity (dating patterns, apparently) that he remained the sensitive and alert performer that De Niro saw in the nine-year-old boy — he here brings a new dimension to his work. And proves, again, a genuinely great actor. 

Veteran critic Glenn Kenny reviews‎ new releases at RogerEbert.com, the New York Times, and, as befits someone of his advanced age, the AARP magazine. He blogs, very occasionally, at Some Came Running and tweets, mostly in jest, at @glenn__kenny. He is the author of the acclaimed 2020 book Made Men: The Story of Goodfellas, published by Hanover Square Press.