Martin Scorsese delivers a true-crime epic like no other.
These days, it’s hard to write about Martin Scorsese without mentioning the (largely unearned) criticisms everyone with an internet connection directs at the legendary director. Scorsese only directs gangster films. His films are too long and pretentious. They’re too sympathetic to the seedy criminal underworld he’s depicting. It only takes a few minutes with any of the films from Scorsese’s vast and rich catalog to see that these criticisms are wildly misguided.
All the same, Scorsese is not a director above a little introspection. His quietly devastating The Irishman saw him reflect on a career spent helming the kind of thrilling crime dramas the 2019 gangster epic meticulously and tragically dismantled. But where The Irishman allowed Scorsese to turn the camera on himself, Killers of the Flower Moon turns it on his audience.
A towering achievement of immense empathy and startling historical truths, Killers of the Flower Moon shows a master at work on a level few can achieve. It’s a repudiation of the glamorized gangster movie Scorsese has become so associated with, a deconstruction of the romanticized Western genre, and a condemnation of you, the audience, the complacent viewer who gobbles up the very things we so frequently criticize. And it does all this within the framework of a sweeping American tragedy that built the bloody, rotting foundation upon which our country currently stands.
Based on the 2017 nonfiction book by David Grann, Killers of the Flower Moon tells the true story of a series of murders in the Osage Nation throughout the 1920s, after oil was discovered on tribal lands. The oil, and the headrights over the lands that contain it, become the impetus for the murders by greedy white Americans who envy the Osage families that grew wealthy overnight. READ MORE FROM INVERSE
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