“Killers of the Flower Moon” is a brilliant synthesis of Martin Scorsese's filmography

Martin Scorsese has finally brought it all home.

Though most famous for his crime films centered around Italian-American mobsters, the Oscar-winning director has made many different kinds of movies over the course of his six-decade career. Scorsese's oeuvre also includes richly furnished historical dramas, faith-focused films about the consequences of religious devotion, and rock & roll concert movies, among others. What's so astounding about his latest picture, Killers of the Flower Moon, is how it synthesizes many of these disparate elements of Scorsese's work into a singular, cohesive, and damning statement about American history.

Together with screenwriter Eric Roth (Forrest Gump, Dune), Scorsese adapted Killers of the Flower Moon from journalist David Grann's 2017 nonfiction book of the same name about the killing spree inflicted upon oil-rich members of the Osage Nation in 1920s Oklahoma. Readers of the book will not find it difficult to spot what must have piqued the interest of both Scorsese and his longtime leading man, Robert De Niro. Like Goodfellas or Casino, the saga of the Osage murders was a criminal conspiracy that involved a lot of sex, money, and murder. As reported by Grann, when federal agents started investigating the murders, prime suspect William K. Hale (portrayed by De Niro in the movie) responded by killing off his various henchmen in order to prevent them from implicating him — much like De Niro's Jimmy Conway did in the iconic "Layla" sequence from Goodfellas.

These elements of Grann's story are not as foregrounded in Scorsese's film as you might expect, though. The subtitle of the book is The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI, and a good portion of the text follows the investigation by proto-FBI agent Tom White (Jesse Plemons) into Hale and his nephew Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio). But Scorsese has said in multiple interviews that he decided to rework the story after "I realized I was making a movie about all the white guys." As a result, Jesse Plemons' performance as White only gets minimal screen time in the finished film. He and his team of operatives are often placed in the background of scenes, fuzzy and literally out of focus, while the camera foregrounds Hale or Ernest or the latter's Osage wife Mollie (Lily Gladstone).

Melinda Sue Gordon/Apple Lily Gladstone, Robert De Niro, and Leonardo DiCaprio in 'Killers of the Flower Moon'

Scorsese's Killers of the Flower Moon begins and ends with the Osage, bookends that elevate the film beyond a typical Scorsese gangster picture. The first scene portrays an Osage ceremony, wherein tribal elders bury a ceremonial pipe as they mourn how their children are forsaking the traditional beliefs and symbols of their people in favor of marrying white men and attending Catholic mass. Starting with such religious questions evokes Scorsese's more faith-based films, which usually exist separate from his explorations of the Mafia. When the movie takes on the perspective of Mollie's mother Lizzie (Tantoo Cardinal), her dream-visions of a doomsaying owl and Osage ancestors at the gates of the afterlife are treated as seriously as Jesus' desert confrontation with Satan in The Last Temptation of Christ.

For better and worse, Killers of the Flower Moon isn't always seen from the Osage perspective. Though Scorsese said he wanted his adaptation to focus less on white men, such characters still occupy the majority of screen time. It's just that audiences are forced to stew in the guilt of racist criminals Hale and Burkhart instead of getting to feel validated by the crusading justice of White's team of do-gooders. Scorsese's crime pictures have long had a clear rise-and-fall arc, but sometimes the rise to power is portrayed with such energetic fun that audiences are left wondering if The Wolf of Wall Street is actually meant as an endorsement of Jordan Belfort's behavior. It's not, and to emphasize that point, Scorsese's previous film The Irishman has all the criminal brotherhood fun of Goodfellas but then spends a whole third hour watching De Niro's protagonist slowly wither away into an empty life of guilt and regret, isolated from his family and bereft of friends (many of whom he killed himself).

Guilt has been a major part of Scorsese's movies for a long time. Mean Streets, his 1973 crime drama that forged the template for all his later gangster films, finds Harvey Keitel's protagonist constantly reckoning with the imbalance between his Catholic faith and his lifestyle as an up-and-coming mafioso. That Catholic guilt was made even more literal in The Last Temptation of Christ, where Willem Dafoe's Jesus wonders whether his destiny on the cross is worth more than years spent with friends and family, and in the more recent Silence, where Jesuit missionaries can save their Japanese converts from the wrath of the Tokugawa shogunate at the cost of publicly denouncing their faith.

Everett Collection (2) Robert De Niro in 'Goodfellas'; Andrew Garfield in 'Silence'

But while there are certainly Catholic connotations to the guilt of Flower Moon (watching his uncle's workers burn the family ranch for an insurance payout, Ernest feels plagued by visions of hellfire), it also carries the weight of historical crimes as much as personal ones. The new film is Scorsese's first reckoning with the genocide of Native Americans, and unlike his past movies about crime, everyone is complicit. White people didn't have to always want to be a gangster or consciously choose to become a stockbroker in order to benefit from the eradication of Indigenous Americans; they just had to be silent and go with the flow as horrors unfolded around them.

Thankfully, the Osage themselves never went silent. Denied the protection of the American legal system or the historical record of American media, the Osage continue to tell their story through music and performance — and Scorsese is no stranger to showcasing either via his handful of documentaries. Robbie Robertson, whose farewell concert with the Band was captured by Scorsese in The Last Waltz, provided the score for Killers of the Flower Moon — his last completed musical project before his death earlier this year. Robertson was of First Nations heritage, and his score combines percussive rhythms from Native music with the blues rock that he and Scorsese chronicled for so many years.

In fusing together so many previously disparate elements of Scorsese's filmography, Killers of the Flower Moon points a way forward. You can't change the past, but you can learn from it. The beat goes on.

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