Killers of the Flower Moon

Directed by Martin Scorsese

Running time: 3hrs26 | REVIEWED BY CATHERINE BRAY

Killers of the Flower Moon starring Lily Gladstone and Leonardo DiCaprio

Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon is an ambitious blend of Western and film noir, fashioned brick-by-brick from a steady procession of solid creative choices, from the casting of minor roles (look out for Louis Cancelmi, Cara Jade Myers and Ty Mitchell in particular) to the humour of the highly quotable dialogue (“Look at me like you understand what I’m saying”). The mortar between the bricks is the masterful score by Robbie Robertson, sticking the whole unshakable structure together.

But my favourite of the zesty creative flourishes studded across the three and half hour runtime is Leonardo DiCaprio’s teeth. This isn’t a slight against Leonardo DiCaprio’s performance, you understand. He is not fully upstaged by his teeth (as nearly happened to Jonah Hill in Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street), and is wonderful playing a dim bulb manipulated into helping his uncle William Hale (Robert DeNiro) with a plot to marry and murder their way to full ownership of the vast oil fortune that is rightfully the inheritance of the Osage Nation peoples.

But those teeth! Oh my. Off-white, wonky, stained, with something of the weasel about them, these are the teeth of a grifter, the teeth of a weak man, second-rate teeth, teeth whose owner is incapable of real love. I’m not trying to insult anyone who has similar teeth in real life; teeth have their own significance in cinema, completely divorced from what you can tell about people from looking at their teeth in the real world, which has more to do with economics, geopolitics, genetics and vanity. DiCaprio’s teeth in James Cameron’s Titanic were supposed to be the teeth of an itinerant Wisconsin orphan in 1912, and they probably should have looked more like the teeth he has in Flowers of the Killer Moon – but we understand that a mouth full of pearly whites is more important than historical accuracy. The straight white teeth of Jack Dawson help tell us that he is a leading man, a hero, a guy to fall in love with.

26 years later, DiCaprio is notionally the lead in Flowers of the Killer Moon, but although he probably has more screen-time than any other character, the thing that I found so fascinating about this film is that he feels like a second-tier character elevated to the narrative position of a lead – while, crucially, retaining all the characteristics of a low-status secondary antagonist. It’s not even one of those movies where a full-throated villain is the lead, which is a little bit more common. The diabolical, high-status villain of the piece is DeNiro, a man who trails nothing but rot and corruption in his wake, and all for the sake of money. DiCaprio’s character is more like one of those guys in a film noir who is found dead at the end of the first act – only here, he's front and centre structurally, while remaining stylistically very much the schlub. When he injects his wife with tainted insulin, not just once but many times, poisoning her by slow degrees, you think not “how could he?” but “of course” – this is exactly the kind of person who does something like this and is almost too dumb to realise he’s doing something evil. He’s culpable, but also too morally emaciated to comprehend the extent of his own culpability. 

The teeth telegraphed all this from the first moment I saw him, but it still took a while to sink in. Why does all this matter; why is this interesting? Because it’s an honest reflection of how the world works: too many of the people at the top of almost every society, community and industry imaginable are a second-rate cast of sub-par talents, while the rightful inheritors of the world are slowly poisoned by mediocrity.

KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON (2023) Written by Eric Roth, Martin Scorsese, based upon the book by David Grann | Shot by Rodrigo Prieto | Edited by Thelma Schoonmaker