'You talkin' to me?' How Scorsese's 'Killers of the Flower Moon' gets in your head

Lily Gladstone, left, plays Mollie Kyle in directed by Martin Scorsese, right. Apple TV+ hide caption

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Lily Gladstone, left, plays Mollie Kyle in directed by Martin Scorsese, right.

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Killers of the Flower Moon.

A jarring cut to a god's eye view of an indigenous man writhing on a floor, foaming at the mouth, appears early on in Martin Scorsese's .

It's soon followed by the melancholic voice-over of Mollie Kyle (Lily Gladstone), a wealthy Osage Nation woman from oil-rich Fairfax, Okla., in the early 20^th century, injected into the story like a sobering medicinal shot. "John Whitehair, age 23. No investigation," she intones, as black and white "footage" shows someone we assume to be Whitehair running happily on a football field. Then again, but differently, in montage: She recites other names and other ages of Osage people in her community who have been found dead, all meeting the same postmortem fate of "no investigation."

Scorsese's filmography is flush with characters who love to talk and talk (or yell), sometimes at others, sometimes to themselves, other times directly to us viewers. He's long understood the power of getting inside the storyteller's mind, that when the audience feels as though they're being addressed directly, they will identify more with that character, if only for a moment.

In clumsier hands, this technique can be an expository crutch. For Scorsese, it's meant to be an immersive and occasionally empathy-inducing stylistic choice.

isn't driven by narration in the same way as, say, or, more recently, . It's heard sparingly and from multiple perspectives – but it's at its most effective when used to bring the viewer closer to Mollie and the Osage community.

'You talkin' to me?'

Mollie's way of speech is careful and deliberate; she communicates so much with just a knowing, observant glance, maybe a sly smirk. This is a feature, not a bug. It's at least partly a defense mechanism, a way of staying on guard against the white men who circle her close-knit family and community like buzzards.

Leonardo DiCaprio as Ernest Burkhart and Lily Gladstone as Mollie Kyle in Apple TV+ hide caption

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Of course, one of those white men is also her husband, Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio), a World War I vet who's the unabashedly lethal combination of lazy and greedy. It's complicated, though: She knows he's attracted to her money, and she flirtatiously calls him a "coyote." But for most of the film, she doesn't know – or, maybe, doesn't – he's responsible for many of the Osage murders, in cahoots with his slithery crime boss and uncle, William "King" Hale (Robert De Niro).

Time. "Meaning I was taking the approach from the outside in, which concerned me."

The script was retooled to examine Mollie and Ernest's fraught marriage and how racism fuels hatred and greed.

Some have said Scorsese didn't – and perhaps – go far enough in prioritizing Mollie's perspective. Upon seeing the film, Christopher Coté, one of the Osage language instructors brought on to coach the cast, expressed disappointment while acknowledging that the movie's overarching theme is complicity in white supremacy. "Martin Scorsese not being Osage, I think he did a great job representing our people, but this story is being told almost from the perspective of Ernest Burkhart,".

"This film was made for everybody [who is] not Osage," he added.

Coté is correct; this aligns with how the director has talked about "Look at the world and Europe between 1930 and 1940," Scorsese said about Ernest's characterization during a. "There's a lot of good people who maybe through letting one thing slide and letting another thing slide and another thing slide, that they could have taken a moral stand on? They didn't ... they become complicit."

Scorsese's long been the kind of director who has no trouble breaking down his artistic intent from movie to movie, disclosing the responses he's hoped to elicit with his work. In the book , he spoke about Henry Hill's absence of any shred of regret for his criminal misdeeds at the end of : "There's no hypocrisy about being sorry for his life, it's just, 'Gee, no more fun.' ... I think the audience should get angry at him and I would hope they do — and maybe with the system which allows this."

All of it feels perfunctory and profound, like Scorsese is imagining the funhouse mirror version of the entire movie – whitewashed and sanded down, a world where the story has a clear-cut "hero," and it's Tom White/the federal government. In other words, the kind of story that's been told time and time again to the diminishment and erasure of indigenous voices. As he seeks to counter that tradition, he knows it won't do pretending as if it never happened. That's just another form of complicity.