We thought we’d seen it all from one of the greatest actors of all time. Roberto De Niro had nothing left to prove – he’d played all kinds of characters in the last 55 years since his outrageous debuts in Bryan De Palma’s early movies (Greetings and Hi, Mom! in 1968 and 1970, respectively); he’d played gangsters, priests, maniacs, war veterans, boxers, missionaries, talk show hosts, firemen, as well as loving fathers, husbands and lovers, young, old, comedy, drama… De Niro’s recent track record composed mostly of duds and box office poison seemed to hint at an actor who felt spent, with little left in the tank after years of putting himself through a grueling regimen to inhabit the characters he was so passionate about.
And yet, two of his best efforts came in the form of two consecutive reunions with long-time friend and collaborator Martin Scorsese for The Irishman in 2019, and more recently for Killers of the Flower Moon. Both movies saw De Niro give very nuanced late-career turns, the like we hadn’t seen before from the veteran performer. Both very different in tone and characterization, but the essence remains the same: De Niro tapped into a quiet and restrained sense of violence, preventing the audience from empathizing and yet finding a way to connect with us and the reality we belong to.

Today I want to look at his latest collaboration with Scorsese – what both of them have referred to as possibly their last ride together – for which he is expected to earn his ninth Oscar nomination as he portrays one of the most cold blooded figures in the history of the American West, namely William King Hale, also known as ‘The King of the Osage Hills’ in Osage County, Oklahoma.
Hale was a gang leader on whose command possibly hundreds (over 60 were confirmed dead) of Osage Natives were killed in the 1920s for their wealth and mineral rights to the land of their reservation. In one word – oil. Scorsese’s film goes hand in hand with De Niro’s performance as a crucial supporting character responsible for driving Di Caprio’s Ernest Burkart to murder.
The film, like Hale, doesn’t make a mystery of its intentions. Scorsese presents the murders in a pure, matter of fact basis. The killers are shown in plain sight. Gone is the mystery narrative of the book which the film was based on. Gone is the heroic framing of the FBI in the resulting investigations. Gone is the ambiguity to Burkhart and Hale’s culpability. Scorsese strips the film of any sense of morality or aesthetics, admitting to his own fault of presenting the story of Native Americans from a white man’s perspective and what in the end will be viewed as, inevitably, entertainment.
Like Scorsese, De Niro interprets Hale without a moral compass – he shows Hale for the manipulator that he was, for the power-hungry killer that lay dormant beneath the robe of a Sheriff’s deputy and local businessman and rancher. It is one of the most impressive performances of De Niro’s career because it consistently demonstrates how one can never hide his true colors. Instead, Hale is Scorsese’s engine to the story, ‘King’ – as the Osage and his family refer to him – is the living manifestation of the genocide that afflicted Native Americans and that drove them into poverty, alcoholism and death through a steady annihilation of their culture, values and language.

De Niro as Hale is the neighbor everyone respects and knows from across the street. He is seen attending every social gathering involving the local Osage population. He is their link to the white man’s world – to the world that looks into their business, the world that is ready to welcome them not for who they are, but for their wealth. He is one of the few white men in the area to be fluent in  Dhegiha Siouan, the Osage’s official language, and one of the few whose status as local authority translates into the Osage community, too. Everybody knows King. And De Niro, the actor, never forces his gravitas as a powerful figure – instead, he carries himself like a strict yet dignified community leader whose worries reflect the worries of his flock. When something’s wrong, he senses it and lends his services. He keeps a close eye on every person that may be suffering of illness or depression, tracking each and every member to their headrights, the one thing King is really interested in.
Yes, everything is commodified, the Osage become a walking source of income, to the point that some white men are willingly killing their own Osage wives and adopted children. That is, with King’s own blessing. “I love’ em,” says Hale. “But in the turning of the earth, they’re gonna go. Their time is over,” his words resounding like those of a blood-thirsty dictator. Yet, Hale is no dictator, only a politician who goes about his business like everyone else. Because that’s who Hale is – a businessman trying to make the best of a golden opportunity. The fact that it involves bloodshed is a mere formality to guarantee the future of his generations of white children.

Upon rewatching Killers of the Flower Moon, I noticed how restrained De Niro’s physicality is, how the actor barely moves on screen as William Hale. He lets silences and looks do the work. Scorsese shoots his long-time partner with mostly steady shots, paying close attention to Hale’s reactions to his surroundings. Hale is the Owl, aware of everything and everybody, and the Osage believe that once you see an owl approach you in your dreams, it means death is knocking at your door. Hale embodies this impending doom, but unlike in Alan Parker’s Angel Heart from 1987 where he played the Devil complete with creepy fingernails, black attire and a weirdo ponytail, De Niro never makes the plunge into ridicule or grotesque.
When recently asked about how he approached the character of King, De Niro – who is not famous for being too expressive about his craft – simply replied, “I didn’t know him and I still don’t.” This cold, analytical take is perhaps the only correct way to bring back to life a person whose outlook on life involved mass murder and contract killings as a regular practice to preserve a sense of ‘natural’ order. I say bring back to life instead of ‘give a voice to’ because De Niro doesn’t give a voice to Hale: instead he uses him as an instrument to give voice to a nationwide sentiment.

In Killers, everything begins and ends in rituals. For the Osage, rituals were what kept them in touch with their ancestors and higher powers watching over them in times of suffering and turmoil. For the white folk, rituals became an excuse for entertainment and scheming. As the movie progresses, Scorsese makes it evidently clear that the Osage’s ritual practices are steadily being replaced by the white man’s own customs and attire. Funerals are increasingly less about commemorating a loved one and welcoming them into a new life, and more about dressing in black and trying to hide past sins. The shaman is eventually replaced by a priest, the power of organized religion suffocating the last bit of Osage tradition.
And behind all of this stands Hale. From a simple observer, he soon becomes the ruling figure in most weddings and funerals. He is the man everyone suspects but no one points fingers at – De Niro embodies the destruction of a people, how can anyone possibly stand in his way? Justice has no effect on him. Justice to Hale is a turn of phrase, a metaphor, a joke. Hale knows this, as he tells Ernest, “There might be some insurrection for a while. But then people forget that. They don’t remember and they don’t care. It will be another ordinary everyday tragedy.”

Regardless of who he’s dealing with, Hale operates more or less in the same way. De Niro never makes it too obvious whether his character is being threatening or comforting – the fine line between these two is what sets off the tension in each scene. Hale’s signature move is holding someone else by the shoulders and looking deep into their eyes, this applies to both friends and enemies. There are no distinctions in his attitude because it all stems from the same place of power and entitlement. Hale feels entitled to treat everyone like his own children – and depending on the color of skin and their status, he will make a decision with regards to your fate.

De Niro’s nuanced and subtle turn makes everyone complicit. There is not a single moment that his behavior is meant to alienate us. Instead, his cold blooded and calculated demeaner sucks you into Hale’s schemes. There is no outrage. There is no crying, screaming. There is none of the emotional release we’ve come to expect from the actor who gave so many instances of emotional vulnerability in Raging Bull, Mission or Deer Hunter, among others. In Killers, his character’s observations are so simple, so crystal clear despite their murderous nature. Critics of the film seem to have failed to understand that the focus – due to Scorsese’s own acknowledged sense of a limited white man’s perspective – is on the enabling of the killers, on the ease with which the entire homicidal plot is put into motion by someone as ordinary as Hale – a loving father, uncle and grandfather – and the absolute complicity of a town, a community and a nation that was built on similar instances of widespread bloodshed. Hale – through De Niro’s silent stare – is not the exception, but the rule. He is the model, the example to follow in the eyes of men and women who still to this day fail to question the realities of our world, because in Hale’s view – he’s merely doing what the situation requires of him.

Other actors would have fallen into the trap of humanizing Hale or ridiculing his evil nature. De Niro doesn’t. De Niro embodies the factual traits of a man whose memory was omitted from history books for several decades. The sincerity with which he does it does not grant Hale a pardon and does not overtly demonize him. He simply exists within the frame of Martin Scorsese’s canvas as one of the ghosts that haunt the filmmaker’s vision of America, a vision that has become essential to how we approach the power of cinema as a medium and source of knowledge. The story of Killers is just another story, just another broadcast from the world of men who got to where they are now by crushing ‘lesser’ others.