It’s been a while—49 days—since I last wrote a review. But in these last two months of the year, I hope to get back on pace to reach the 50 review goal I set out to hit at the beginning of the year. First up, Martin Scorsese’s much anticipated Killers of the Flower Moon.
Scorsese, one of the greatest American filmmakers in the history of the art form and knower of Gen-Z slang, takes on the sad-but-true story of the 1920s Osage Nation murders in his latest effort. Based on the 2017 book of the same name, the movie focuses on the plot hatched by William King Hale (Robert De Niro, Raging Bull) to murder and defraud the newly-wealthy Osage tribe out of the fortunes they were awarded from the headrights to profits of oil deposits in Oklahoma.
David Grann’s book positions Tom White, the lead FBI agent played by Jesse Plemons in the film, as the story’s focal point; this incident played a major role in the formation of the FBI and the start of J. Edgar Hoover’s notoriety as the nation’s top cop. Scorsese is more interested in the crimes of Hale and his nephew Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio, Shutter Island), and most importantly, Mollie Burkhart (Lily Gladstone, Billions) as the film’s face of the Osage.
Throughout his long and acclaimed career, Scorsese has made himself no stranger to stories of greed and evil that has been seemingly indigenous to the project of the United States of America (see: Taxi Driver, Goodfellas, Casino, Gangs of New York, The Aviator, The Departed, The Wolf of Wall Street, and most recently, The Irishman). It’s a clear throughline of his work, dating back to his second feature film Boxcar Bertha in 1972 about poor Southerners who take up train and bank robbery *by accident*. In recent years, he has become the avatar of the fight against comic book movies. In my estimation, unfairly so; but the backlash he’s received for that criticism ignores his own filmography, littered with crowd-pleasing movies listed above. What sets him apart is that he takes you to the deepest pits of hell, the farthest point of immorality as you root for his villainous protagonists.
Killers of the Flower Moon begins with the delivery of what amounts to an omen, Osage tribe members mourning the loss of their land, culture, and wealth (material and spiritual) at the hands of predatory white people. Shortly after, we’re introduced to Ernest, a vapid former infantryman who moves in with his uncle in Oklahoma. King Hale, as he’s known colloquially, knows everyone and everything about Osage County.
There’s a ton of motifs I find interesting in the movie, but I’m particularly fascinated by Scorsese’s depiction of language and assimilation. King Hale learns the Osage tribe’s language as a tool of deception—it ingratiates him to the members and creates a plausible deniability that he would ever be the one to commit such atrocities directed towards them. Even as the Osage begin to shift their tune to blame the white man for the serial killer-esque murders, Hale is allowed to be in the room. By contrast, Ernest also learns their language. He is no less guilty than Hale but his willingness to “talk the talk” comes from his love for Mollie.
The themes of assimilation and cultural genocide also undergird the film’s entirety. On the surface, Hale is the movie’s face of evil. It’s clear to the audience that the murders happening by his order are causing the destruction of the tribe. But what also contributes to it and is just as repugnant is the emergence of the Catholic Church and modern medicine. What we now know as American culture infiltrated the Osage and other indigenous tribes just as swiftly and deadly as disease and war. And Scorsese provides so many more layers of depth, subtly dropping in the first iteration of the Ku Klux Klan and the Tulsa Race Massacre as tangential to this story.
The film is not without its flaws. Scorsese and the team around him went to great lengths to make sure they sought the wisdom and guidance of the Osage Nation’s tribe in telling this story. One of the Osage consultants, Christopher Cote, lamented that the film focused too much on Ernest and King Hale, leaving Mollie (and the Osage tribe) as secondary characters. To this I completely agree. Gladstone’s performance of Mollie stands out head and shoulders above the rest of the cast, which includes giants like De Niro, DiCaprio, John Lithgow (Dexter), Brendan Fraser (The Whale), and Plemons. The Osage story and ones like it deserve to be told by their own people, but for too much of the film Gladstone is asked to do very little. When she is on screen, the movie relies on her as its moral center.
But that aside, there’s not much else for me to complain about. Cote also spoke about his wish to make it more evident that Ernest did not truly love Mollie but I respectfully disagree with his assessment here. As I mentioned above, Scorsese has a knack for trusting his audience to come to the correct conclusions about the morality (or lack thereof) of his characters. I would caution anyone who comes out of the movie believing he took it easy on Ernest to look deeper. Mollie sees right through him at the beginning of the couple’s courtship and she does again at the end. But it's no small feat that people like Cote have been brought into the process that for so long Hollywood kept out. Osage involvement and the key shift in focus from the book to the film, which saves it being just another a white savior film (check out
for a guide on this genre) and shows just how thoughtful a filmmaker and person Scorsese is—a quality he’s always had.We should not take it for granted that Martin Scorsese is active and still giving audiences his best in his 80s. In a recent profile with GQ Magazine when asked what’s left for him to do, he replied, “I have to find out who the hell I am.” What a profound thought for someone who has seen and done it all.
Will you see the movie opening weekend?
Thanks for the mention! Keep up the excellent work