Killers of the Flower Moon Review: Martin Scorsese’s Dazzling but Flawed American Epic
By Film and TV Editor Mia Tobin Power
This article contains spoilers for Killers of the Flower Moon.
It has arrived: Martin Scorsese’s latest film, the 206-minute historical epic Killers of the Flower Moon, has finally been released. Now, audiences can experience the film beyond the one still that constituted its existence on the Internet for years. Killers of the Flower Moon recounts the murder of Native American Osage tribe members in Oklahoma during the 1920s. The “Reign of Terror” saw white people infiltrate the Osage community with the intention of stealing money that the tribe had made from oil in Osage County.
It is adapted from David Grann’s 2017 non-fiction book of the same name. I read the book in anticipation of the film and loved it, and as a Scorsese fan, my expectations going into this film could not have been higher. And I can tell you that it (mostly) lived up to the hype. It is an undeniably effective film. The dedication and collaboration of Scorsese and his collaborators shines through in every frame. But my biggest criticism of the film lies with the decision made by Scorsese and co-screenwriter Eric Roth to centre the character of Ernest Burkhart, played by Leonardo DiCaprio, in their telling of this story.
Grann frames his book around Mollie Burkhart, an Osage woman whose mother and three sisters were murdered for their money. Her husband, Ernest’s uncle William Hale, was the mastermind behind these murders and many others. Scorsese’s film, however, is told largely from Ernest’s perspective, who helped Hale to arrange the murders of Mollie’s family. At the beginning of the film, we see Ernest, who has just returned from World War I, manipulated by Hale – first into marrying Mollie, and then into murdering her family and slowly poisoning Mollie herself. While at first the film suggests that Ernest is merely a pawn used by Hale to achieve his own aims, as it progresses, Ernest’s agency and immorality are undeniable.
My biggest issue with the film is that Ernest features too heavily; I did not find his crises of conscience as interesting as the experiences of Mollie, her family, and the rest of the Osage Nation. I also believe the film has too much sympathy for Ernest. It suggests that he did truly love Mollie, even though he conspired to kill her and everyone she loved. Christopher Cote, who worked as an Osage language consultant on the film, raised a similar criticism of the film to The Hollywood Reporter: “[T]his history is being told almost from the perspective of Ernest Burkhart and they kind of give him this conscience and kind of depict that there’s love. But when somebody conspires to murder your entire family, that’s not love.”
The centring of Ernest leads to the marginalisation of Mollie, who is played by Lily Gladstone. Gladstone is an electrifying presence, especially in her first few scenes; she commands the screen, and more than holds her own against DiCaprio. However, her role in the second half of the film mostly consists of grieving her family, and suffering as she slowly dies from poisoning. Though Gladstone does a lot with what she is given, and these are real events, Grann’s book depicts her as a more active participant in the story, and I would have liked to see that reflected on the screen.
Cote believes that it “would take an Osage” to tell this story from the perspective of Mollie and her family. This raises a question that often pops up when white artists tell stories about cultures that are not their own: was Scorsese the “right” person to tell this story? That is a complicated question. Scorsese worked closely with Chief Standing Bear of the Osage Nation throughout the production of the film; this May, Chief Standing Bear told a press conference at the Cannes Film Festival, “I can say on behalf of the Osage Nation that Scorsese and his team have restored trust.”
Historically, Osage creatives and filmmakers have not been allowed the same opportunities as white directors. Scorsese’s status as one of the most acclaimed directions in film history means that his creative outputs will receive more attention than other creator’s. Scorsese’s film has brought the story of the Osage Nation’s suffering into the mainstream consciousness, but, as Cote suggests, it is not perfect. I feel similarly about Ernest’s role in the story. A film that casts DiCaprio as its main character will naturally appeal to a wider audience and thus introduce them to this history, but that does not make up for the marginalisation of Mollie and other Osage characters. Ultimately, I think that Scorsese told this story in the way he knows best how, and though it is successful, it is still fair to criticise the film for its shortcomings.
Killers of the Flower Moon is, in many ways, a film Scorsese knows very well how to make. It is clear why Grann’s book interested him: this is a story about greed, power, betrayal, and the psychology of violence – themes Scorsese returns to again and again throughout his career. The criminal characters in the film, such as Blackie Thompson and Kelsie Morrison, would fit in very well in one of Scorsese’s gangster films; thus, it is fascinating that he gives relatively little time to them in this film. Here, Scorsese is more interested in interrogating the concept and personification of pure evil than in traditional immoral or criminal characters. Like so many of Scorsese’s characters, Ernest and Hale are driven by greed (“I love money!” is a refrain of Ernest’s throughout the film). Scorsese examines how, in the history of America, white settlers’ greed and racism have worked in tandem to destroy the lives of Indigenous people.
In shifting the framing of this story from Mollie to Ernest, Scorsese makes Hale’s insidious violence evident from the beginning of the film. In contrast, Grann, obscures the truth about Hale’s involvement in the murders. In making this change, he emphasises how Hale and his conspirators enacted their evil actions almost in plain sight. Early in the film, Hale gives Ernest a book about the Osage Nation’s history; it mentions how, when the Osage people were displaced from their homes by settlers and forced to live in Oklahoma, they were surrounded and threatened by wolves by night. He asks, “Can you find the wolves in this picture?” underpinning the wolves as a striking allegory for the white people surrounding, hunting, and violently killing the Osage Nation.
The story of the Osage murders is the story of America, and the themes of Killers of the Flower Moon are deeply American themes. Once again, Scorsese proves himself to be a truly successful interrogator of white American masculinity. He has sympathy for Ernest like he has sympathy for all of his disturbed and violent male protagonists: Travis Bickle, Jake LaMotta, Henry Hill – even Jordan Belfort to an extent. But in this film, maybe more than in his other films, I do not think Scorsese lets Ernest off the hook. Despite his characterisation as spineless and unintelligent, he is depicted as a willing participant in the violence perpetrated against the Osage Nation. Scorsese asks the audience to consider whether or not they can have empathy for a man like Ernest, and your mileage may vary on that.
The final scene of the film’s main timeline is an affecting confrontation between Mollie and Ernest, wherein Mollie challenges Ernest to tell her the truth about his poisoning of her, thus reclaiming her agency. But the film does not end there. It cuts to a recording of a radio play, which narrates the endings of the main characters’ lives, as they happened in real life. To me, the best part of this scene was the appearance of Scorsese himself, reading Mollie’s obituary. I like the image of him as one of the shepherds of Mollie’s legacy, along with her surviving descendants, helping to keep her story alive. But the final image he leaves us with is not of himself, but of members of the modern-day Osage Nation dancing. As Scorsese puts it, “while the story is set in the 1920s, it’s not a ‘historical’ film… the effects of the tragedy are still felt within the community.” This is an excellent way to end this film – with a reminder that the Osage Nation still alive and living with the consequences of the violence depicted in the film.
