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Director Martin Scorsese
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Scorsese with Lily Gladstone
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Scorsese with Robert De Niro and Leonardo DiCaprio
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Scorsese with Lily Gladstone
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William King Hale
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Mollie Burkhart
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Mollie with sisters Anna and Minnie
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Ernest Burkhart
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Scorsese with Chief Standing Bear, Chief of Osage Nation
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Author David Grann
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KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON B USA (209 mi) 2023
‘Scope d: Martin Scorsese
Anna Kyle Brown.
Osage. 1896-1921.
Fairfax, Oklahoma.
Because she died where
the ravine falls into water. Because
they dragged her down to the creek. In death, she wore her
blue broadcloth skirt. Though
frost blanketed the grass she cooled her feet in the spring. Because I turned the
log with my foot. Her
slippers floated downstream into the dam. Because, after the
thaw, the hunters discovered her body.
Because she lived
without our mother. Because
she had inherited head rights for oil beneath the land. She was carrying his
offspring. The
sheriff disguised her death as whiskey poisoning. Because, when he
carved her body up, he saw the bullet hole in her skull.
Because, when she was
murdered, the leg clutchers bloomed. But
then froze under the weight of frost. During Xtha-cka Zhi-ga
Tze-the, the Killer of the Flowers Moon. I
will wade across the river of the blackfish, the otter, the beaver. I will climb the bank
where the willow never dies.
Wi'-gi-e by Elise
Paschen Osage poet, 2009,
spoken by Mollie Burkhart, whose sister, Anna Kyle Brown, was murdered during
the Osage Reign of Terror
The kind of thing they never taught you in the finest
schools of the country, yet Native American genocide is reflective of the very
soul of the nation, founded on the pillars of greed and racism, as American
history is largely taught as an extension of European history, and while there
is some argument that African American slavery is central to the making of
America, Native American history has largely been omitted, perhaps due to the
massive extent of the atrocities committed which have largely been swept under
the rug, something the majority of the country would just as soon forget. This is American history as we’ve never seen
it, one of the darkest chapters come to light, so this film will likely have a
polarizing effect on viewers who are already positioned to think what they
want, irrespective of what actually happened in American history. For those searching for the truth, this film
only tells part of the story, given free reign under poetic license, but it
tells enough to suggest a staggering crime with profound implications that
still reverberates today, where it’s hard to imagine that this kind of thing
could actually happen, but Scorsese gets underneath the psychological mindset
of the perpetrators, where the epic scale recalls Erich von Stroheim’s silent
American classic Greed
(1924), an off-the-rails yet blistering critique of the American Dream. This film isn’t really for everyone, as it
requires a great amount of patience, an eye for detail, and an ability to feel
empathy, standing in sharp contrast to the Marvel superhero films that dominate
American theaters these days, seen featured in the coming attractions prior to
the start of the film. Of unique
interest, in a short video Scorsese briefly welcomes the audience to the
theater to see his film, which is a personal touch, yet sets the stage for what
follows, as this is a deeply personal project for the 81-year old director, along
with his longtime 83-year old editor Thelma Schoonmaker, who has edited every
film made by this director since RAGING BULL (1980), with Scorsese making a
cameo appearance near the end of this $200 million dollar film, premiering out
of competition at Cannes, where it received a 9-minute standing ovation
(Scorsese films had been absent from the festival for 37 years since a 1986
screening of AFTER HOURS, with Scorsese winning the Best Director award). At the Cannes press conference afterwards,
Robert De Niro referred to this film as “the banality of evil,” where it’s hard
to fathom the sheer hopelessness that exists on Indian reservations. Adapted by Scorsese and Eric Roth from the
2017 Pulitzer-Prize nominated non-fiction book by David Grann, a staff writer
for The New Yorker, the story is set
primarily in Osage County, Oklahoma in the 1920’s, as Scorsese worked with
Osage experts in order to accurately reflect their culture and traditions. Originally from the Ohio and Mississippi
river valleys, the Osage people had been pushed to Missouri and Kansas by white
settlers, along with the forcible removal of about 100,000 American Indians
from their eastern homelands to western reservations, eventually forced to
relocate to a reservation in Oklahoma about the size of Delaware in the middle
of nowhere, given the worst piece of barren and undesirable land imaginable,
viewed as worthless at the time, only to later discover the tribal land was
sitting on some of the largest oil deposits in the United States, quickly
striking it rich, making the Osage
Nation residents among the wealthiest people in America. Their shares were known as “headrights,” with
the tribe distributing royalties equally among its few thousand enrolled
members, collectively earning more than $30 million dollars in royalties (equivalent
to more than $400 million today) in 1923 alone.
Despite their wealth, the racial bias against Native
Americans was only exasperated by white society’s jealousy of the Osage people’s
wealth and lavish lifestyle, as in the public’s eye, as depicted by the press,
they were still wild Indians, mocked for their extravagance while still living
in a primitive style, wrapped in colorful blankets, described as “the laziest people on earth,” claiming they were “slow to civilize,”
expressing contempt at seeing whites slavishly performing menial labor for
conspicuously wealthy Indians, which was viewed as an abominable role
reversal. That massive wealth drew the
attention of the white neighbors, who murderously conspired to get their piece
of it, using marriage, guardianship, and devious legal maneuvers to steal the
Osage oil money, where this sprawling three hours plus movie documents just
some of what is now referred to as the Reign of Terror, From
the archives: The Osage murders and "Killers of the Flower Moon" David Grann on CBS Sunday Morning (8:18), as an estimated 5% (or roughly 150
people) of the Osage tribe were poisoned, murdered, or died under suspicious
circumstances in Osage County, Oklahoma from 1921 to 1926, most of which were
never even investigated. In the state of
Oklahoma, killing an Indian was simply of no consequence, and those who dared
to investigate the killings were themselves murdered, while evidence was routinely
tampered with or destroyed, with oil rights transferred to the whites who were
likely their murderers. In 1921, the
federal government passed a law requiring Osage members to prove “competency”
with money or else be assigned a (white) financial guardian, as most tribe
members were considered incapable of handling such large sums of money, for no
other reason except for the fact they were considered ignorant Indians, described
in the film as “incompetent.” One Osage
tribe member named John Goodskin was a college graduate and a WWI veteran, yet
the Bureau of Indian Affairs mandated a white guardian be assigned control over
his financial affairs. The origins of
this racial bias came from the words of Chief Justice John Marshall in 1832,
claiming the relationship of Native Americans to the U.S. was “that of a ward
to his guardian,” so the use of these same terms 90 years later on the Osage
Reservation is not a coincidence, as the government still viewed themselves as
primarily protecting the interests of their supposedly incompetent wards,
opening the floodgates for grifters and fortune hunters, with lawyers pouring into
the region to get their hands on this unique opportunity, with judges handing
out Indian guardianships to faithful friends as rewards for favorable political
contributions, as laws allowed mismanagement and corruption to thrive, where the
entire white community became incentivized to participate in this system of
greed (the guardianship system was not overturned until 1978). A 1924 study
by the Indian Rights Association, a policy and advocacy group founded by
non-Indians, estimated that guardians had stolen at least $8 million directly
from the restricted accounts of their Osage wards, calling it an “orgy of graft
and exploitation.” When Osage guardians
funneled Osage money into their own pockets and the case went before a local
judge, it would routinely be ignored, despite the grisly fact that many
guardians ended up with multiple dead wards.
For this reason many Osage women married whites, so their guardian
overseer was their own spouse, presumably a reliable and trustworthy ally.
No one makes crimes stories like Scorsese, the maker of
gangster films like Mean
Streets (1973), Goodfellas
(1990), The
Departed (2006), and The
Irishman (2019), describing this film as “a sober look at who we are as a
culture.” There are visual and thematic
similarities with Paul Thomas Anderson’s There
Will Be Blood (2007), both featuring megalomaniacal lead characters, both
crafted by the same production designer Jack Fisk, yet what makes this
different is Scorsese’s first attempt at making a western, shot out in open
country, where typical of westerns, the story pits civilization and the rule of
law against frontier outlaws who exploit the system. Police investigations, if they happened at
all, often blamed the victims, as deliberate poisonings were chalked up to
drinking bad liquor or what was described as a peculiar wasting illness,
shootings got labeled as suicides, autopsies were often skipped, burials
rushed, and death certificates falsified.
Grann’s book is meticulously researched while diligently providing the
context for these shocking acts, becoming a searing indictment of the
callousness and prejudice toward American Indians that allowed the murderers to
operate with impunity for so long, turning late in the book to firsthand
experiences with the families and communities that continue to be affected by
the murders. Scorsese omits that late
transition, which makes all the difference, so this film takes a different
perspective, centering upon the story of Mollie Kyle (Lily Gladstone, who is of
Blackfeet and Nez Perce heritage, acknowledging in an
interview earlier this month, “Nobody is going to hand an Osage filmmaker
$200 million”), an Osage woman who marries a white man, Ernest Burkhart
(Leonardo DiCaprio in his sixth Scorsese film), an easily manipulated foil heavily
influenced by his domineering uncle, William King Hale (Robert De Niro working
with Scorsese for the tenth time), to personally carry out or be complicit in
the murders of most of her family. Hale’s
psychopathic hatred towards Indians draws an apt comparison to John Wayne’s
archetypal Ethan Edwards in John Ford’s THE SEARCHERS (1956), while it was
impossible not to think of De Niro’s overwrought maliciousness as Max Cady in
Scorsese’s CAPE FEAR (1991), yet at the time of his trial for orchestrating a
string of murders, the press, still enthralled with the myth of the American
West, romantically referred to him as an “old-time cowboy.” While Mollie and her family are the targeted
victims, the storyline closely follows Ernest Burkhart in his transition from the
budding romance of a returning war hero to a deceitful and treacherous husband
who carries out despicable crimes, where the film is largely seen through his
point of view. Unlike Grann, who follows
the arc of the investigation, within the first ten or fifteen minutes Scorsese
makes the intentions of Hale and Burkhart known well before the story starts,
diffusing the film of any underlying tension, yet the deteriorating trust in
the marital relationship becomes closer in spirit to Hitchcock’s Suspicion
(1941), focusing instead on an unraveling character study as he attempts to get
at the heart of what feels like a void in humanity. Hale was a cattle rancher who amassed a
fortune through insurance fraud and unfair trade with the Osage people, proclaiming
himself “King of the Osage,” owning a controlling interest of the Fairfax bank,
part interest in the town’s general store and funeral home, while also serving
as a reserve deputy sheriff, giving him access to local criminals to do his
bidding. While taking us into frontier
settlements called Gray Horse, Hominy, Pawhuska, Fairfax, and an illicit
gambling outpost called Whizbang, this captivating murder mystery may be viewed
as a journalistic exposé, but it lacks the electrifying suspense and emotional
complexity of Truman Capote’s In Cold
Blood (1967).
“I’d never been out to the prairie,” said Scorsese in an
interview with The New Yorker, “When I got out there, we were driving for
so long on one road, and I wondered why we were going so slowly, and I looked
at the — it was, like, 45 minutes — I looked at this speedometer, we’re doing
75, and I realized this place never ends.”
In both the book and Scorsese’s film, the full brunt of the emotional devastation
falls upon the shoulders of Mollie, who narrates a description of the dry
grasslands, as every April millions of tiny flowers spread over the hills and
vast prairies as Johnny jump ups (wild pansies), spring beauties, and bluets
blossom over the Osage land. In May,
however, taller plants like black-eyed susans and spiderworts begin to grow,
overtaking the smaller blooms, stealing their sunshine and rainwater. As the smaller flowers try to reach for the
sun, their necks break and their petals fall, buried beneath the taller
plants. The Osage refer to this period
as “the time of flower-killing moon,” becoming a metaphor for the way the white
men came and brutally killed the Osage people.
In something of a strange twist, the Osage petitioned to President
Coolidge and the federal government for help, a plea that was initially
ignored, as there was a tremendous amount of corruption in Osage County, where
lawmen were either complicit in the murders or bought off, turning a blind eye
to justice. Even the Governor of
Oklahoma, Jack C. Walton,
was impeached out of office in 1923 for accepting under-the-table oil bribes
after serving less than a year. In this
murky landscape, whites were emboldened to commit cold-blooded crimes, thinking
of themselves as untouchable, as it’s questionable whether a jury of twelve
white men would ever punish another white man for killing an American Indian, where
one lawman can be heard saying, “You got a better chance of convicting a guy
for kicking a dog than killing an Indian.”
Seeking a high-profile success to erase the bureau’s stained reputation
for its role in another oil corruption scheme, the Teapot
Dome scandal, newly appointed director J. Edgar Hoover sent investigators
to Oklahoma in the new Bureau of Investigation, then an obscure branch of the
Justice Department, which would later be renamed the Federal Bureau of
Investigation (FBI) in 1935, but only after the death toll rose to more than
twenty-four. With a culture of killing
and complicity, the FBI investigated only a fraction of the killings, as Hoover
was in a hurry to close the case, never looking deeper into the darker
conspiracy implications, turning the case over to Tom White (Jesse Plemons), a
former Texas Ranger and an experienced investigator who lived in the saddle,
putting together an undercover team that included a Native American agent, John
Wren (Tatanka Means), actually charging the Osage $20,000 for their services, as
they had to pay for justice, which is simply unheard of, yet the headlines
generated by this case gave birth to a more professional, modern era FBI. However, even after the Bureau of
Investigation closed the case, according to Yancey Red
Corn: Actor, Osage Native American, “the killings just kept going on.” While the oil ran dry and the Depression
depleted their wealth, one important consideration here is that even though the
Osage tribe were the targeted victims, something they never forget, they don’t
live their lives as victims, as the Osage Nation has not just survived, but is
thriving, making attempts to reacquire the stolen lands (including Ted Turner’s
expansive 43,000-acre Bluestem Ranch) while adopting new ways to ensure its
future. Having once owned nearly 1.5
million acres in the early 1900’s, before this 2016 acquisition the Osage
Nation owned only 5% of that.
While the story itself has profound implications, the film
is very sluggish and feels like an overlong death march, with vicious murders
accumulating before our eyes, one after another in a succession of endless
brutality, growing darkly unsettling and relentlessly grim throughout, where
you wonder where the hell was Thelma Schoonmaker’s reputedly outstanding
editing, as it definitely needed some help.
This never lives up to the best of Scorsese, feeling instead like an
elderly version where you try to say too much, and don’t want to leave out
anything, but makes it more rambling while attempting to chronicle such a dark
and nearly forgotten aspect of American history that resembles the grisly maliciousness
of Shakespeare’s Macbeth. The opening sequence is the best thing in the
entire film, as that Robbie Robertson music just grabs you by the throat, Killers
of the Flower Moon Soundtrack | Osage Oil Boom - Robbie Robertson | Original
Score | YouTube (2:51), while Scorsese’s gravity-defying crane shots lure
you in. Malevolence is everywhere in this film, as the loss of life feels
unstoppable, most of it masterminded behind the scenes by Hale, who spent years
ingratiating himself into the good graces of the Osage community so no one
would suspect him. He proclaims himself
a merciful friend, speaking their language, making benevolent donations for
schools and the local hospital in the Native community, where he’s allowed a
privileged position to sit at tribal meetings and at funerals that he
orchestrated, but his benevolence is a ploy to disguise his evil intent, drawing
a parallel to the billionaire pharmaceutical Sackler family, famous for their
philanthropy, positioning themselves as bastions of morality, building a
reputation as generous patrons of the arts while pushing the highly addictive OxyContin
on the general public, where more than half a million have died from the damage
caused by the opioid epidemic, so brilliantly revealed in Laura Poitras’ All
the Beauty and the Bloodshed (2022). Scorsese exposes the murderous intent of Hale,
but he did not act in a vacuum, and many more Osage went missing than were ever
accounted for. Left out of the film is
the unmistakable reality of federal Indian policy, which, from the 1880’s
through the 1940’s, fostered a legal strategy through which Native peoples
would lose their land and resources more and more easily, which is an
underlying cause of why this happened, as it wasn’t just Hale, but the
government’s intent as well, yet instead of murdering Indians they simply stole
land and wealth through legal channels, as the federal government has seized
hundreds of millions of acres of land from Native nations in over 300 treaties. It was the official government policy of
assimilation which saw Osage children forced into boarding schools, with
attempts to eradicate Osage language and culture (both survived). Even in the 20th century, the federal
government collected billions of dollars from sales or leases of natural
resources like timber, oil, and gas on Indian lands, which it was supposed to
disburse to the land’s owners, but it failed
to account for these trust funds for decades, let alone pay Indians what
they were due, so this film is just one chapter in a much larger story, one
that affirms the U.S. was built on stolen lands and wealth.
Despite Scorsese’s best efforts to tell the story of the
Osage murders in the most respectful manner, working closely with the Osage
people in Oklahoma, Native Americans are relegated to the background in a
larger story predominately featuring white male protagonists, as Hale enlists
the aid of ranch hands, doctors, lawyers, insurance agents, law enforcement
officials, and relatives to carry out his relentless schemes and
cover-ups. Perhaps due to the commercial
appeal of De Niro and DiCaprio, they are onscreen for the majority of the time,
where much of this is seen through their eyes, perhaps focusing too much on
Ernest Burkhart, giving him a conscience, while taking away the pain of Mollie
and her family, where the Osage community are largely given a distant
ceremonial presence, remaining passive bystanders as one by one they are picked
off in the most heinous manner by a racist and utterly vile plot against
them. For most viewers, they will remain
outsiders, silently playing the tragic victims, perhaps mirroring Scorsese’s
delicate position as an outsider himself, where little time is spent attempting
to understand their culture. Even when
speaking among themselves in their own language, there are no subtitled
translations, so viewers have little opportunity to become emotionally invested
or gain needed insight. Scorsese simply
accentuates the wrong perspective, shifting the emphasis to those carrying out
the crimes, giving too much screen time to the villains instead of expanding an
indigenous narrative, as David Grann does with his book. Compare that to Sarah Polley’s Women
Talking (2022), for instance, where there are a stream of revelations from
the point of view of those who are targets of a crime, while those that carry
out the crimes are largely unseen. As a
sign of the times, it was no accident that these events happened simultaneously
to the 1921
Tulsa Race Massacre, where wealthy blacks in Oklahoma were terrorized by a
two-day long mob attack from white supremacists, literally destroying the homes
and businesses of a well-established black community, where hundreds of lives
were lost and up to 10,000 black residents were left homeless, leaving a
thriving community utterly decimated. These incidents do not reflect upon black or
Native American history, but instead reveal the historically racist mindset of
whites (the Ku Klux Klan of the 1920’s had a nationwide membership in the
millions), instilling widespread community fear by devaluing people of color to
such a degree that they readily resort to murder to stop minority economic
advancement from happening in America, where the laws and political
institutions have been complicit in either covering up these crimes or
conspiring against those who were plotted against. Unlike Grann’s book that exposes how the
murders and ethnic violence against the Osage Nation affect its people to this day,
with families still haunted by the atrocities, Scorsese’s tale is one of an
extensive criminal conspiracy, still largely undocumented, where one group
plots against another with complete impunity.
This kind of mindset has not disappeared, reflecting the complicity of
white supremacy, as a Pandora’s Box of toxic race hatred has infected the
present as well, with hate crimes on the rise (Hate
and Extremism — In the Mainstream and on the Main Street), along with a gun
culture of mass shootings, as if we’re still living in the lawlessness of the
Wild West, where families continue to deal with inconsolable losses from dreadful
tragedies that all Americans need to come to terms with.
Note
The family of Ree Drummond, aka television’s Pioneer Woman, a staple on the Food
Network since 2011 who married into the Drummond family
(Oklahoma) in 1996, is the largest landholder in Osage County that also includes
churches, oil companies, banks, the University of Texas, and the University of Oklahoma,
owning 433,000 acres in 2017, or 9% of the county, as the Drummond patriarchs
were able to amass so much land because they were guardians to at least 10
Osage estates, owning a trading company offering extensive services like will
executions, deed transfers, as well as undertaker and funeral services that
eventually turned into a funeral home, routinely overcharging Osage customers, with
Jack Drummond in a late 1970’s interview openly acknowledging a 700% markup for
Osage shoppers (The
Strange but True Story of the Pioneer Woman's Link to ...), while also
purchasing Osage headrights during the Reign of Terror, making money off of the
Osage Nation, with the Drummonds eventually purchasing William Hale’s ranch.
