2025 Top Ten List #7 Soundtrack to a Coup D’État

 

Louis Armstrong and his All-Stars

Patrice Lumumba

Max Roach

Andrée Blouin

Malcolm X

CIA director Allen Dulles with his everpresent pipe

Director Johan Grimonprez

SOUNDTRACK TO A COUP D’ÉTAT                   A-                                                       Belgium  France  Netherlands  (150 mi)  2024  d: Johan Grimonprez

History is the lie commonly agreed upon.                                                                                      —Voltaire

A stark assessment of how little we actually know about modern day history, where everything is cloaked in secrecy, as truth is a liability, telling one tale for public consumption while undermining that exact same position behind-the-scenes.  Nothing new was shot for this film, as it’s all drawn from existing archival material, a truly radical, formally inventive effort, as the amount of research involved here is truly extraordinary, where the entire film consists of footage not shown when the events were happening, providing a glimpse behind the headlines of what the media was not telling you.  Meticulously examining the 1961 assassination of Congo’s newly elected leader, Patrice Lumumba, where not much was known or written at the time, the film documents each and every source, looking behind the curtain at what really happened, creating a chilling portrait of the cruel manipulation of international affairs, where it’s all about the art of deception.  Using American jazz as a connecting thread, including live performance footage, with improvisational music fueling a free form, avant garde, cinematic collage approach, this is something we haven’t really seen before, yet the scholarship in breaking down the various political smokescreens is impressive, using eyewitness accounts, official government memos, recorded United Nations debates, testimonies from mercenaries, CIA operatives, British intelligence, and speeches from Lumumba himself, along with published memoirs by Congolese activists and writers.  The compelling subject matter is dense and often difficult to watch, juxtaposed against various jazz compositions that act as an underlying narrative, from Abbey Lincoln’s haunting rendition of Max Roach's Freedom Now Suite YouTube (9:08), a Civil Rights anthem, perhaps the best-known jazz work with explicitly political content, to the deeply soulful Nina Simone - Wild Is The Wind (Live In New York 1964) YouTube (7:00), or her jazzy rendition of a Bob Dylan anthem, The Ballad of Hollis Brown - Nina Simone 1965 YouTube (6:10), which starts and ends the film, to a Congolese song of liberation by Joseph Kabasele, aka Le Grand Kallé, "Indépendance Cha-cha" - Congolese Independence Song YouTube (3:05), where the film is full of contradictions and bumps along the road, with no talking heads or voiceovers, featuring teeny, tiny, academic footnotes onscreen that are hard to read, yet essential for any continuing dialogue which this film hopes to inspire, while the film itself is also two and a half hours long.  Ostensibly a dissection of what was happening behind the scenes that led to the overthrow of Patrice Lumumba, the first democratically elected Prime Minister of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, whose government was overthrown in a US-backed military coup, as he was kidnapped, beaten bloody, and tortured by his captors before facing a firing squad, pouring sulfuric acid on his body to prevent identification, saving only his gold teeth as war trophies, where the announcement of his death was withheld for over a month.  A rising star in Africa who essentially advocated a philosophy of Africa for Africans, aligned with Kwame Nkrumah in Ghana and Gamal Abdel Nasser in Egypt, beliefs that coincided with Malcolm X and many black jazz artists, as American black nationalist solidarity aligned with African liberation, Lumumba broke the yoke of colonialism while espousing freedom and democracy, beliefs that would normally be aligned with the West, sharing the same democratic principles, coming from hundreds of years of enslavement and colonialism, where the immediate outlook was bright, finally having their own country’s interests first and foremost.  But Lumumba posed a threat to the West precisely for those principles, as the West wasn’t ready to break the link of readily available resources coming from minerals that had been plundered from the African continent for centuries, which includes uranium, as the Congo mines were the main source of uranium used during the Manhattan Project to develop atom bombs and harness nuclear energy, a significant factor during the Cold War, where it’s no coincidence that this was happening at the height of the nuclear arms race.  The film addresses a diffuse mixture of base racism, colonial arrogance, and economic greed, less with agitational intent than as an enlightened treatise on injustice that remains just as relevant today.  The foremost film on colonialism is Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers (1965), which exposed France’s unwillingness to stop its colonial occupation of Algeria, by force if necessary, part of the French colonial empire in Africa that they were unwilling to grant independence, but the Algerians successfully fought back, starting the spread of emancipation from multiple former African colonies, while stylistically, featuring so much archival footage, the film this most resembles is Chris Marker’s The Grin Without a Cat (Le Fond de L’Air Est Rouge) (1977).

Johan Grimonprez is a Belgian multimedia artist, filmmaker, and curator who studied anthropology, photography, and mixed media at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Ghent, receiving a Masters in Video and Mixed Media at the School of Visual Arts in New York, now teaching at the Belgian Royal Academy and the Film Institute in Amsterdam.  A child of the 60’s, he describes his films as “an attempt to make sense of the wreckage wrought by history.”  Known for his critical view of media, corruption, and propaganda, situating themselves at the intersections of art, cinema, documentary, and fiction, the critically acclaimed films and video installations of Grimonprez explore the mechanisms by which fear and ignorance are perpetuated and whipped up in the media.  Informed by a wealth of fully documented media sources, spending eight years researching the film and four years editing it, his work explores the tension between the intimate and the bigger picture of globalization, suggesting history has been infected by fear, which has tainted the political and social dialogue, providing instead new narratives to tell a story, where his work emphasizes a multiplicity of realities.  With that in mind, this video essay film is about the promise of decolonization, the hope of the Non-Aligned Movement and the dream of self-determination, yet it is also about the multinational corporations working hand-in glove with the military-industrial complex to smother this very dream.  In a choice that might seem perplexing to some, jazz musicians are as prominent as the historical realities, featuring the distinguished voices of Abbey Lincoln and Nina Simone, along with some of the giants of jazz, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Dizzy Gillespie, John Coltrane, Thelonius Monk, Charles Mingus, Eric Dolphy, Art Blakey, Ornette Coleman, Archie Shepp, Max Roach, Pérez Prado, and Melba Liston, among others, with Armstrong and Dizzy Gillepsie sent to Africa on a good will tour as Jazz ambassadors by the State Department, following earlier trips to the Soviet Union in the 50’s, spreading American values worldwide, though some might describe it as propaganda countering the influence of the Soviet Union during the Cold War.  Playing to more than two million Africans, with newspaper photos following the tour, they found themselves in the eye of the storm, peddling freedom while behind the scenes a myriad of westernized forces led by Belgium, Britain, and the United States, were undermining that very concept from being born in Africa, conspiring to assassinate one of the leading lights of the decolonial movement in Lumumba.  In September 1960, the Congo had entered the UN world body together with 16 other newly independent African countries, but on February 16, 1961, a month following Lumumba’s betrayal, Abbey Lincoln, Max Roach, writer Maya Angelou and 60 others crashed a UN Security Council meeting in protest of Lumumba’s murder, seen combatively fighting with security, while Belgian embassies around the world came under assault, with demonstrators pelting them with eggs or setting fires, where the hypocrisy of this heinous act was on full display around the world.  President Eisenhower, in an attempt to restore America’s image abroad, sent these jazz ambassadors to Africa, hoping to quell the storm, but when Louis Armstrong realized they were being duped, unknowing decoys in the CIA’s assassination plot, he got on the first plane home, back to a country where racial segregation was still enforced by the law.  Perfectly encapsulated by Allen Dulles, the director of the CIA, seen casually smoking his pipe, not to be confused with his older brother John Foster Dulles, who was Secretary of State at the time (with an airport named after him), with one brother sending the jazz musicians as camouflage while the other was concocting a murderous coup, this barrage of mixed messaging is an atypical yet clear-eyed interrogation of Western powers’ murderous collusions under the guise of liberal values, giving viewers a distinct view of just exactly what this meant at the time, where the effects of nation destabilization are still being felt today, as you can draw the parallel with current genocides in Rwanda, Sudan, Gaza, and Yemen.  In Belgium, no one investigated their complicity in Lumumba’s murder for over forty years, establishing a parliamentary inquiry in 2001, classifying his murder as a war crime, concluding that Lumumba could not have been assassinated without the complicity of Belgian officers, backed by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, with Belgium bearing a ‘moral responsibility’ (Report Reproves Belgium in Lumumba's Death), leading to an official governmental apology in 2002.  To this day, there still isn’t much resource material available.  The film is a refresher course on geopolitics, as even sixty years later, armed groups continue to roam the countryside in the Congo threatening ordinary citizens, where according to a 2023 Amnesty International report (Human rights in Democratic Republic of the Congo):

Persistent large-scale attacks against civilians by armed groups and the Congolese security forces fuelled the humanitarian crisis in which nearly 7 million people were internally displaced and thousands of others fled the country.  Armed groups killed thousands of civilians, and the army carried out extrajudicial executions.  Sexual and gender-based violence remained prevalent, with over 38,000 reported cases in Nord-Kivu province alone during the first quarter of the year.  The rights to freedom of expression, peaceful assembly and association were routinely violated.  Journalists, opposition members and activists, among others, were subjected to arbitrary detention and faced unfair trials.  Mining projects in Lualaba province led to the forced eviction of thousands of people from their homes and livelihoods, while Indigenous Peoples faced eviction in the name of conservation.

Not unlike Swedish documentary filmmaker Göran Olsson’s The Black Power Mixtape 1967 - 1975 (2011), this film encourages thought-stimulating concerns about the international order and the way in which media and music shape our cultural worldview.  Some films have explored these subjects before, like Djibril Diop Mambéty’s Hyenas (Hyènes) (1992), Peter Bate’s CONGO: WHITE KING, RED RUBBER, BLACK DEATH (2003) or Hubert Sauper’s We Come As Friends (2014), where the dominant capitalistic interests are so overwhelmingly in favor of corporate interests like the oil companies, yet they hide their true objectives behind puppet African figureheads who have been given titles and positions of prominence in African “corporations” that have been formed only to bypass laws designed to exclude outsiders from obtaining controlling interests in what are African resources.  Initially there were two Congos, where one was a former French colonial area, while the other was the former Belgian colony.  African directors Mambéty and Ousmane Sembène were extremely suspicious of Western colonialist values and its allegiance to materialism corrupting the African shores since independence in the 1960’s, with Mambéty providing the central thrust of his film, suggesting Africans are “betraying the hopes of independence for the false promises of Western materialism… We have sold our souls too cheaply.  We are done for if we have traded our souls for money.”  Oreet Rees and Pippa Scott’s KING LEOPOLD’S GHOST (2006) exposed the systematic atrocities from Belgium’s 19th and 20th century colonial intrusion into the Congo, becoming the personal domain of Belgian King Leopold II, where they burned and destroyed up to a hundred local villages for rubber plantations, shooting anyone who disagrees, imprisoning the villagers for slave labor, kidnapping the wives of the working men, then cutting off the men’s hands if they resisted or if what they produced was too small, where the history of atrocities is horrendous, yet the underlying method behind this madness was purportedly “bringing civilization to the uncivilized.”  Instead they brought murders and mutilations, which have been historically passed down to subsequent generations, along with a swath of destroyed villages.  You may squirm when you hear then Belgian Prime Minister Gaston Eyskens literally speak of an inferior race of people while also claiming Belgium’s colonization of the Congo was “not to satisfy colonial or imperial aspirations but to complete a mission of civilization.”  This film also introduces the dark figure of Moïse Tshombe, a man Malcolm X described as “the worst African ever born,” a backstabbing Congolese official accusing Lumumba of communist leanings and dictatorial rule, leading a secessionist movement splitting the lucrative Union Minière mines Katanga region from the Congo solely for monetary gain, with the full support of Belgium who wanted to secure their interests, flying in paratroopers and surrounding the mines with paramilitary forces.  However, it was America’s rejection of Lumumba that forced his government into turning to the Soviet Union for help, as he inherited a disaster, with the Belgians emptying the coffers of the fledgling state and making sure the Congo never had a chance to develop, as they never trained their replacements, but just left in masse, with resignations in droves, leaving more than 25% of the country unemployed, having little other recourse due to the fragile nature of forming and running a government in a new nation, where allies and resources are essential.  The crisis that engulfed the Congo, impossibly complex, increasingly brutal, ended with a military coup and the three-decade rule of Joseph-Désiré Mobutu, a onetime Lumumba ally who went on to govern as a ruthless Western client.  The death of Lumumba, brought down by a combination of Congolese politicians, Mobutu’s army coup, and Belgian “advisers,” with the tacit support of the CIA, the British M16, and the malign neglect of the United Nations, was a signal moment of both the Cold War and decolonization, two defining events of the postwar world, where Lumumba’s story, as depicted in the film, is the story of how they became inseparable, while also providing an expansive view of how the last vestiges of American imperialism, with its policy of meddling in the affairs of others, exactly as they were doing in Vietnam, literally destroyed Congo's hopes for independence.  Along with Mati Diop’s Dahomey (2024) and Raoul Peck’s Ernest Cole: Lost and Found (2024), we are constantly reminded that the deplorable impact left behind by colonialism is still with us today. 

Even after all these years, it’s simply amazing what was happening at the United Nations in 1960, given prominent exposure on the international stage, as world leaders routinely met on the biggest stage and actually discussed how to solve world problems, something that would seem unthinkable today, as the organization has been stripped of all power and significance, reduced to little more than clerical duties.  One of the stark revelations of the film is how Russia’s Nikita Khrushchev and Cuba’s Fidel Castro were viewed at the time as enemies of freedom and democracy, yet it is actually the Americans undermining the democracy movement in Africa, while Russia and Cuba, along with a host of African and Asian nations, were actually aligned against the colonial powers, namely Belgium, Britain, and the United States, in support of Africa’s attempts to break free from the devastating effects from centuries of colonialism plundering the resources of the African continent by brutality and force, with the CIA financing resistance armies that raped, killed, tortured, imprisoned, and mutilated African citizens who fought for freedom, assassinating democratically elected leaders, then installing puppet regimes to carry out policies that benefited their exclusive interests.  It’s rare to see Patrice Lumumba, Fidel Castro, and Malcolm X united in solidarity with Nikita Khrushchev.  It’s the 1950’s Cold War, anti-communist playbook that we’ve seen before in the 1953 Iranian coup d'état, overthrowing an existing government that was preventing the flow of oil to the wealthiest nations like Britain and the United States, imprisoning the Prime Minister, placing him under house arrest, while installing the Shah of Iran, who eventually became a ruthless war criminal, or in Chile in 1973 with Salvador Allende, with the CIA assassinating the first Marxist to be elected president in a liberal democracy in Latin America, then installing Augusto Pinochet as president, a ruthless dictator for twenty years who was ultimately charged with a litany of war crimes, with similar shenanigans also happening in Guatemala and the Dominican Republic.  Yet this film focuses on Patrice Lumumba in 1960 immediately after obtaining their colonial independence from Belgium, a high profile leader who was simply extinguished for political expediency, reflective of how the world viewed blacks at the time, still believed to be inferior and subhuman, so his murder was seen as acceptable by agents acting on behalf of the CIA, the Belgium government, and the blatant neglect of the peacekeeping United Nations Operation in the Congo under UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld (impossible to believe today, but he held one of the most powerful positions in the world at the time, commanding international respect), with the West labeling him a communist, a completely false accusation, but this demonizing and stigmatization allowed them to bulldoze over his pan-African beliefs, envisioning a unity of African nations, voicing his concerns at the independence handover ceremony, “We who suffered in our bodies and hearts from colonialist oppression, we say to you out loud: from now on, all that is over.”  This African solidarity was viewed as a threat to the West, with Lumumba replaced by a puppet government under Joseph-Désiré Mobutu, who was a notoriously corrupt autocrat, amassing millions in personal wealth at the expense of the economic deterioration of his own country, where a brutal war left millions dead, using rape as a weapon of war, yet he was more sympathetic to Western interests, where the historic flow of colonial mining interests could continually be extracted out of Africa to the West, where it’s safe to say that not one Congolese has benefited from the wealth extracted from those mines except the kleptocracy running the country.  Countered by footage of Eisenhower’s public promises not to interfere in the policy of the Congo, the extent of just how much the United States resorted to lies and dirty tricks to covertly undermine newly formed democracies abroad is staggering. 

One of the other revelations is bringing to light an enigmatic figure that is barely known, remaining on the periphery of historical narratives that privilege the so-called founding fathers of African independence, with the film re-introducing Andrée Blouin, a mixed-race Congolese woman who threw herself into the fight for a free Africa, an activist and writer, as well as a dynamic, charismatic speaker, mobilizing the Democratic Republic of Congo’s women against colonialism, singlehandedly enrolling 45,000 people into the Congolese Independence Party, heading the women’s wing of the party where she worked to expand literacy, fight alcoholism, and for women’s and children’s rights, rising to become a key adviser to Patrice Lumumba, actually trading ideas with famed revolutionaries and legendary postcolonial leaders like Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah, Guinea’s Sékou Touré, and Algeria’s Ahmed Ben Bella.  These relationships led the European press to denigrate her as a shadowy communist and “whore,” often called the “Mata Hari of Africa,” a courtesan of powerful African politicians, completely representative of the historically racialized and sexualized representations of women of color in politics, belittling her intelligence and widespread influence, yet in the same breath she is also described as “the most dangerous woman in Africa,” much as the FBI’s J. Edgar Hoover in 1962 labeled Martin Luther King as “the most dangerous and effective Negro leader in the country.”  She experienced first-hand the deadly effects of racism at the hands of French colonizers, raised in an orphanage where she endured years of starvation, torture, and imprisonment, fleeing the orphanage at 15 to defy an arranged marriage, but it was as a young mother when the French colonial administration refused to allow her 2-year old son access to quinine, malaria medicine, claiming it was for Europeans only, an ill-fated decision that left her son dead within days, a traumatizing event that led to her radicalization, concluding that colonialism “was no longer a matter of my own maligned fate but a system of evil whose tentacles reached into every phase of African life.”  What little we see of her onscreen is utterly fascinating, as all the other leaders are men, where she is viewed as the woman behind Lumumba, serving as his speechwriter, Chief of Protocol in the new government, and diplomatic liaison to European governments, yet her intelligence and profound influence are unmistakable, taking part in multiple struggles for independence across Africa in the 1950’s and 1960’s.  At the time of Lumumba’s arrest, Blouin was sentenced to death as well but was able to flee the country, leaving her children behind, relocating to Algiers and later Paris.  While in exile, soldiers looted her family home and brutally beat her mother with a gun, permanently damaging her spine.  She wrote her own personal memoirs, My Country, Africa: Autobiography of the Black Pasionaria, published in 1983, an excerpt can be read here: How the West Destroyed Congo's Hopes for Independence, but it’s been out of print for decades, republished earlier this year following the release of this film, where cinema, much as it did with Pamela B. Green’s Be Natural: The Untold Story of Alice Guy-Blaché (2018), or Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich’s The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire, is exposing forgotten and long-neglected female historical figures who were automatically assumed to be less important than the male figures surrounding them, whose contributions never received their due during their lifetimes. 

Where Jazz & Espionage Collide | Soundtrack to a Coup D ...  Greg Lemley video interview with director Johan Grimonprez from Inside the Arthouse, YouTube (42:32)

Killers of the Flower Moon

 

Director Martin Scorsese

Scorsese with Lily Gladstone

Scorsese with Robert De Niro and Leonardo DiCaprio

Scorsese with Lily Gladstone

William King Hale

Mollie Burkhart

Mollie with sisters Anna and Minnie

Ernest Burkhart

Scorsese with Chief Standing Bear, Chief of Osage Nation

Author David Grann

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.