This review first appeared in the April 2024 edition of Vita Poetica.
The Din of Iniquity
by John Kendall Hawkins
Killers of the Flower Moon was nominated for 10 Oscars this year but won none. As with many films by Martin Scorsese, it's long, presenting in just under three and a half hours. This exposition provides ample time to get immersed in the story by way of character arc and how each of the protagonists responds to the tension built by the steps of the plot. Most of Scorsese's epic films involve confrontation and violence, gangs, cabals and criminal families, and often a heaping helping of psychopathology. One thinks immediately of Taxi Driver (1976), Cape Fear (1991) and even The Last Temptation of Christ (1988), but there are many others over his long, enthralling career.
Killers of the Flower Moon can be seen as a crime thriller. The IMDB storyline is simple and a good place to start an analysis of the narrative and characterization: "When oil is discovered in 1920s Oklahoma under Osage Nation land, the Osage people are murdered one by one -- until the FBI steps in to unravel the mystery." This is sufficient, but it is not a full account. Having read the book (2017) by David Grann, which bears the subtitle The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI, for instance, I know that Tom White, the FBI agent played by Jesse Plemons, was a star of the book and that the FBI tale took up two-thirds of Grann's narrative. Tom White is an imposing ex-Texas Ranger, but Plemons's White quietly blows into the "boomtown" -- albeit in keeping with the character of the FBI at that time, which had no arrest powers and carried no weapons -- and he doesn't arrive until about two-thirds of the way through. Plemons is not the star. The big roles go to Robert De Niro (William Hale), Leonardo DiCaprio (Ernest Burkhart), and newcomer and Native American actress Lily Gladstone (Mollie Burkhart).
The film begins with a 1920 black-and-white newsreel backgrounder about the Osage and their discovery of oil and the curious observation about their wealth, relative to the world: "The world's richest people per capita." The film ends with a tribal ceremony or dance where the Osage dance around a circle of drummers and form what appears to be a flower, which reminds one of Grann's description in the book: "tiny flowers spread over the blackjack hills and vast prairies in the Osage territory of Oklahoma. There are Johnny-jump-ups and spring beauties and little bluets." And then oil and evil men arrive and choke it all with, as Grann puts it, "spiderworts and black-eyed Susans, [which] begin to creep over the tinier blooms, stealing their light and water." Thus, the wealth created by the dinosaurs (fossil fuel) is contrasted with the simplicity and presumed integrity of the tribal milieu.
What's missing is a sense of who the Osage are. There is something generic about the Scorsese depiction, in contrast to, say, the care to establish rituals that director Kevin Costner takes with Dances With Wolves (1990). Such missing information might have been partially filled in by replacing the beginning and ending of the film -- especially the oddly-placed end stage show depicting the Osage murders that includes Scorsese himself standing up at the microphone and delivering pap -- with historical information.
The Osage Nation (the name is an English rendering of the French phonetic version of Wa-zha-zhe), comfortably ensconced in Missouri, was one of the many Native American nations pushed out by white Western expansion. Grann writes in his book that "the Osage were forced to cede nearly a hundred million acres of their ancestral land, ultimately finding refuge in a 50-by-125-mile area in southeastern Kansas." Ouch. Then they were promised by Thomas Jefferson that they would not have to move again. But he lied. As Grann writes,
The Osage had been assured by the U.S. government that their Kansas territory would remain their home forever, but before long they were under siege from settlers"In 1870, the Osage-- expelled from their lodges, their graves plundered-- agreed to sell their Kansas lands to settlers for $1.25 an acre. Nevertheless, impatient settlers massacred several of the Osage, mutilating their bodies and scalping them. [41]
While some superficial references are made to the so-called Trail of Tears era, which saw Native Americans continuously disrupted by the white movement west following the Louisiana Purchase in 1803,[john morr1] [JH2] Grann opts to eschew the more complicated history of a white nation expanding, in order to set up his scene of the crime narrative. The Oklahoma Osage are a nation under siege by the scourge of capital expansion, material gain, and the profit motive that goes back to the founding of the USA. The Constitution was established by property owners, and only reluctantly mediated by the justice implied by the amending Bill of Rights.
Scorsese last directed De Niro in The Irishman (2019) and DiCaprio in Gangs of New York (2002). The two haven't co-starred since This Boy's Life (1993), when DiCaprio was a teenager, and this is the first time both worked have together for Scorsese. This is effective ensemble work here. These three principal characters create a complex, triadic, dialectical bond that features themes of criminal loyalty (Hale - Ernest), marital devotion and trust (Ernest - Mollie), redemptive faith in Catholic ethics (Mollie - later Ernest), and the parasitical domination of one tribe over another (whites over Reds).
Such dialectical turmoil is a feature of Scorsese's work. But in Killers it is not fully fleshed out. The director relies heavily on the interaction of the three main stars to manifest the tensions among these themes. But it is such a simple plot that the dynamic becomes tired, maybe even trite, over three hours. De Niro's Hale has worked out how to plunder Mollie's money by getting Ernest to marry her and then wiping out her relatives so that all their oil rights go to her. Hale is poisoning Mollie through Ernest, using him, and in the end he will attempt to control the funds by having Ernest sign them over "voluntarily."
I think that the depth and variety needed to sustain the motivating forces of the action could have been remedied by the Scorsese who is deeply engaged with questions of faith, who has often depicted the internal struggles with faith, loyalty, and devotion, especially when up against the forces of dark oppression and exploitative domination. Such is the Christian mission, but especially the Catholic way, and Scorsese is a Catholic.
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