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Killers Of The Flower Moon Scrubs The Whitewash Off America's Bloody Past

For most filmmakers, a film like <em>Flower Moon</em> might have been their magnum opus. With Martin Scorsese, it feels like a sign of even better things to come.

Prahlad Srihari

Oct 28, 2023

Still from Killers Of The Flower Moon

TikTok star Martin Scorsese returns in some style with Killers of the Flower Moon: a late-career moral reckoning with the myths that defined the Western genre, whitewashed America’s past and fuelled his own love for the movies. The director picks up from where he left off on the introspective path of his previous film. By challenging the violent underpinnings of the Western, as The Irishman did with the mob epic, Flower Moon transcends the limits of its genre.

There is a marked difference between how the West was won and how the West was spun. The myth of the civilised white cowboy dishing out harsh but fair justice against the savage Native American became so powerful it overwrote the truth. History couldn’t compete with the narrative curated by painters, writers and filmmakers who invested the colonisers with all the heroic symbolism they could muster. Scorsese sets the record straight by casting Native Americans not as hurdles but actors in the shaping of the American economy.

In fact, the Osage nation was one of the wealthiest communities at the start of the 20th century. An introductory mock-newsreel shows how not too long after being stripped of their land in Kansas and sold a part of Oklahoma, the Osage discovered there was black gold beneath their new home. The resulting oil boom brought in millions of dollars which paid for chauffeured cars, mansions, clothes, jewellery, and even white servants. The trouble is it also brought the wolves and the parasites: white opportunists of all stripes eager to get their teeth into the wealth of a burgeoning community. Soon the men and women of the community began dying: some shot, some bombed, some poisoned, some drugged, some lost to a "wasting illness." To paraphrase Ian Fleming, once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, more than three times is conspiracy. It is white interlopers making a concerted attack against Native Americans, cocksure in their belief that history will paint their serial murders as “taming” another frontier.

How a system of genocide was put in place to enable the abuse, misappropriation and elimination of oil-rich Osage people in 1920s Oklahoma was documented by David Grann in his 2017 book, Killers of the Flower Moon. Nested within the book and the film is a searing reminder of the blood-soaked foundations upon which modern America was built. For American history is best measured not by acts of compassion and generosity, but by acts of greed and cruelty. The West was not won by noble pioneers, but by predatory capitalists. It was the strength of their founding belief in white supremacy that allowed the settler colonies to normalise slavery and genocide, and operate with impunity for so long.

With the violent crimes against the Osage ignored by local law enforcement, a federal investigator named Tom White (Jesse Plemons) is brought in from Texas to expose whatever conspiracy is afoot in Oklahoma. Grann framed this ghastly episode of history as a police procedural, as he went on to establish how the belated investigation led to the birth of the FBI under its ambitious director J Edgar Hoover. The screenplay by Scorsese and Eric Roth, on the other hand, refracts it through the doomed love story of Mollie Burkhart (Lily Gladstone), a wealthy Osage woman, and Ernest (DiCaprio), her white husband conspiring to steal her family fortune. Honing in on a marriage poisoned by betrayal and broken promises allows Scorsese to bring an intimate focus to a chapter of history epic in scope. The history of America is indeed full of stories of how the colonisers invaded indigenous communities from the outside in. Flower Moon shows a cancerous invasion from the inside out — and the film is all the more devastating because of it.

For most filmmakers, a film like Flower Moon might have been their magnum opus. With Scorsese, it feels like a sign of even better things to come. But what makes it such a remarkable achievement is how he transforms Grann’s vision into a robust dialogue with his own past work, from the crime sagas (Goodfellas, Casino, The Departed) to the spiritual odysseys (The Last Temptation of Christ, Kundun, Silence). The tone of Flower Moon is elegiac and meditative, as he exposes the moral decay at the heart of a white Oklahoman network of criminals pretending to be otherwise. An entire network of businessmen, doctors, lawyers, and cops, all motivated by greed and working like a mob, is made visible. The government too played its part, facilitating a scheme that let white “guardians” oversee (read: appropriate) the Osage people’s finances.

One of these “guardians” is Bill Hale (Robert De Niro), a Machiavellian pretending to be Maecenas. De Niro lends an icy charm to a living embodiment of how white allyship can be used as a veil. The key to how Bill held those he claimed to serve in his thrall lies in the insidious force of his personality. Generosity has seldom had an uglier face. Bill is a vulturous landowner who persuades his white brethren to marry into the Osage tribe and lend a hand in their wives’ demise so their wealth could be passed on through inheritance. When Bill’s nephew Ernest (DiCaprio) returns home from the Great War, Bill gets Ernest a job as a chauffeur to wealthy heiress Mollie (Gladstone) to do the same. Mollie sees through Ernest's designs from a mile away, referring to him as a "coyote". Yet she falls for him. So does he for her. Only he loves money a lot more. The most crushing moments come when Mollie loses her siblings and family, one by one, and Ernest reassures his wife that she will be okay, that she is loved, even as he poisons her with tainted insulin shots. DiCaprio is suitably impish, creating an almost discomfiting comedy out of a man both wounded and empowered, suggestible and manipulative.

It isn’t DiCaprio or De Niro who give Scorsese’s saga its emotional pulse, but Gladstone. As the soul of the film, she exudes a careworn grace. When the camera lingers on Mollie’s face, we see in her eyes an internal civil war, the weight of agony and anger arching her back and close to cracking her voice. If Mollie refuses to believe that Ernest is part of the sinister conspiracy, it speaks to how her defence mechanisms are disarmed by the effortlessness the privilege of being white grants him. She sticks by him, her trust misplaced and misguided, believing this privilege will transfer to her and shelter her from the tragedy that befell her family and community. As she so often withdraws into a stoic silence, her words ring louder when she does speak up. In these moments, it feels like Gladstone, being an actor of Siksikaitsitapi and NiMíiPuu heritage, is channelling her own pain and strength.

Early in the courtship, a thunderstorm strikes when Ernest visits Mollie in her home. His instinct is to close the windows. Hers is to sit in silence and listen to the sounds. This difference in response establishes how the Native Americans had a reciprocal relationship with nature, while the white colonisers only saw it as something to be exploited for its resources. How Scorsese frames the scene — of a love not yet wholly corrupted by greed — is an example of how his interactions with the Osage community enriches his vision. Yet, as he suggests in the coda, history tends to distort. Time consigned the full horrors of the Osage killings to the shadows. The truth of what the tribal nation had endured was supplanted by a more sanitised myth of the heroic white man who led the investigation and helped launch the FBI. Scorsese puts himself in the film to challenge this cultural erasure, while recognising the limits of his own vision relative to Osage history. For all he has created is an abridged cultural memory. When most of us walk out of the theatre, we have the luxury to forget. The Osage don’t.