Killers of the Flower Moon, 2023

Osage Indians of Oklahoma are being systematically murdered

I got to see this Michael Scorsese film while visiting a lightly populated area of Northwest Arkansas called Osage Valley. This area continues to hold many traces of the departed tribe which used it as a hunting ground (people can still dig up stone arrowheads by the bucket, I'm told). The rural audience on a Sunday evening in November filled the theatre and patiently sat through the three-and-one-half hour tale showing the plight of the oil-rich Osage tribe in nearby Oklahoma facing a steady rate of murder among their members.

The film Killers of the Flower Moon is somewhat constructed like a murder-mystery, but we know the culprits from the start, their evil actions in our face so that whatever prevaricating we hear them produce as dialogue isn't just suspect, but further condemnation. However, for the characters within the cast, as the story moves along, there is the puzzle over the growing list of Osage tribal victims, then a growing fear that motivates many to gather their families and flee as if plague has come to town.

Mysteries aside, our story is really the ancient tale of avarice compounded by racism and that particular violent form of family loyalty where everyone within the clan is human, but those without are not. We see a boiling pot of greed that swells up in Oklahoma as fortunes are being made off of oil found on Osage land, and visually we see a mushrooming population attracted to the money and opportunity.

An important aspect of the story is the handicapped legal status of Osage Indians trying to control what's happening around them as they accumulate fantastic wealth. As the film announces in a title card at the beginning: the Osage Indians had become the richest people on earth on a per capita basis, but were in a strange predicament where they were legally forced to use white interlocutors in order to manage their financial affairs. This legal mechanism, actually meant to protect the Osage from getting fleeced from outsiders, instead created opportunity to exploit them by the locals, and the film shows us some of the tension between the whites(for example the local undertakers) vying for their turn to take advantage through this arrangement.

Director Scorsese manages the tale of Killers of the Flower Moon and it's very large cast efficiently, and we mostly stay on top of who is who, but the fringe characters that populate both the murderers and the Osage tribe itself can be harder to keep straight as the hours pass.

Scorsese stays focused on the sheer scope of the conspiracy, which develops and grows as the body count ticks upward. The depth of both the stupidity and arrogance of the perpetrators, protected by both racial politics and an implied sense, told mostly visually, that the oil wealth had bred sheer confusion in the area, creating that classic situation where chaos helps hide criminal activity, is offset by the steadily unfolding exploration of the moral character of the main three performers in the movie: Leonardo DiCaprio as a wounded army veteran (who only actually worked in an army kitchen) being taken into the family business of "King" Hale (played by Robert De Niro) who rules over the local area; and Mollie Burkhart (Lily Gladstone) as an Osage woman who begins to sense the size of the threat around the Osage and battles not only a debilitating case of diabetes but a mushrooming paranoia.

There are courtroom scenes, family drama, and of course episodes of murder, this being both a Scorsese film and the main theme of the film, which is the simplicity of reducing inconvenient living people into inert objects.

Based on a novel by David Grann, the dialogue in the film is mostly used for moving us on through the plot or for measuring the self-deluding powers of a few of the main characters (which is immense). Visual craftsmanship for the film is first rate, carefully using historically accurate cars, costuming, houses, furnishings, etc., though this may actually hinder the film for a modern audience as what constituted enormous wealth in 1920's Oklahoma doesn't impress us the same in 21st century consumer-goods conscious America.

Storytelling isn't perfect but that's hardly unusual in multi-hour, massively cast epics of this sort. There's a lot of story trying to stay vibrant and fresh as the hours pass and for the most part Scorsese has expertly pulled that off. As a document about the crime of harming the Osage, the film Killers of the Flower Moon is Scorsese's entry into that small genre telling the tale of how the American West was harshly exploited after being "won."

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Original Page November 13, 2023