Killers of the Flower Moon

~ Review ~

I've wondered recently about suitable audiences. And I don't mean protecting kids from adult content. I've wondered at films that deal with confrontational issues, who they are addressing and for whom they might be inappropriate. For instance: Soft & Quiet (2022), a social-horror film about the escalation of race violence over the course of a single night, focuses on a group of middle class, white-supremacist women in a suburban US town. Shot in a few continuous takes (with hidden edits), it is a claustrophobic staring match with evil. There is deliberately no space for the lives of characters of colour, with the exception of falling victim to graphic violence. For my money, that makes Soft & Quiet a movie 'not suitable' for audiences of colour. This is less an exclusionary remark than a trigger warning. I read that film as a brutal cautionary tale for white people, asking: what awful things lurk under the surface in your environment and to what horrors could they lead if they go unchecked? So what about Killers of the Flower Moon? One of the most acclaimed directors ever, best known for depictions of Irish- and Italian-American culture, Martin Scorsese here shifts focus to the First Nations Osage people in 1920s Oklahoma. The crucial issue with Flower Moon is that despite this choice, the film remains in thrall to two white men, Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo di Caprio) and William King Hale (Robert de Niro). Played by two of the most famous actors in the world - regular collaborators of Scorsese's - these characters are the stars. No matter how despicable they may be, like the women in Soft & Quiet, it is their story we follow. This true story is of the serial exploitation and eradication of the Osage Oklahomans who struck oil in the 1910s and became some of the richest people in the world. What appears to be a murder-mystery film quickly unravels and abandons suspense once we realise that the killers are no great secret and that in fact no one here can provide a moral anchor. Ernest, fresh from cooking duties in WWI, is the naïve nephew of Hale, an apparent pillar of the community who is gradually draining the wealth and life from the native people around him. It can, of course, be interesting to centre and explore evil. Soft & Quiet is certainly powerful. Breaking Bad remains influential. But when we only ever spend time with the oppressors, the oppressed are segregated away from us, confined to their suffering (suffering that often exists as secondary characterisation for the oppressors). If I related personally to the oppressed group in a film such as this - First Nations people who were colonised and murdered - I'm not sure I would want to watch my suffering siloed in this way. I cannot contend that Scorsese is anything less than an accomplished filmmaker. He creates wonderful scenes that immerse you in a time and a place. The film opens with Osage elders carrying out a ritual burial of a ceremonial pipe, grieving the loss of their traditional systems of education as their children grow and assimilate into white society. Flower Moon is at its best when individual scenes do foreground the Osage people. It makes sense, if we consider this a film 'suitable' for white people, that it shines when opening windows into the lives of foreign, historic peoples from whom we would otherwise be profoundly alienated. Witnessing ritual, customs and speech with which I am unfamiliar is a privilege. Scorsese succeeds at bringing the period to life, and telling a richly detailed story of colonisation and oppression. The Osage people are portrayed with empathy and sincere interest. It is telling that the film pivots from its epilogue to close on a spectacular aerial shot of a traditional dance.

But Killers of the Flower Moon isn't really about the Osage people. It's about Ernest Burkhart and William Hale. After the opening ritual, our attention is recalibrated: we watch Ernest arrive in town like an unlikely Disney hero, gleefully admiring his novel surroundings - cueing us to admire the mise en scène, which we do. As usual, di Caprio and de Niro turn in strong performances. It is only disappointing that, as time goes on, it seems increasingly like they've always been turning in the same strong performance. No detail meaningfully separates Burkhart from Marshal Edward Daniels, or William King Hale from Jimmy Conway. At more than one point in the film, they descent into unintentionally hilarious shouting matches, their thick southern drawls becoming little more than dog barks. Centring such recognisable Scorsese stars draws the film alarmingly close to self-parody, not helped by the fact that the director seems to have lost his skill at brevity. The Departed is a viciously edited film, and it benefits from it endlessly. It's fast-paced but knows how to introduce variety. It's unpredictable but maintains clarity, using montage to tell stories quickly (or fill in flashbacks). By contrast, Flower Moon drags. Many interactions go on longer than necessary and accelerations in time feel abrupt. There are long music sequences that sound like montages, but keep you waiting for a rhythm that never kicks in. Consequently, the three and half hour runtime doesn't feel earned. The older I get, the more I ask the films I watch, What's the point? With so much vying for attention and in a world that seems ever closer to self-destruct, films have to have a good answer. The point of Flower Moon could be, as has been touted by Osage Principal Chief Geoffrey Standing Bear, to "[lay] bare the truth and injustices done to us, while challenging history not to be repeated." I think, to an extent, this is very true. Much adoration has been rightly given to Lily Gladstone portrayal of Ernest's Osage wife, a performance that starts and ends with dignity but spends a great deal of the film stranded in illness - and not only illness, but a slow poisoning. Gladstone remains fantastic to watch, and is given space to speak for herself. The film is careful not to speak for the Osage people, but it also forces them to endure great suffering, without reclamation. First Nations actor K. Devery Jacobs has criticised Flower Moon for being "unnecessarily graphic." She said, "I believe that showing more murdered Native women on screen, it normalizes the violence committed against us and further dehumanizes our people."

The final parts of the film draw our attention away from the injustices. Scorsese pivots around the central scumbags as they are brought to trial, before deliberate evading the final consequences. Instead, we cut to a 1970s style true-crime theatre show, complete with live sound effects, actors and a small orchestra. It's a fascinating sequence, but one that seals our distant perspective, leaving us locked up with the murderers. The last words are given to Scorsese himself, who takes the stage to read a short epilogue. Ironically, Flower Moon seems to ask: how much more does this film respect its subject than would a true-crime podcast? While the inherently flawed representation in Killers of the Flower Moon is an important point, the broader picture will tell us that whatever the intricacies, Scorsese has pulled in millions of people to learn about the history of America. The film may function best as a gangster film, luxuriating in the charisma of cruelty, but the key difference is that these characters are the prototypes, the giants upon whose shoulders the most successful (white) gangsters in the United States stood as they helped build the country for the next 100 years. Here we see the origins of the Irish and Italian crime syndicates so well catered to by Scorsese. Flower Moon is deserving of praise for steering the story away from the federal investigators (who were the main characters in the book) in order to avoid a white-saviour narrative. But equally, perhaps, it should be admonished for letting its scene-stealing leads eclipse the systematic nature of the oppression of First Nations people that continues to this day. Contemporary footage appears at few points in the film but so does new footage made to look contemporary, the mix of which undermines authenticity and once again, keeps us at a distance.

William Hale/Robert de Niro, commanding the witless Burkhart to do his bidding, throws up his hands aggressively. "Look at me like this makes sense!" It feels like an unintentionally reflexive comment. Christopher Cote, an Osage language consultant on the film, said “Martin Scorsese, not being Osage, I think he did a great job representing our people, but this history is being told almost from the perspective of Ernest Burkhart — they kind of give him this conscience and kind of depict that there’s love. But when somebody conspires to murder your entire family, that’s not love. That’s not love, that’s just beyond abuse.” “I think in the end, the question that you can be left with is: How long will you be complacent with racism?” Cote continued. “How long will you go along with something and not say something, not speak up, how long will you be complacent? I think that’s because this film isn’t made for an Osage audience: It was made for everybody, not Osage. For those that have been disenfranchised, they can relate; but for other countries that have their acts and their history of oppression, this is an opportunity for them to ask themselves this question of morality, and that’s how I feel about this film.”