*Spoilers Included*
“Killers of the Flower Moon” centers around a shameful piece of American history, a series of murders of members of Osage Nation, a tribe of Indigenous peoples in the midwest, that took place in Oklahoma between the years of 1910 and 1930. When Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio) arrives in Fairfax, Oklahoma, his uncle William Hale (Robert De Niro) decides to let him in on the story of the Osage, who have recently become enormously wealthy due to discovering oil underneath their land.
At the film’s beginning, the viewer is aware that these murders are occurring but is unsure who is responsible. As time passes, the viewer learns the grim truth: William Hale has been killing the Osage to benefit personally from their economic status. He concocts a plan for his nephew Ernest to marry one of the Osage, Mollie (Lily Gladstone), and eventually kill her. Ernest and William end up murdering every single one of Mollie’s family members before attempting to poison Mollie. When FBI agent Tom White (Jesse Plemmons) shows up on Earnest’s doorstep and ends up solving the murders, Ernest and William get their karma… sort of.
Director Martin Scorsese makes a cameo at the end of the movie to explain that although William and Ernest received sentences of life imprisonment, they ended up both later being paroled. Ernest was even given a pardon for the offenses he committed in connection with the Osage murders while Mollie ended up remarrying but passed away shortly after at age 50.
In a brief message before the film begins, Scorsese tells audiences that he worked very closely with the Osage people during the making of the movie to tell the story as accurately and truthfully as possible. While the film did include many Osage and Indigenous actors, visibility does not equal representation.
The Osage perspective is present in the film; however, the storyline focuses more on Earnest and William, and in some moments, it seems that the movie wants audiences to empathize with Earnest. There is a scene where Earnest administers poison to Mollie and afterward feels so guilty that he puts some in his drink. He chugs it down while crying and looking at Mollie who is so sick from the poison that Earnest has been giving to her that she can barely open her eyes. There are a handful of scenes, such as this one, where Earnest does something terrible but then becomes emotional, evoking sympathy from viewers.
It’s a strange choice for Scorsese to make Ernest’s character a sympathetic one, as he is, after all, leading a genocide of the Osage people with his uncle. Sympathetic characters such as Ernest only contribute to our belief that Hollywood cinema has a tendency to overlook the struggles and oppression of BIPOC by shifting the audience’s attention from Mollie’s pain to Ernest’s, despite the latter being the film’s antagonist (at best).
Overall, the film follows the facts of the Osage murders well and centers on the Osage people, but we would have liked to have more insight into Mollie’s feelings and perspective as she dealt with the murders of her entire family.
“Killers of the Flower Moon” tells the tale of one of the many dark stains on America’s history. Although these murders occurred 100 years ago and seem unbelievable, there are countless other instances of similar mistreatment of Indigenous Peoples, starting with the theft of the land this country was founded on at its inception.
Scorsese utilizes several different genres (western, romance, murder mystery, thriller, crime, drama) to make a statement about the mistreatment of Native Americans throughout the history of the United States, the supposed “land of the free.” Although the movie begins as a typical whodunnit murder mystery, deep shame and embarrassment linger in the theatre as the lights in the cinema come on.
It is horrifying that mass murders of this scale could have happened within this country and even more so that most had never heard about it before this film. Instead of teaching children that nobody was living on this land when Christopher Columbus discovered it, it would be infinitely more important to teach how Indigenous Peoples were here first and persecuted for it. After all, as George Santayana said, those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.