Killers of the Flower Moon, Directed by Martin Scorsese
The closest Killers of the Flower Moon comes to a moral theme is a vague sense that “greed” is bad.
Starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Robert De Niro, and Lily Gladstone
Distributed by Paramount Pictures and Apple Original Films
Running time: 206 minutes
Rated R for violence, gory images, and language.
In the early 20th century, the Native American Osage tribe were, per capita, the richest group of people on Earth.1 Most tribes settled on reservations the government gave them to administer, but the Osage purchased the land for their reservation outright. When Congress stopped recognizing tribal administrations and began dividing reservations among individual tribal households, it allotted 160 acres to each and sold what was left to outside buyers. But the Osage, which legally owned their entire reservation, kept all of it, each household getting 657 acres.2
Only later did the Osage (and the government) become aware of the huge value of the oil deposits underneath those vast lands. The rising demand for oil, combined with the massive acreage the Osage owned, made them spectacularly wealthy. Unsurprisingly, this situation drew the attention of prospectors from all over the country, keen to get a share of the wealth. Some were legitimate entrepreneurs; others were frauds, robbers, and murderers. What followed was the Osage Reign of Terror: the murder of an estimated sixty men and women for the rights to extract oil from their lands. These murders are the subject of the new film Killers of the Flower Moon, based on David Grann’s 2017 book of the same name.
The film follows a white veteran, Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio), after he arrives in Fairfax, the main town on the Osage reservation. Burkhart is the nephew of William King Hale (Robert De Niro), an earlier white settler in the area who has become a dominant figure in the local community and has proclaimed himself “King of the Osage.” Hale is the reserve deputy sheriff, but otherwise the exact nature of his influence is not clear. (As a matter of historical fact, Hale held various political and business leadership positions and controlled the main bank in Fairfax.) Hale takes advantage of his positions of influence to orchestrate a criminal scheme to obtain the oil rights of various Osage landowners through theft and murder.
Hale sets up Burkhart as a taxi driver, encouraging him to develop relationships with the Osage that might be useful for Hale’s plans. In doing this, Burkhart develops a romantic attachment to an Osage woman—Mollie (Lily Gladstone)—and subsequently marries her. Hale orchestrates a series of killings to ensure that Mollie gets her family’s oil wealth, then pushes his nephew to gradually poison her so that the rights will pass to him.
The film lacks any sympathetic characters. Burkhart, the film’s main character, is reprehensible in several respects. In addition to being a thief and a murderer, he is ineffectual and directionless. Continuously manipulated by his uncle, he alternates between being a pawn in Hale’s schemes and helping Mollie enlist outside investigators to solve the murders. Burkhart makes but one significant decision of his own—toward the end of the story—only to negate it a short time later by continuing to evade responsibility for his actions.
One of the few characters with whom viewers might comfortably sympathize is Mollie—if they can get past her almost complete lack of charm and personality. It is never clear why she fell in love with Burkhart; the two have radically different mind-sets and worldviews and very little chemistry. She also seems largely oblivious to Burkhart poisoning her, even though the real Mollie suspected that she was being poisoned and reported it to her priest, triggering an investigation. In a bizarre affront to the real-life Mollie, the film strips her of agency by having other characters discover the poisoning.
This lack of characterization is an instance of the film’s primary problem—naturalism: an emphasis on depicting mundane details to the exclusion of conveying a moral theme. The film, which is overwhelmingly dark, presents the murders, Osage customs, and period attitudes in exhaustive detail. Every character is either a victim or a criminal (aside from the officers who arrive to investigate the murders), and most characters display no independent thinking or moral virtue. In its laborious three-and-a-half-hour runtime, the film depicts an abundance of murder, racism, and abuse without offering moral evaluations of any of it.
The film also omits a key historical detail necessary to understand both the film’s plot and the racism to which the Osage were subjected. This is the fact that, in 1921, the United States Congress mandated that a white “guardian” (chosen from among local business and political leaders) be appointed to manage the oil revenues of every person of half or more Osage ancestry—because Congress deemed the latter “incompetent” to manage their own assets.3 The film makes passing references to “guardians” and to Mollie being “incompetent” (despite being of normal intelligence) and even shows her meeting her guardian and requesting money. But it never explains this context for the audience, leaving anyone who doesn’t know the history wondering who her guardian actually is and what’s going on. Not only that, but the omission leaves the audience unaware that the Osage were victims not only of murders by a gang of thieves, but also of a racially motivated violation of their rights on the part of Congress that left them unable to respond to the murders by using their own funds to bring in investigators.
The closest the film comes to a moral theme is a vague sense that “greed” is bad. As Burkhart robs, plots, and steals, he frequently repeats his catchphrase—“I do love that money, sir!”—leading some other characters to call him a “Jew.” The result is that the movie equates rationally pursuing wealth through creating value and trading (e.g., by extracting and selling oil) with coveting and stealing other people’s property. The real historical entrepreneurs (both Osage and white) who legitimately profited during the Osage oil boom are absent from the movie. Instead, all we see are Osage who try to hold onto their tribal traditions (at a time when many were, in fact, embracing capitalism and becoming successful businessmen) and white men who try to steal their wealth.
There is a little about the film to celebrate: Robert DeNiro and Brendan Fraser deliver particularly strong performances, and the script offers a few amusing, well-crafted lines that provide brief relief from the otherwise miserable experience. The fact that the film highlights this important episode in American history (albeit without doing it justice) is commendable.
Ultimately, however, Killers of the Flower Moon is a bloated film with a malevolent sense of life. Despite its enormous runtime, it misses the opportunity to depict both the rights abuses to which the Osage were subjected and the good entrepreneurship they and others engaged in. The result is a movie devoid of moral value.