Killers of the Flower Moon

Martin Scorsese’s Killersof the Flower Moon is a timely and masterful meditation on the smallness of strongmen and their followers. 

 

Scorsese leaves viewers no doubt as to the sorrow and pity inflicted by white ne’er-do-wells on people of the Osage Nation in his retelling of this true-crime story. What makes it poignant and universal is his ability to draw from his cast qualities that make their characters personalities with points of view and feelings who are people we all know and who would be recognized anywhere in the world. Business as Scorsese portrays it here gets no more personal than this.

 

And yes, the prospect of spending three-and-a-half intermission-less hours of one’s life seated in a dark room with strangers is daunting. But we found ourselves at times so drawn into the space of Scorsese’s story that we looked around the theater to make sure that we were not right there in the room with his characters. So the short answer is, see this on a big screen while you can. Our discussion includes no spoilers.

 

Scorsese bookends his narrative with stylized contemporary U.S. media productions of the Osage and the so-called Reign of Terror which was the murder of Osage oil lease owners—and the first case of the U.S. Bureau of Investigation which would become the FBI.

U.S. serviceman Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio) returns home to a booming Fairfax, Oklahoma, after serving as a cook in World War I. He is not particularly interesting, intelligent, or ambitious. He walks among Indians ostentatiously celebrating the enormous wealth oil has brought them, fancy clothes, cars, and hats. We also see sepia-toned stills and movie clips with old-time title cards. An orphan, Burkhart visits his uncle William “call me ‘King’” Hale (Robert De Niro) seeking work. King Bill Hale’s cattle business made him prosperous. He is the resident Big White Man who has a long association with the Osage and speaks their language. But he had no oil under his cattle ranch. 

Since individual property owners ordinarily do not drill for and extract oil, the game is leases: Owners lease property to oil companies to receive “royalties” on their mineral rights. Much of Oklahoma’s oil lay under Indian reservations. Due to legal and financial settlements devolved from U.S. Government treaties with indigenous peoples, federal authorities did not recognize non-Indian leases in Oklahoma. 

Thus the issue in this film set in the Osage Nation is the “headright”, one of about 2200 shares of land allotted equally to its tribal members. Mineral rights were held in common, each headright getting an equal share of the oil lease royalty. 

However, non-Indians could acquire headrights though legal marriage to a headright, unmarried or widowed, which is precisely what King encourages Ernest to do with Mollie (Lily Gladstone), one of four Osage headright sisters: Reta (Janae Collins), Anna (Cara Jade Myers), and Minnie (Jillian Dion). (There is no mention of female non-Indians marrying male Indian headrights.) Mollie, her sisters and the other Osage have no doubt that these white layabouts are after their money; but life is short, money is just money, and these guys are not bad looking. Grounded in cultural pride and tradition, the Osage are tragically blind to the disdain of rootless uncultured bigots and the delusions of power money can give them.

 

The story bookends with a closing summary on a World War II-era (Lucky Strike green) live in-studio broadcast of the Osage murders as a radio murder mystery; Scorsese reads King Bill Hale's obituary; and he closes with an aerial shot of a modern Osage community dance that makes a flower mandala. 

 

The film’s title comes from an Osage folktale read aloud by Ernest from a book King gave him to help understand them. The “flower-killing moon” is a time in late spring when purple and white flowers which Scorsese shows us covering the land are overshadowed and crowded out by taller plants, returning those flowers to the earth to come back the next year. Scorsese does his big scenes with crowds with his usual panache. 

Color in the costume of his Osage characters works along lines similar to Akira Kurosawa in the latter’s stories set in Japan’s Edo period. In a scene striking in its beauty and simplicity, a dying Osage woman is approached in broad daylight by three ritual figures in plain costumes of primary colors, perhaps her former husband and parents, who lead her away.

 

And Robbie Robertson’s soundtrack is excellent. It features North American “roots” and popular music of the 1920s as well as indigenous drumming and chants. Best known as guitarist and song writer for The Band and work with Bob Dylan, Robertson, whose mother was a Mohawk, has said that he was first inspired to be a musician among family on the Six Nations of the Grand River reserve in Ontario, Canada. Robertson died in August: Scorsese, who worked with him for 55 years, dedicated this film to his memory.

Killers of the Flower Moon 2023 U.S. (206 minutes) Appian Way/Apple Studios/Paramount Pictures. Directed by Martin Scorsese; co-written by Scorsese and Eric Roth, based on David Grann’s 2017 book Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI; music by Robbie Robertson; Rodrigo Prieto, director of photography; editing by Thelma Schoonmaker; production design by Jack Fisk; costume design by Jacqueline West; produced by Scorsese, Dan Friedkin, Bradley Thomas, and Daniel Kupi.