Killers of the Flower Moon (Martin Scorsese, 2023).
Interviewed by the Hollywood Reporter at the film’s Los Angeles premiere, Osage language consultant Christopher Cote shared his thoughts on Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon. “As an Osage, I really wanted this to be from the perspective of Mollie and what her family experienced, but I think it would take an Osage to do that,” Cote said from the red carpet, referencing Lily Gladstone’s character in the film. “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 [Mollie’s husband] Ernest Burkhart and 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.”
Cote continued:
I think in the end, the question that you can be left with is: How long will you be complacent with racism? 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.
It was only a matter of time before Cote’s nuanced and conflicted response was taken out of context, and then twisted to imply that Scorsese was siding with the colonizers. Laughable as such charges may be, especially when weighing the film’s surplus of humility and righteous fury, they’ve still stoked suspicions that Killers is more invested in the story’s perpetrators than its victims. “Although [the film’s] moral ambition is to honor the tribulations of an Indigenous people,” Anthony Lane writes at the New Yorker, “it keeps getting pulled back into the orbit—emotional, social, and eventually legal—of white men.” Based on an incendiary 2017 nonfiction book of the same name by David Grann, Killers uncovers a seldom discussed chapter in early twentieth-century US history: the systematic extermination of members of the Osage nation in 1920s Oklahoma by white people determined to usurp them of the astonishing wealth they’d amassed through their “head rights” to the oil fields scattered across the area. Mollie—whose given Osage name is Wah-kon-tah-he-um-pah—was one of countless Osages who suffered the violence firsthand; the film chronicles her marriage to Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio) and the murderous plot he orchestrated with his uncle Bill “King” Hale (Robert De Niro) to slaughter his wife and her family and rob them of their riches.
“This is inherently an Indigenous story,” Robert Daniels notes at The Playlist, and “a white director taking it on brings with it deserved charges of exploitation and fears that another white person will once again whitewash Indigenous history.” Those worries, in Killers, “are not wholly unfounded,” and though Scorsese took great lengths to recruit Indigenous advisors—among them Cote himself—“there are only so many blindspots one can fill”; to the director’s credit, “there are very few (but they are glaring).”
Arguably the most damning is the way Mollie is slowly pushed to the story’s margins, Daniels contends:
Though the director and the actor try, there is simply not enough of her. Scorsese attempts to grant us her interiority through his tried and true methods: brief POV shots take us in her head, her vision granting us a picture of the slings and arrows she takes from white people’s venomous glances. Her narration tells us the fear, anger, and rightful paranoia that occurs when the cruel panopticon of white supremacy is ever-present. The scenes come off so well that you’re left craving and wanting much more. You want less rooting through the vile actions of these white folks — which only serves them, even as villains — and more of the ripe emotional vein that building out Mollie can provide.
“For all the episodic ramble of Killers of the Flower Moon,” Richard Lawson echoes at Vanity Fair, “not enough space is provided to restoring palpable personhood to people so relentlessly robbed of it.” Less charitably still, per Kevin Maher at the Times, Mollie “is a major disappointment.”
Championed in pre-release hype as Scorsese’s conscientious pivot away from his usual white male anti-heroes to a non-white female heroine, she is a worryingly slight creation who spends most of the film in a horizontal stupor. She faints, she groans, she’s grief-stricken, she wails, she’s sedated, she’s incapacitated, she’s poisoned. Well, he tried.
Granted, Gladstone does indeed spend a considerable amount of the film’s three and a half hours suffering from her husband’s abominable machinations. But Maher’s reading strikes me as overly simplistic. Not only does it seem to downplay Gladstone’s extraordinary performance, it also reduces Mollie to a martyr—which Killers doesn’t. If anything, Dana Stevens contends at Slate, Mollie “is quiet, watchful, reserved—but never stoic or pitiably long-suffering in the style of a stereotypical onscreen ‘Indian.’”
We see her experience longing, lust, grief, suspicion, forgiveness, and fury, even as she’s obliged to conceal her true feelings—and the extent of her awareness of the deceit all around her—in order to survive in a white-controlled world. Scorsese has been criticized in the past for failing to deliver female characters as complex and believable as the men his movies usually showcase. In the portrait of Mollie Burkhart, embodied by a performer as intuitive and artful as any he’s ever worked with, he has outdone himself.
And yet one of Daniels’s points remains: hard as it tries, the film doesn’t quite succeed in granting us access to Mollie’s interiority. Gladstone’s performance is indeed “astonishing,” Justin Chang notes at the L.A. Times, yet her character is “too dramatically sidelined, especially in the later passages, to shoulder the movie’s much-vaunted representational ambitions.” Save for Mollie’s strongest scenes and a few deathbed visions of her mother, “the movie seems curiously reluctant to penetrate the psychology of its Osage characters.”
That’s in part because characterization is secondary to the film’s story and the urgency of its telling. Killers “does not presume unrestricted access to Mollie’s thoughts and feelings,” Richard Brody admits at the New Yorker.
The movie doesn’t explain what Mollie is thinking while her sisters are dying young, or while she’s getting sicker during Ernest’s treatments. It doesn’t explain what Ernest thinks when he’s first put up to nonviolent crime and then is dispatched on lethal errands. The character psychology of “Killers of the Flower Moon” is minimal—because Scorsese instead presses its action furiously, urgently, onto the screen as if it were something like a dramatized documentary in the first person, his own bearing of witness. The confrontational political view of American life that he unleashes in his previous film, “The Irishman”—a furious work made in furious times and, like this one, a film with silence at its core—here reaches even more deeply into the core of national identity, and into Scorsese’s own self-image.
It is also because, as Justin Chang himself notes in his review, the director films Mollie and the Osage community with a sense of distance, whether out of “timidity, respect, or maybe a mix of both.” Indeed, Scorsese is unmistakably aware of his position as an outsider, and Killers, per Michael Koresky at Reverse Shot, “knowingly positions its own white perspective as othering and inadequate in its mediation.” The fact that the film’s initial précis on the Osage should be delivered by De Niro’s King Hale, for one thing, “is a pointed, unsettling acknowledgment of the ways in which history is commonly twisted to one’s own ends, how the past is reduced to fit the agendas of those looking to gain an advantage.”
If there’s one thing that Killers makes painfully clear, it’s that “dramatizations of historical trauma, like, perhaps the very one you’ve been watching, are insufficient approximations of human suffering.” It’s a point Scorsese underscores most forcefully in the film’s coda, which yanks the action away from 1920s Oklahoma to catapult us into the middle of a live performance of a true-crime radio drama in the 1930s, where the director himself takes the stage to read out what happened to Mollie after all those grueling events we’ve witnessed. “Like so much in this deeply felt yet cautiously measured movement,” Adam Nayman observes at The Ringer, “his appearance is tinged with palpable humility.”
He’s there only to say that, when it comes to the Osage murders and an aftermath that’s still unfolding to this day, he can say only so much. Direct address of this kind has its pros and cons. For some viewers, breaking the fourth wall means breaking faith with drama itself. Which, of course, is Scorsese’s point: He’s calling attention to his project’s myriad inadequacies—as history, as representation, as reparation—not as an ethical get-out-of-jail-free card or an admission of his own waning powers, but rather to implicate the Hollywood apparatus he’s operated with such aplomb for so many years.
Which brings us back to Cote’s response, and the doubt it hinges on: shouldn’t an Osage have told Mollie’s story? Legitimate as it may be, the question—and the bilious reactions it fueled among those who so hastily chastised Scorsese for whitewashing a history of unspeakable horrors—says less about this particular film’s alleged shortcomings than it does about our myopic approach to art. “There seems to be a collective inability in our culture to sit in silence without saying something reflexively,” Soraya Roberts writes at Defector, in one of the most thought-provoking takes on the film, “particularly when that silence is pregnant with the kind of contradiction art is meant to produce.” Killers is rife with such contradictions, not least the paradoxical but no less genuine love that the real-life Mollie and Ernest shared for each other. And our growingly moralist approach to art—our tendency to conflate not just the art with the artist, but also the politics with the art—here threatens to gloss over the way Scorsese challenges his own position as the story’s mediator, and what or who his film is ultimately about.
The filmmaker’s cameo, Roberts concludes, isn’t just a means to implicate the film industry in the obliteration of Indigenous history. It is also “a recognition of [the director’s] own complicity in the wiping away of the Osage (both as an American and as a filmmaker) and his attempt to, in his own way, make something of a corrective while also acknowledging his limited ability to do so.”
While the last shot of Scorsese’s film is a bird’s eye view of the continuing cycle of Osage Nation life in the present day, you could ask, as Cote did, why are the Osage not telling their own story? But sit with it a minute. You may realize this is not a film about the Osage, but a film about settler America’s relation to the Osage, and, more largely, to the world. Specifically, it’s a film about a country’s colonialist, exploitative, violent, destructive, patriarchal subjugation of the world. This is a story of white America, as Scorsese has always been eager to tell. And just as Scorsese could not tell the Osage story, the Osage couldn’t quite tell this one.
The Current Debate is a column that connects the dots between great writing about a topic in the wider film conversation.