REVIEW: Killers of the Flower Moon
Martin Scorsese made a masterpiece. Killers of the Flower Moon will take its rightful place in the canon of great film and history will continue to tell the story of the white man: of his evils and his triumphs. Scorsese will make sure that DiCaprio, 49, and De Niro, 80, have roles to play yet.
But Scorsese told the wrong story.
The following review contains spoilers.
Killers of the Flower Moon is the unbelievable but true story of the mass murder of the Osage Tribe in the 1920s. The Osage Tribe, once described as “the tallest, finest looking race of men in North America, many of them six, six and a half feet tall were [an] uncommonly fierce, courageous, warlike nation,” originally spanned most of the mid-west. In the 19th century, the Osage were forced to move to a shrunken desert area designated “Indian Territory” in present-day Oklahoma. By the 20th century, a freakish stroke of fate would interfere on this forgotten Indian Reservation, turning it into a bounty of riches more abundant than the gold rushes of California. Turns out, the Osage were relegated to land atop a sea of oil. By the 1920s, oil tapped, the Osage were the richest people per capita in the world. Then, one by one, sometimes two at a time, members of the Osage Tribe went missing, their corpses found dead in lakes, poisoned in their homes, burned alive, or shot and buried.
David Grann, author of the book by the same name, took great journalistic care to ensure that there were many stories to tell about this seminal moment in American history. I can appreciate the morbid curiosity to investigate two particular criminals in the story who methodically killed women they appeared to love (and also had sex with). How could they enact such evil to people they knew so personally? It's a powerful question. But I'm infinitely more curious to find out how one woman defied all odds and managed to survive one of the greatest living nightmares of all time.
Mollie Burkhart, a strong, beautiful woman is treated cruelly her entire life. As a young girl, she is forced to move away from her home and her community to learn the culture and religion of her captors. She is fluent in the language of land, nature, and respect, but she's forced to learn the language of her enemies instead. When she grows into a woman, she is rich but unable to access her own wealth. She has a sweet tooth she can't satisfy because she suffers from diabetes. Her first husband, a childhood love, is suicidal, unable to find peace in the disrespected, lawless land that used to be his flower-covered home. In her loneliness she finds herself falling in love with a pigeon-minded white man with soft blue eyes and a handsome jawline. They have children who are treated as animals by the white people they welcome into their home. And all this is just the introduction. The real impossibility of this true story is that her Uncle-in-Law and her beloved, stupid husband wickedly conspired for years to kill her and her entire family in order to access the rights to her family's wealth. Ernest Burkhart (her husband) and William Hale (her Uncle-in-Law) succeed in almost every murder except for hers. Somehow Mollie Burkhart survives this unbelievably cruel condition, saving herself and two of her children.
You could watch this magnificent woman slowly discover her entire life is a lie, or, you could watch 3 hours of a barely literate, impoverished drunk, played by Leonardo DiCaprio, and his conniving uncle, played by Robert De Niro, plot to kill Indians for money.
To demonstrate how truly ridiculous this Martin, Robert, Leo vanity project is, consider the climactic scene of Ernest Burkhart's trial. When Ernest takes the stand and question by question confesses the role he played in the wicked plot, Mollie is seated in the courtroom watching. Presumably, this is the first time she is faced with the truth that up until now she only feared: the fact that everyone in her life is either dead or the murderer. The audience already knows that Ernest is guilty. Martin Scorsese has filmed most of his crimes on screen. The crimes Scorsese didn't film, we watched Ernest confess to in a prior interrogation with federal agent Tom White. I know the look of tortured guilt on DiCaprio's face; I've watched him wrestle with it - adroitly - for almost 200 minutes of film. I want to see Mollie's face as each fact reaches her ears and crushes her already battered soul. I want to see her stand, somehow, and walk out of the courtroom. I want to see the quiet triumph of this woman, with every sane reason to go insane, continue living day after day for years. I want to witness the impossible strength of this incredible woman.
Don't get me wrong, DiCaprio, De Niro, and Scorsese did a great job. But how did this story become about them? If I were an Osage Indian, I'd be devastated. A hundred years later and the story still isn't about the victoriousness of their survival, it is about the white men who tried and mostly succeeded at killing them.