In 2019 HBO released an excellent series called Watchmen. It was not an adaptation of the groundbreaking comic of the same name by Alan Moore but it was set in that universe. The series opens with a depiction of the Tulsa Race Massacre, a historic event in which a group of white men burnt an affluent black neighborhood to the ground after a black man had been accused of assaulting a white woman.
The internet was abuzz about the episode because most of the United States had never heard of the massacre. I grew up in Oklahoma, not thirty miles from Tulsa. I had heard of the massacre but never studied it in school. I believe my Oklahoma History textbooks included the event, but it was never discussed in class. If I’m being generous I’d say that was because we covered the state’s history in chronological order, and we didn’t have time to get that far into it before the school year was up.
I was completely unaware of the Osage Indian Murders until David Gran’s book Killers of the Flower Moon was released in 2017. It makes one wonder how much of our history has been whitewashed or completely erased. Considering what is currently happening in the United States I fear even more will disappear before too long.
Martin Scorsese adapted the book in 2023. My hometown was buzzing with the news of the filming and I tried multiple times to become an extra in it, to no avail. There were Facebook groups that breathlessly reported on every day’s shootings and multiple people showed up every day taking blurry photos of the film’s stars Leonardo DiCaprio, Robert DeNiro, and Lily Gladstone.
I could not wait to see the film. I caught it opening weekend at Tulsa’s wonderful independent movie house the Circle Cinema. I loved it. It was one of my favorite movies of 2023. I’ve been meaning to watch it again ever since. But it is a long movie and I just now got around to it.
After years of being kicked around the Osage were finally settled on a hard-scrabble chunk of worthless land in North West Oklahoma. It was literally land that no one wanted.
Then they discovered oil.
Amazingly the Osage were able to retain their rights to the land and maintained what were known as headrights. This allowed them to keep their land whilst giving the oil companies the right to drill underneath it. In return, the oil companies gave the Osage regular payments. This made them some of the richest people per capita in the world. For a time.
As it is their way, white men quickly found ways to cheat the Osage out of their money. The government created a system in which Osage could be declared incompetent, allowing white men to oversee their money and decide how it was spent. Naturally, they found ways of spending that money for themselves. Corruption was rampant. A great many Osage were declared incompetent for ridiculous reasons. I read that at least one woman was declared incompetent because she wasn’t spending enough of her money, and therefore didn’t understand its value. Plenty of white folks moved into the area selling goods and services at ridiculously high rates.
And then they started murdering the Osage. At least 60 full-blood Osage were killed between 1918-1931. Killers of the Flower Moon focuses in on one conspiracy led by William King Hale (Robert DeNiro) and his nephew Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio).
As this is already long I’m gonna skip most of the plot details. The basics involve Ernest marrying an Osage woman named Mollie (Lily Gladstone) whose family owns a fortune in headlights. Led by King Hale, Ernest hires various other men to murder most of Mollie’s family pushing more and more money into his control. By the end, he’s poisoning Mollie by adding something nefarious to her daily insulin injections.
It is a horrific, true story about racism, white supremacy, and greed.
The book it is based on is plotted like a murder mystery. We don’t know who is responsible for the murders until the end. It is also a story about the burgeoning Bureau of Investigation, a precursor to the F.B.I.
Originally Scoresese’s movie was going to follow in those same tracks. It would be a mystery, and DiCaprio was set to play the F.B.I. man. but along the way, they realized this was really a story of the Osage. But Scorsese, a rich, white, Catholic Italian from New York is smart enough to realize he is not the person who can truly tell their story. At the same time his privilege as a rich white man, and a decorated director at that, allows him to tell such a tale. In all likelihood, an Osage filmmaker would never be given the funding to make it.
You can feel that tension throughout the film. Scorsese took great pains to consult with many Osage tribespeople, trying to be respectful of their culture and tell their story as best he could. But he also centers it on Ernest, he tells it from his perspective. At the end of the film, Scorsese does something that directly indicates that this is a story told by a white man. Stories like this are important to tell, but we should always be aware of who is telling them.
DiCaprio is brilliant as Ernest. He’s not a particularly intelligent man. To put it bluntly, he’s an idiot. And easily manipulated. King Hale regularly talks him into doing his bidding. There is a question at the heart of the film about whether Ernest loves his wife. I think he does. Of a sort. In DiCaprio’s performance we see him genuinely care for her. Yet he also loves money. On multiple occasions he literally states this. At one point he declares he loves money almost as much as he loves his wife.
I think he is able to compartmentalize the horrible things he is doing and separate them from his feelings for Mollie. He’s also a blatant racist. So killing Native Americans is no big deal to him. Killing Mollie’s sisters is just killing some more Osage and that’s okay. The fact that they are Mollie’s kin, that she loves them, and that their deaths pain her is somehow separated in his mind.
We eventually see some regret rise up in him. He’s willing to poison Mollie because that will “slow her down” and keep her from discovering the truth. But slowly he realizes he’s killing her. Slowly he sees the effect all this murdering has on her. I mean, he’s still a horrible human, but just slightly better than King Hale who has no remorse at all.
Lily Gladstone is nothing short of brilliant. She doesn’t have a lot of lines, but she makes every scene count. Watch her face and notice how she’s hiding her emotions and thoughts, but look closely and you can see everything underneath. It is a subtle, fantastic performance.
This has grown too long. The film is long. At 3.5 hours you have to have patience with it. It isn’t a perfect film, that tension between the story that needs to be told and the one that Scorsese is able to tell sometimes falls on the wrong side. But it is a great film. One that tells a hugely important story in meaningful ways.
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