Killers of the Flower Moon (2023) | Dir. Martin Scorcese
Courtesy of Apple TV+
Written by: Belle McIntyre
This gargantuan film both demands and rewards your commitment to it’s almost 3 ½ hour length as it presents a Western, a love story, a murder mystery, and a historical moment in time. Artfully woven together with first rate performances from a brilliantly chosen cast, we are plunged us into a strange and unforgiving place and time. Based on David Gann’s 2017 non-fiction book of the same name, Scorsese provides a skillfully edited series of newsreels and archival newspaper accounts of the mis en scene into which we are about to be engulfed. We are in 1920’s Fairfax, Oklahoma a bleak frontier town, settled by ranchers and hard men leading a hardscrabble life, who are driven to distraction by the fact that the discovery of vast quantities of oil has been discovered on the adjacent reservation of the Osage Indians, making them ridiculously rich.
Courtesy of Apple TV+
It is into this milieu that Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio) a young war veteran, comes to get rich with the help of his successful uncle, William Hale (Robert Di Nero), a wealthy rancher. Ernest is naïve and drifting around searching for his future. Hale, known as “King” by most of the towns people is a wily, crafty operator who begins to guide the very earnest Ernest, who embodies his name with a permanently furrowed brow and down-turned mouth. It seems that the growth opportunity in Fairfax is getting the oil from the Osage, who have the mineral rights, as granted to them by the US government when they were forced onto the reservation, before the oil was discovered. King describes the Osage people as “the finest, the wealthiest and most beautiful on God’s earth”. Suddenly they are accorded new respect by the white men who are desperate for their money and their land.
Courtesy of Apple TV+
One tactic used by the venal white men, including King, is to marry into the tribe and then get rid of all of the family members and inherit the land/oil rights. As a result, there have been dozens of strange killings and mysterious fatal illnesses among the Osage, with virtually no consequences from white law enforcement. Ernest, dutifully and sincerely, courts Mollie Kyle, a beautiful Osage woman, and shortly marries her. He moves into her house with her mother Lizzie Too (Tantoo Cardinal) and seems perfectly comfortable in their domestic happiness. But Mollie is much more savvy than Ernest and she is determined to do whatever she can to rectify the murders and prevent further ones. To that end she boards a train to Washington DC to present her case, which is taken seriously enough to trigger a visit from the law enforcement agency which would soon become the FBI.
Courtesy of Apple TV+
The extreme juxtapositions between the passive and gullible wealthy Indians and the scurrilous predatory behavior of greedy, entitled and ruthless whites brings the story of the Tulsa Massacre to mind, when a furious white mob burned down an entire community of wealthy and prosperous Black citizens. It is not a pretty picture and a source of discomfort. (One which Ron DeSantis would prefer to eradicate). Yet, accept it we must, less we allow this sort of injustice to recur. Racism is embedded in our history and will remain there unless we are honest and address it and do not allow it to happen again. A powerful cautionary tale.
Courtesy of Apple TV+
