Apple Original Films
Lily Gladstone and Leonardo DiCaprio in Martin Scorsese’s “Killers of the Flower Moon”
This review contains spoilers.
When I wrote my book Chain of Title, I had one or two conversations with film producers who expressed some interest in adapting it. And the big question they had was “Who is the villain?” They wanted to personify the antagonist responsible for the foreclosure of millions of homes, fabrication of documents to secure those dispossessions, and the lack of prosecutions for anyone who perpetrated this rampant fraud. And my answer was usually some form of “Everyone was the villain.” The fraud was systemic, at every level of the mortgage origination, transfer, recordation, securitization, and servicing process, and the failure of accountability occurred at every level of government, from local courts up to the federal government.
Hollywood doesn’t do systemic. Chain of Title didn’t get adapted.
I was reminded of this when watching Martin Scorsese’s brilliant adaptation of David Grann’s Killers of the Flower Moon. The book and film document crimes against the Osage tribe in Oklahoma, who became the richest people per capita in the world due to oil discoveries in the early decades of the 20th century, and subsequently became a target for whites seeking a share of the fortunes.
Scorsese had a very natural example to dramatize this through the conventions of traditional storytelling. Osage woman Mollie Burkhart (played by the resplendent Lily Gladstone) lost her three sisters and her mother to various forms of murder, at the hands of a criminal syndicate that included her own husband, the thick-headed and easily manipulated Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio). When federal investigators uncover the scheme, Burkhart wrestles with informing on his uncle, “King of the Osage Hills” William Hale (Robert De Niro), who devised the plot to funnel oil headrights (that is, oil payments granted to tribal members) from Mollie’s family to her and then bump her off, leaving Burkhart and Hale with the loot.
The scheme unfolds with increasing horror, alongside Mollie’s grief at losing everyone important in her life. And it’s meant to stand in for the slow-motion robbery and massacre of the Osage, at one point equated with what happened (albeit with more speed) 50 miles up the road in Tulsa, where “Black Wall Street” was set ablaze in a race riot.
But synecdoche, in this instance, cannot account for the monstrous violations against the Osage or other Native tribes. In fact it cheapens it, by reducing it to one man’s greed rather than a sweeping mindset, rather than white supremacists refusing to believe that killing or stealing from an Indian is immoral. I loved Scorsese’s film—it’s full of great performances, impeccable production design in the very towns where the murders of the Osage took place, the late Robbie Robertson’s haunting score, and terrifically rendered lessons about the consequences of one’s actions—but I didn’t like it.
DAVID GRANN’S BOOK DOESN’T FALL INTO THIS TRAP, and concludes with a flourish that not only implicates white Oklahomans in the 1920s, but the reader as well. The story of William Hale, and Ernest and Mollie Burkhart, ends about 75 pages before the end of the book. The final section instead depicts Grann’s own journey, as he gradually recognizes that Hale, while a powerful civic leader in Osage County, was in no way the only one angling to get a share of Osage oil money.
The section strings together bits of evidence Grann finds about hundreds of murders, not just the handful associated with Hale, and an entire set of financial swindles, insurance scams, and price-gouging. He relates a series of murders by numerous whites in which Hale had no hand, including women who married Osage men and then poisoned them to grab the inheritance. These cases, unlike the Hale murders, were all unsolved, covered up by officials in Osage County, from doctors to undertakers to law enforcement. One scheme involved killing an Osage and having another woman impersonate her to collect the annual headright payments.
The plots predate the Hale cases, and go on long after he is (temporarily) sent to prison. “The evil of Hale was not an anomaly,” Grann writes.
For instance, Grann gathers information on a man named H.G. Burt, a bank president who handed out dubious loans to Osage people at enormously inflated rates. Why would such wealthy people need loans? Because Native Osage were seen as incapable of handling their own money, and formal guardians—white men, naturally—would have to approve all expenses. (By the way, one of those guardians was H.G. Burt.)
When the guardians balked, people like Burt, or William Hale, were ready to provide the Osage with funding. But it came at a cost, and eventually sucked them dry. In a chilling scene, Grann discovers that the Osage wards of guardians kept dying, over and over, in cases that were unsolved. The guardians then administered the dead Osage members’ estates. One bit of evidence intimates that Burt “split the boodle” (the money) with Hale on one Osage death. Yet he fled to Kansas and never faced legal action for his conduct.
At the heart of this arrangement is a denial of Native Americans as having their own liberty or sovereignty, forced to serve as wards of white financiers. The Osage didn’t originate in Oklahoma; they were pushed there, to what was seen as hardscrabble and worthless land. When oil was discovered, the tribe briefly found reward, reversing the trend of a country that brutalized and marginalized them. But as is often the case, that resource was a curse, creating resentment, backlash, and greedy exploitation, carried out not in one action but over decades. And the white men who carried it out saw it as righting a historical wrong of actually giving Native Americans valuable land by accident.
Apple Original Films
Robert De Niro and Leonardo DiCaprio in a scene from “Killers of the Flower Moon”
To his credit, Scorsese does show the humiliation of Mollie Burkhart having to visit her guardian, declare herself incompetent, and haggle with him over being able to spend money that was rightfully hers. But there isn’t any explanation of why the Osage had this guardian structure. You almost need the book as a companion piece to understand these more subtle elements of the film.
And that’s the problem. A straight reading of the movie could see in it the hallmarks of a Scorsese gangster picture. You have a criminal cabal with a powerful leader, and underlings in way over their head, carrying out orders and thrown into unspeakable moral crises. It’s a formula Scorsese has used to great and powerful effect before, and it hits the mark here, especially in DiCaprio’s performance, where he gradually finds himself poisoning the woman he deeply loves.
But in Flower Moon, we’re not in the world of Goodfellas or The Irishman; we’re in the midst of an outrage that has no single crime family at fault. The society is the perpetrator.
The way Grann reveals his own understanding of a slaughter he previously told mainly through the case of Hale and Burkhart is unsettling for both author and reader. Normal storytelling techniques allow for a part to signify the whole. But what Grann ultimately concludes is that this is a kind of sleight of hand that minimizes what we did to Native Americans in this country. It almost excuses the violence as the aberrant work of one evil tycoon, rather than the banal work of defining a race as second-class citizens.
There’s a sense of guilt that came over me reading of this, not only for obvious reasons, but because of how it transpires. As you read the Hale/Burkhart story, you dimly understand that it’s just one of a series of murders, but then you have to read about the other nefarious actors in detail, realizing that all of them never faced anything resembling accountability. You start to distrust how stories like this can be told, as Grann goes out to the edges beyond one perfect case study.
For all his gifts, Scorsese was unwilling to attempt such an audacious experiment, though there are hints of it. Near the beginning, he files through a series of Osage deaths, with a narrator stating that they were unsolved. But at that point they are dropped, and we never return to them. The film stays focused on Hale, Burkhart, and a series of partners in crime, from the doctors who ladle out poison (including Mollie’s insulin shots) to the hit men who take care of one of Mollie’s sisters with a bullet in the brain, to the “yegg” (safecracker) and “soup man” (demolitions expert) who combine to blow up the house of another of Mollie’s relatives. There are brief asides by tribal leaders about “hundreds” of deaths, and how the oil riches have become an evil burden, but these strands never get followed.
This is how virtually any filmmaker would do it. The Mollie Burkhart story is the perfect way to display how whites schemed to rob the Osage, how they fought to avoid justice, and how the Osage suffered incomparably for these sins. But when you know that this wasn’t isolated, wasn’t a Mafia scheme to exploit a weak point to make money, that it was indeed a systemic crime, then synecdoche is simply not enough. It disappoints and even dishonors what happened in Osage County, and more broadly to millions of Native people. And what is still happening: Practically every day in Oklahoma there’s another provocation showing white people trying to roll back whatever rights Native Americans have scratched out for themselves. Non-Osage members still today hold large sums of the oil rights given to the people of the tribe.
At the film’s end, Scorsese cleverly avoids the white-text-on-black-background explainer of what happened to the protagonists, instead showing a 1930s-era live radio show, complete with Foley sound effects, to describe how the story ended. (Look for White Stripes front man Jack White among the radio actors.) At the end, Scorsese appears, delivering the line that Mollie Burkhart’s obituary gave no mention of any reign of terror in Osage County or murders of her family.
Some reviewers have written that this was Scorsese telling on himself about transforming great tragedy into entertainment, and what gets left out in the process. I think it was as much escaping the awkwardness of trying to fill with words the story he chose not to tell. Another choice would be to tell that story, the story of a corrupt society, without boiling it down. If Scorsese’s words were a cry for forgiveness for making something crass out of the wholesale elimination of a race of people, then maybe the actions could have spoken louder than those words, and carried more weight. If we’re all complicit, then searching for that complicity as Grann did, through tattered documents and tiny pieces of information, is one option. I wish Scorsese, maybe my favorite filmmaker, took that path.
