Why ‘Killers Of The Flower Moon’ Is A Masterpiece, Even With Its Flaws

When I was a child I was taught that Native Americans—Indigenous people—were savages, deranged monsters, an ignorant bunch so uncivilized, so unintelligent, and so incompetent that they actually sold the island of Manhattan, what would become the financial heartbeat of New York City and the United States, for a mere $24 in trinkets, beads, and cloth. I was taught that White men were the good and brave guys, including the cowboys and explorers of the American frontier, and that Red men, “Injuns” as we were taught to call them, were the bad and cowardly guys. I was taught these “facts” at school, in books, by way of cartoons, on various tv shows, and via movies, especially the westerns. It was and is such a thorough miseducation that both children and adults in this nation still say racist and anti-Native American phrases to each other, like “Don’t be an Indian giver,” if someone declares they desire something back, as if Indigenous people had willingly given up the parcel of earth they inhabited and now, selfishly, wanted it returned.

That is why I feel Martin Scorsese’s epic new film, Killers of the Flower Moon, is not merely a masterpiece but also the single most important work of art he has ever created, even with its flaws. Because it is the first movie depiction of Native Americans I’ve absorbed in my entire life, made by a White American, that dutifully humanizes this resolutely proud but beleaguered community. After all, we are talking 400-plus years of brutally destructive images and ideas in all forms, plus scores of rotten federal and local government treaties, easily broken promises, mass genocides, and everything from the Trail of Tears to Standing Rock. There are only a bit over 8.75 million people who identify as Indigenous, as American Indian, present on these shores today, or just 2.6% percent of the 340 million citizens in our country. How many were murdered, exterminated, because of power lust and basic greed, how many lives snuffed out for the sake of land, or mineral resources, or both, across time and generations, we will never fully know.

What we do know is that Martin Scorsese is to the American cinema what James Baldwin and Joan Didion are to the essay, what Joy Harjo and Bob Dylan are to the poem and song, and what Chiura Obata and Frida Kahlo are to the visual arts: a spectacularly gifted, resilient, and unapologetic documentarian of the human experience. And like those other creatives, Scorsese’s feature films, from Mean Streets and Taxi Driver, to Raging Bull and Goodfellas, and from Gangs of New York to The Irishman, plus his equally engrossing documentaries (my personal favorite is George Harrison: Living in the Material World), unmask, over and over, a soul in search of the soul in all of us. Or, rather, why do human beings behave the way we do, what and who created us, what do we believe in, why do we hurt ourselves, and others, even when we (should) know better, and why do we say we believe in love, but do not practice love, truly?

Those questions, those themes, to me, are the soul, and heart, of Killers of the Flower Moon. Based on David Grann’s acclaimed and best-selling nonfiction history book, Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI, the movie version launches with a group of Osage Nation leaders preparing to bury a pipe while lamenting what the White world has done to Indigenous culture, to Indigenous values, to the Indigenous self. It is a slow burn that suddenly jerks and explodes, like Childish Gambino’s “This Is America”  music video, into a series of frames and voices: the pipe is buried; young Indigenous men discover oil and strut jubilantly in it; we see mega-wealthy Indigenous families, dressed to the nines, clearly the beneficiaries of this “black gold”; then the mysterious deaths of Native folks in this Fairfax, Oklahoma enclave where the story, and “love story,” unfolds, three hours and twenty-six minutes of a hypnotic yarn that made me weep ferociously on the inside, while also beating my brain with rage at the tragedy before me. An American tragedy, set in the aftermath of World War I and the roaring 1920s, that most of us were unaware of until the book, or this Scorsese adaptation.

First, without giving away huge parts of Killers of the Flower Moon, please know the performances are everything: Lily Gladstone is an artistic epiphany, her interpretation of Mollie Burkhart, Native American wife to Leonardo DiCaprio’s Ernest Burkhart, is sublime, effortlessly understated, her spiritual and emotional traumas at what is happening all about her methodically peeling color and joy from her face, until we are left, at the climax of her blues, with a scream so piercing and pain-ridden it could be for an entire race of people. Leonardo DiCaprio is the ordinary working-class White male, military veteran, so pathetically confused and so woefully under-educated that he is a lump of clay, readily shaped into whatever his uncle William King Hale, played by Robert De Niro, wants and needs him to be. Be it his wobbly body posture or the perpetual downward turn of his lips, DiCaprio has manifested a character study that not only explains those times, but also why economically challenged Whites like him are such staunch believers in the radical right-wing of the Republican Party in these times. They simply do not know who they are—culturally, psychologically, spiritually, historically—but think they do; meanwhile, racism becomes a convenient best friend, and anyone who is “other,” including the American Indian, is subhuman, not worthy of real respect, or a safe life, even if the “other” has enormous wealth and privilege, like Mollie and her family.

And Robert De Niro as the town godfather/goodfella is a vintage director-actor collaboration with De Niro once more embodying, as one of our greatest actors, all that Scorsese is aching to reveal about human nature, about the spiritual realm, or the absence of the spiritual. One can tell that they’ve worked together for 50 years, since Mean Streets in 1973, 11 films and 11 portrayals which have left an indelible mark on the American movie landscape. Martin Scorsese choreographs with a wizard’s wand as Robert De Niro dances, with God, and with the Devil. Killers of the Flower Moon is as much about the booming presence of William King Hale as it is the tormented love of Mollie and Ernest. That is because Robert De Niro wrings dry, with his puffy hands, the washcloth which is the hypocrisy and horrors torn from the history texts of our minds. With his pasted-on smile Hale is one vile and audacious White man, yes, but likewise a stark symbol of a systemic American philosophy responsible for the enslavement of my ancestors, the slaughter of the Indigenous, and, yes, things like book bans, the watering down of school curriculum that dares to tell stories like this one, and the trampling upon everything from abortion rights to Affirmative Action to voting rights to the inhumane shuffling of immigrants. Because Killers of the Flower Moon, at its soul-searching core, is about money, power, control, who has it, who wants it, no matter the human cost.

You feel this cost, every bit of it, because the movie’s cinematography is awe-inspiring and as empathetic to the souls of Indigenous folk as the paintings of George Catlin: the colors at moments lush, warm, inviting, bright-eyed, and then also dangerous, foreboding, muted, an inferno of heaven and hell waging war against manicured money fields, stupendous period costumes, and chiseled facial features. You feel this cost, too, every bit of it, because of the magnificent musical ecosystem constructed by Robbie Robertson—his last partnership with Scorsese before his sad and recent death. Robertson’s mother was born on the Six Nations Reserve near Lake Erie in Canada, and you can tell. The sounds feel remarkably personal, a sonic meditation for the Indigenous who ain’t here. There are drums and shakers, acoustic and electric guitars, banjos and flutes, the score perhaps what an inclusive American soundtrack could have been, if this very group had not been fighting for its survival, from Mollie Burkhart to now. Maybe that is why Robertson’s music worships, why the music cries, why the music laughs, why the music asks questions, and why the music seeks the divine.

For sure the music is as much a mystical journey as what is happening to Mollie’s family and community: the weird and abrupt deaths, the random murders, the severe alcoholism, the debilitating depression, the turning inward and hurting of each other. Killers of the Flower Moon is an intellectually curious film, but it is not a perfect film. There were occasions where I wanted to yell at the screen and say, Please stop centering Whiteness when telling a story about people of color! We get to learn layers about the men played by De Niro and DiCaprio, but far fewer layers about Gladstone’s woman character. Indeed, imagine how much more game-changing this compelling portrait of Indigenous life, culture, and history could have been if besides our hearing Native languages being spoken, hearing Native music being played, and seeing Native attire being worn throughout the film, if we could have learned something more, about Mollie’s mother, and her three sisters, if we could have witnessed genuine interactions between these Indigenous women. Like, who were they, really? And who was Mollie, really, besides a tragic victim of oppression, of racism and sexism, of an abusive and demonic sort of love?

But we know that has long been a blind spot of Scorsese’s pictures, his glaring inability to see the full humanity of women, and also his habitual near erasure of African Americans, beyond a reference here or there in any of his movies. With Killers of the Flower Moon, we learn, in quick passing, of the racist Tulsa, Oklahoma massacre of that Black community, the legendary “Black Wall Street,” but no one speaks on it, and it’s very easy to blink and miss that brief scene. We get that mention by way of a newsclip as Hale sits in a theater watching. We know the Ku Klux Klan exists because we see them in a Fairfax parade, marching behind the Indigenous community no less. This, to me, is where Scorsese fumbles the ball terribly, because there is clearly a direct connection between what happened to the Osage Nation and “Black Wall Street” in Tulsa, but you would not know that, if you do not know that. And this same F.B.I. that comes in to help Mollie and the community, as overseen by an off-camera and young J. Edgar Hoover, is the same Hoover-led F.B.I. that would harass and terrorize people like Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and other Black Civil Rights workers 40 years later. Thus, matter of factly, while telling this story of what happened to the Osage Nation we still get White folks as would-be saviors, clumsily: near the film’s conclusion Scorsese tells us what happened to the villains into the future, but Hoover and his boys get to be heroes, in the Osage narrative and into the future, which simply ain’t the whole truth, because J. Edgar Hoover would come to dominate the F.B.I. exactly the way William King Hale dominated Fairfax, Oklahoma.

Despite these awkward and blatant slip-ups, you can feel Scorsese’s genuine respect for the Osage Nation in how the film was crafted, the 100 or so Indigenous extras casted, the numerous Native consultants hired, the attention to major and minor details of that era. It is earnestly a transporting of the audience into the American Southwest of yesteryear. And you can feel Martin Scorsese, now an 80-something elder White man, trying to figure out, in a post- Black Lives Matter, post- #MeToo, and post- Standing Rock universe, how and where his voice, and his soul, frankly, can and should be used. The answer does for sure blow in the wind, that if an Indigenous co-writer was there eyeball to eyeball with Scorsese and Eric Roth to pen this screenplay, likely an even more transformative and even more poetically just movie. But because our society remains hell-bent on holding on to the old ways and the old days, the blunt reality is there is no possibility a Killers of the Flower Moon would have gotten made, with a $200 million budget, if not for a filmmaker, a White male filmmaker, of the reputation and influence of a Martin Scorsese. Which makes his film that more of an activist manifesto; because in making it, and making it as he did, my necessary critiques aside, Scorsese has demonstrated for us, in real time, what memory ought to be, and how to tell forgotten or ignored American history, unapologetically, in hopes we will never repeat gruesome chapters like this again.

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Kevin Powell is a poet, human and civil rights activist, filmmaker, and author of 16 books, including The Kevin Powell Reader, his collected writings. His 17^th book will be a biography of Tupac Shakur. And his new spoken word poetry album, Grocery Shopping With My Mother, is available on all music streaming platforms.

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