I don't know what to think about Killers of the Flower Moon
It either does something really smart or does nothing smart at all
The following post contains spoilers for the content and structure of the film, but I’m also not going to talk much about the details of the case itself. Hopefully no one subscribes to this newsletter for incisive and thorough reviews! I am not above recommending Wikipedia for summaries of the book and movie.
I spent last weekend convalescing from a (minor, and successful!) surgical procedure, so thought it was the perfect time to finally set aside three hours and twenty-six minutes of my one wild and precious life to watch last year’s critically acclaimed adaptation of David Grann’s true crime classic.
The book is a favorite of mine, but I was (obviously) not in a hurry to see the movie. I like Scorsese just fine (Gangs of New York is one of my faves of all time), but the way the film was marketed did not inspire confidence that the stories of the Osage victims and survivors would be the story’s focus.
And for three hours and twenty-three minutes, I was pretty sure I was right. The deaths of the Osage are mostly collapsed together into montage, and/or interspersed with long, loooong conversations between white men about the complexities of stealing their oil rights and revenue.
The few killings that are given more attention are still portrayed problematically, with an extended scene of one murdered woman’s body undergoing a gruesome and public autopsy, and another Osage man whose botched staged suicide prompts a conversation between Leo and his uncle (De Niro), who is orchestrating the murders, that I think was supposed to be funny? Oof.
The stories of the white men in the film, whether they are evil (De Niro) or heroic (the FBI agents who arrive with an hour of movie left to solve the crimes) are given the most attention and screen time. For example, Mollie, (Leo’s wife, whose portrayal by Lily Gladstone is as good as everyone says it is), who is being slowly poisoned by her husband and has lost literally everyone in her family, raises money, arranges for transportation from Oklahoma to Washington, D.C., MEETS THE PRESIDENT, and personally lobbies him for help with the unsolved killings in her community. How did she accomplish this? What did it cost her physically and emotionally? WHO KNOWS because the entire sequence lasts fewer than three minutes of montage. Several sources report that the original script only gave her character three scenes. Though that oversight was thankfully rectified, it says a lot about the focus of the film from its earliest conception.
But then something unusual happens. With three minutes left, audio of a smooth voice proclaiming “right had won” bleeds into a silent shot of Jesse Plemons (F.B.I. investigator) reflecting on the prosecution of Leo and Uncle De Niro. Suddenly, we’re looking at a live recording of a radio show called “True Crime Stories.” The host announces, “This brings to a close the authenticated story of the Osage Indian murders,” and the remaining moments serve as the sort of individual character wrap-ups that textual epilogues usually serve in films, except they are performed by voice actors, in front of an audience.
This choice made me rethink everything! If the previous three hours and change was “the authenticated story” of the killings, authenticated by none other than the F.B.I. (as the announcer also reveals), then it makes total sense that the white men are centered and the Osage characters are marginalized. J. Edgar Hoover would have had a vested interest in producing a show, for entertainment (it’s hard not to feel oneself part of that live studio audience, applauding the resolution of the case), that promoted his agency’s ability to quickly and heroically solve crimes with little to no help from the communities that were victimized. Not for nothing, the subtitle of Grann’s book is “The Osage Murders and the Birth of the F.B.I.”
There’s no indication that DiCaprio’s performance as Ernest Burkhart is distinguished from the radio actor who plays him in the film’s closing moments. Same goes for De Niro. Mollie’s voice, though, is not represented by an actor, and her obituary is read by, wait for it, the literal director of the film we just watched, Martin Scorsese himself. Her life, as we have just seen it represented, has been circumscribed, managed, and narrated by white men from start to finish.
But that is not the only way to tell this story. It is presumably not the way Mollie’s community or Mollie herself would tell it. It is, however the predominant way that true crime texts by white creators traditionally have packaged stories that involve the victimization of marginalized groups. Criticisms about true crime’s exclusion of voices and perspectives of color, its propensity to concentrate on perpetrators rather than adequately centering victims, and its problematic fetishization of the police are all deserved, and all of these shortcomings are present in the film.
So if that coda is meant to reframe the movie as an example, and implicit criticism, of the way true crime can distort and whitewash violence against marginalized communities in general and the Osage in particular, applause applause applause. But if I’m honest, I don’t think there’s enough evidence that is the case. The film (despite my problems with it) is meticulously and masterfully made, with care, thought, and a whole lot of money put towards recreating the landscape of 1920s Oklahoma. I don’t see Scorsese putting that much effort into a story that is meant to be a meditation on what not to do. Also, death of the author rebuttals aside, that’s not what he said he was doing. Check this from an interview with Richard Brody:
And the way in which the couple’s relationship is reimagined, as Scorsese made clear to me, embodies his own grappling with the underlying morality of Grann’s tale—a responsibility to place the Osage people at the center of the story that turned out to shift the very aesthetic of the movie.
So I’m left a bit at loose ends. Without the radio show coda, I would be able to confidently go forth with an “it’s not for me” take on the movie. But with the epilogue, it, my take and the film, becomes something else entirely, and I’m still not sure what.
Hope you're feeling fine, Tracy and recovering well! One the topic in hand, 206 minutes seems a lot to spend on a movie. I mean, come on, Martin, I have things to do this week. It's on my list, though. You've made me wonder what I'll think...
I found the ending kind of jarring, too! But also heartwarming? I felt the same about the final few minutes of AMERICAN FICTION.