In this review, writer Kate Nelson examines Martin Scorcese’s new film, Killers of the Flower Moon, starring Lily Gladstone and Leonardo DiCaprio. Warning: Major spoilers ahead.
One of many poignant lines in Martin Scorsese’s epic new film Killers of the Flower Moon, “This blanket is a target on our backs,” is said in a hushed conversation between Lily Gladstone’s Mollie Burkhart and JaNae Collins’ Rita Smith, who fear for their lives. The highly anticipated film focuses on the brutal murders of the Osage people after oil was discovered on their Oklahoma reservation, making them the richest community per capita in the world. These real-life events took place a century ago, but they bear a shocking similarity to the modern-day Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women crisis.
Moviegoers are immediately thrust into the complex world of 1920s Oklahoma, where newly affluent Native Americans mingle with white folks eager to capitalize on that wealth through intermarriage, shady business deals, and outright theft. Well-aware of these ulterior motives, the women at the center of this story — including matriarch Lizzie Q (played by Tantoo Cardinal) and her daughters, Mollie, Rita, Anna (Cara Jade Myers), and Minnie (Jillian Dion) — steel themselves against the onslaught. Even so, they are methodically killed off, one after the other, save for Mollie.
Simultaneously, these women are seen as incredibly valuable and utterly disposable, an uncomfortable dichotomy at play throughout the film. As their bodies turn up in unthinkable circumstances, each murder quickly gets blamed on the victim, either for having a “nasty mouth,” drinking too much, or conducting themselves in an otherwise uncouth manner. The crimes largely go ignored and un-investigated, much like the cold cases of countless missing Indigenous women today. Although the true scope of this modern epidemic is unknown, research shows that murder is the third leading cause of death for Native women and that more than 84% of us have experienced violence.
The beautiful Osage blankets on display in nearly every scene represent the tribal nation’s resilient strength and its vulnerability to such horrific attacks. The blankets serve as a material metaphor for the Indigenous genocide, oppression, and forced assimilation upon which the United States and many other countries were built. In fact, even as the Osage became tremendously wealthy in the early 20th century, they were forced into unjust guardianships, in which corrupt white managers handled their money and doled it out to their wards as they saw fit.
Gladstone’s Mollie is a force to be reckoned with, from the time she meets her future husband, Ernest (Leonardo DiCaprio), to the moment she realizes he is poisoning her in an attempt to gain access to her oil profit share, known as headrights. It’s all part of the master plan of his venomous uncle, William Hale (Robert De Niro), a wolf in white man’s clothing who presents himself as a friend of the Osage in a twisted scheme to slowly siphon off their riches.
Even as Mollie's spirit is broken amid the loss of life and her body is weakened from the poison, her resistance is unwavering. She hires private detectives to investigate the crimes. She fortifies herself to go to Washington, DC, to implore President Calvin Coolidge to send federal agents to find the culprits behind the killing spree. She strives to protect her young brood at all costs.
Along the way, Mollie’s well-founded concerns about her safety are dismissed by her husband, which parallels how women’s intuition — once a guiding force in many matriarchal Indigenous societies — has been purposefully undermined in order to propagate a patriarchal power structure. Likewise, Ernest and the white medical doctors sneer at ancestral wisdom and medicines in favor of Westernized regimens to help treat Osage ailments like diabetes, a condition brought on by replacing traditional Indigenous foods such as wild game and seasonal produce with starchy, sugar-ridden fare. Much like guns and alcohol, these diseases were European imports that have plagued Native communities since the point of contact.
As the film comes to a close and the schemers start squirming when faced with the consequences of their conspiring, Mollie remains resilient. Her extraordinary generosity toward her husband, even after his unforgivable actions, ultimately reflects her strength, not his innocence. The story of Mollie Burkhart is one of Native survival, and she and others who have overcome seemingly insurmountable odds are why Indigenous peoples and cultures are still here.
Audiences will likely leave the theater aghast over the mistreatment of the Osage people; they might even question if the plot was fabricated or exaggerated, as it rivals that of Scorsese’s most intense films. After all, how could such heinous crimes happen right here in the United States with most Americans being totally unaware of them for a century? In fact, the plot is not exaggerated, as Scorsese endeavored to tell the story as authentically as possible, bringing on tribal consultants to help him accurately depict the so-called Reign of Terror.
That said, the film has been criticized by Osage language consultant Christopher Cote, who contributed to the movie, for centering the white perspective. His apt observation forces us to examine not only what stories get told by Hollywood but how they get told. Gladstone certainly deserves more screen time than she gets here, as do all of the Indigenous actors portraying real-life Osage figures. Ultimately, they are the main characters of this story, not the white perpetrators who drive the plot of the movie.
Killers of the Flower Moon acts as an important record of this horrific history, yet it’s just one example of how Native people have been displaced, dispossessed, and disenfranchised the world over. And these injustices aren’t a thing of the past. Even today, Indigenous communities face marked inequities, including a lower quality of life, shorter life expectancy, and a higher prevalence of poverty, addiction, and disease.
Native women, in particular, experience inordinate rates of violence, up to 10 times the national average. Much like the women of Killers of the Flower Moon, sadly, we are still treated as disposable, and much like the white men in the movie, countless people are complicit in allowing these atrocities. Consider the ongoing crisis just across the US border in Winnipeg, Manitoba, where family members and protesters are pleading with government officials to search a local landfill for the remains of victims slain by a serial killer who preyed on Indigenous women.
In the end, perhaps the most important takeaway from the film is this: If you’re outraged by what happened 100 years ago, you should be equally outraged by what’s happening today.
