After watching a film, I rarely find myself in dissonance, feeling as though the filmmaker and story do not match. In my heart, I know that Martin Scorsese, in his highly anticipated Killers of the Flower Moon, meant to highlight a truly disgusting history of the American people. As for his filmmaking, I can almost offer no notes for the wildly successful, prestigious director. As for the story he told, Scorsese inevitably made the film too white and male-centric to have the impact he was hoping for.

The audience is introduced to the Osage, a native American Nation who, after discovering oil on their land, quickly became the richest people per capita in the world. The film is backdropped by both the 1920s and the American West, where power and greed find no opposition in the ever-expanding landscape. The story centers around two (soon-to-be opposing) families. Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio) comes home from war to work for his Uncle, William Hale (Robert De Niro). Hale owns a cattle ranch and is very friendly with the Osage Nation. In fact, he directs Ernest’s attention to Mollie (Lily Gladstone). She, her three sisters, and her mother are all members of the Osage Nation. Thus, two very different families come together by marriage.

Despite Ernest’s slightly skewed motives, he lovingly marries Mollie, and they have three children together. Over the course of their first years of marriage, Ernest gets deeper and deeper, intertwined with Hale’s plans to ultimately take all of Mollie’s money. 

Before the end of the first act, we know two facts. One, the Osage are being targeted for their head rights. Two, Hale is more manipulative and devious than he appears. This is not a crime film where the mystery leads to the thrill and ultimate resolution. In fact, there really is no resolution as more and more people, including Mollie, are targeted. The film’s true climax was not a “breakthrough” in the case, but rather, a horrendous crime that forces Mollie herself to travel to Washington to plead for help from the federal government. 

At almost comically late timing, Jesse Plemmons as the lead FBI investigator and Brendan Fraser as Hale’s defense attorney change the pace of the film. Now, the end reads like a courtroom drama where we watch lies fall apart, men reduced to their actions, and the Osage, once again, taking a back seat to the drama. 

So overall, Scorsese’s first western acted almost like a gangster film but read as a tragedy. In the ‘Western’ fashion, the film truly reveals the worst parts of American industrialization–how, even in assimilation or possible peaceful cohabitation, white supremacy in the West is an inevitable consequence of greed. As a crime or gangster film, both terms I have used to describe this film, the story lays out almost like a “snitch” film where DiCaprio’s Burkhart lies in the center of crimes committed and confronted. 

But the true core of the film is the tragedy of it all. The story of Mollie as a woman whose life falls apart before her very eyes. The story of the Osage Nation, whose horrific murders became nothing more than an exploited spectacle of FBI triumph (but I’ll get to that later). What was disappointing about this film was how the identifiable core was pushed to the side, creating yet another white, male-centric Western crime film, or whatever you want to call it. 

While I don’t deny that both DiCaprio and De Niro turned in possibly career-best performances, I was disappointed that their screen time was significantly longer, or at least more significant than Gladstone’s. She herself offered a heartbreakingly nuanced performance with such powerful moments of explosive anger and sadness. But this was not her film.

If this was meant to be a story about the Osage murders, why is our perspective aligned with the white men–the criminals? I mentioned above that the film let on to almost all the facts right in the beginning. The film did nothing but play out the inevitable crimes and trials. The impact was minimal. Had this been a film centering around Gladstone’s Mollie, where we watched her world slowly fall apart and the truth slowly unveiled, this film would have been more heartbreaking. 

Is the story still impactful and heartbreaking? Of course it is. The use of minimal non-diegetic music and sound, perhaps more importantly, the use of silence made the film, at times, a riveting watch. The cinematography, almost in a Gerwig or Sciamma-type fashion, wasn’t overly romantic or extravagant, with the exception of a few shots. Rather, the film had a sense of realistic observance, where the characters were placed in vignettes of tragedy, greed, and deceit. 

However, although Killers of the Flower Moon is a good film, it needed to be great. It is possible that this wasn’t the story for Scorsese to tell. Many Osage members were consulted for the film but also had conflicting thoughts on Scorsese’s film. Christopher Cote, an Osage language consultant, also holds the perspective that the film should be from Mollie’s perspective. 

And Scorsese even acknowledges this fact in the end. 

In my opinion, the director chooses to end his film in three parts. First, Mollie finally sits face to face with Ernest after his confession and confronts him about all of his crimes. In a triumphant moment for her character, she leaves him. If we had been aligned with her perspective, watching her toss and turn over whether or not to trust Ernest, this would have been the most impactful scene in the whole movie. Instead, the other two endings packed the heat of the hopeful punch. 

First, we travel from the 1920s to the radio serials of the 30s and 40s. Recapping the end of each character’s story, Scorsese himself ends Mollie’s story. He reads her obituary, ending with the haunting statement, “There was no mention of the murders.” Oddly enough, Scorsese simultaneously places Mollie back at the center of the film yet still undercutting her presence by, as a white man, ending her story for her. This scene acknowledges how the stories of the 60 people murdered were reduced to nothing but a radio broadcast that made an entertaining look into an FBI case file. Scorsese, placing himself in the scene, acknowledges that he is not a part of this spectacle. 

In a way, seeing the contemporary white man acknowledge his place in this complex web of history is a breath of painful, cold, fresh air. In another way, his acknowledgment of the inevitable reinforces the fact that this film did not place the Osage on a higher platform than past Westerns. It was a different platform, but they still were not the center of the story that was, unfortunately, supposed to be theirs. 

And up until this point, I have been very hard on Scorsese. I truly believe the filmmaker set out to make an impactful, important film. Unfortunately, Scorsese’s long history of gangster, anti-hero, “boy movies” seeped into this somber, vicious story. His career and obviously white perspective ruined the chances of this film being a film for the Osage. What is more tragic, I believe, is most audience members’ omission of this forced, white perspective that almost caused us to pity DiCaprio’s dumb, manipulated Ernest Burkhart. 

There has never been a film I wanted to like more than this one. But the unfortunate whiteness of Killers of the Flower Moon cannot be ignored. Of course, I acknowledge the great strides Scorsese took to make this film more inclusive, accurate, and respectful to the Osage. Despite its drawbacks, Scorsese bravely tried to say some things to the United States that haven’t yet been said. I hope Hollywood allows other directors, not just white directors, to say some of those same things as well. 

Review Courtesy of Sara Ciplickas

Credit to Apple TV and Paramount Pictures via Variety