Killers of the Flower Moon (Apple Studios, Imperative Entertainment, Sikelia Productions, Appian Way, Paramount, 2023)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

On July 31 my husband Charles, his mother Edi, and I watched Martin Scorsese’s 2023 epic Killers of the Flower Moon, based on a true story involving the Osage Indians. The Osage had been successively relocated, like most of the Native tribes that survived our genocide against them, and dumped on a barren patch of land in Oklahoma. Only that so-called “barren patch of land” turned out to have huge oil deposits under it, and as the oil started shooting up from the ground in uncontrollable gushers starting in 1920, the Osage found themselves possessors of unimaginable wealth – and also beset by whites trying to take it away from them. Killers of the Flower Moon was based on a quite exciting nonfiction book by David Grann, and was scripted by Scorsese himself and Eric Roth, and the central characters – William King Hale (Robert De Niro), a middle-aged patriarch with a striking resemblance to the late President Truman who’s the most influential white person in the area; his nephew Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo Di Caprio – so both of Scorsese’s all-time favorite actors are in this film!), who’s just returned from serving in World War I as a cook and who gets enlisted in Hale’s scheme to grab much of the Osage oil wealth for themselves; and Mollie Kyle Burkhart (Native actress Lily Gladstone, who won acclaim for the quiet dignity and strength of her performance), whom Ernest courts and marries as part of Hale’s sinister plot. There are many aspects of the real story that are explained in Grann’s book, notably that many of the Osage natives were deemed “incompetent” to handle their own financial affairs by a corrupt white-run judicial system and therefore had court-appointed “guardians” who controlled their money so they couldn’t spend any of it without the guardians’ approval. If you saw the film without having read the book, you’d have no idea why some of the Osage are referred to as “incompetent” while others – the ones who escaped the reach of the white-run guardianship system and the obvious opportunities for corruption it presented – were deemed “competent” and able to handle their own affairs.

Also, in a laudable but foredoomed attempt to protect the Osages’ interests, the federal government stipulated that the Osage could not sell their “headrights” – their shares of the oil revenues – but would keep them until they died, after which they would be passed on to their descendants or relatives. This was the loophole Hale seized on to hatch his evil scheme: he’d assign Ernest to marry Mollie and then send hired killers to knock off not only Mollie but also all her living relatives so Ernest would inherit all the Kyles’ share of the oil money. The oddest thing about Killers of the Flower Moon is that it’s boring; a story that David Grann told in a rivetingly exciting, almost breathless prose style became in Scorsese’s hands an almost interminable 3 ½-hour movie. Naturally there are aspects of Killers of the Flower Moon that work, including Scorsese’s vivid staging of the murders themselves; the use of extensive music from the early 1920’s to set the background for the characters (though if we’re to believe Scorsese’s soundtrack, the Osage of the early 1920’s had a remarkably advanced taste in contemporary pop music; their record collections included such recherché African-American items as Mamie Smith’s “Crazy Blues” and the original 1924 Ma Rainey-Louis Armstrong recording of “See, See, Rider,” a song Rainey wrote); and a newsreel depiction of the race riots in Tulsa, Oklahoma in 1921 that killed over 140 people and utterly destroyed a previously prosperous stretch of Black Tulsa that had come to be known as the “Negro Wall Street.” Though one of the white characters in Killers of the Flower Moon dismiss the Osage as not having done anything to earn their sudden, new-found wealth – they just happened to be sitting on top of a stretch of land that contained oil – Scorsese’s and Roth’s parallel between what’s happening to the Osage in their part of Oklahoma and what happened to the prosperous African-Americans in Tulsa, who had worked hard over many years to build their fortunes, is obvious. The racist white supremacists of the 1920’s were appalled at the idea that any people of color could achieve and maintain affluence, and they were all too eager to use their power – including resorting to violence when all else failed – to take it away from them.

Ultimately the Osage killings are solved by agents of the Bureau of Investigation of the U.S. Department of Justice – contrary to the Scorsese-Roth script, which presents it as a newly organized agency, it had actually been around since 1908, and its first director was private detective agency founder William J. Burns, who appears in the movie as a private contractor the Osage hire to find out who’s knocking them off and who’s driven out of the area when thugs beat him to within an inch of his life. (At least Scorsese and Roth correctly call it the “Bureau of Investigation”; it didn’t acquire the word “Federal” at the start of its name until 1935.) The movie ends with an intriguing scene set in a radio studio in 1947, when the story of the Osage murders is being presented as part of a true-crime story with musician Jack White as one of the participants and Scorsese himself as the narrator. I quite liked Scorsese’s choice of the theme music for this show: Ferde Grofé’s 1928 tone poem “Metropolis: A Blue Fantasie” (that’s how it was spelled on the original record labels), in a modern recording by Vince Giordano, Scorsese’s go-to guy whenever he needs an accurate re-creation of the big-band sound for one of his films. “Metropolis” was originally recorded by Paul Whiteman’s band in March 1928, with a 10-second cornet break by Bix Beiderbecke from 6:20 to 6:30 (he’s not improvising but his clarion tone is still unmistakable), and I hope Giordano got a chance to record the entire piece in modern sound instead of just the snippet of its opening heard here. Charles summed up my response to Killers of the Flower Moon when he said after it was over, “I thought it would be zippier.” Certainly David Grann’s book was suitably zippy – as well as including a powerful later section in which the adult daughter of Ernest and Mollie Burkhart finally has to come to grips with the knowledge that the only reason she exists is because her dad married her mom as part of a plot to kill not only mom but her entire family for the sake of some oil money – but the film is a 3 ½-hour meander through a story Grann told with a strong sense of pace. It reminded me of Darren Aronofsky’s Noah (reviewed by me at https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2014/08/noah-paramount-regency-protozoa-2014.html) in that both are films which could have been made considerably shorter (and hence better entertainment) without cutting a word of their scripts if their directors had just paced them faster!