Question: Is the story of the heart-wrenching, absolutely diabolical history of the white man preying upon the Osage Tribe able to withstand the corporate machinations–that are probably an outgrowth of the very sociopathic group-think behavior at the center of this event in the first place–attempting to bring it to film?
Spoiler Alert: No.
I like to see films, plays, exhibits, etc, without any expectations. I purposely try and shield myself from any marketing or pr campaigns or general here-say. I just want to experience the thing for itself and see how I feel. But avoiding expectations are tricky these days. You can hardly go into anything without first being fed what it’s about, how you’re going to feel about it, and what the key takeaways are. There’s just too much at stake for corporate art, or anything really, these days to leave anything to chance. In this instance, I was pretty successful. I knew only broad strokes of the story and the film; when a friend mentioned that it was three and half hours long, even that was a surprise.
I hunkered down for my first film in a theatre in quite a while. But after surviving the gauntlet of previews, no doubt meant to test my resolve, the first thing that struck me as part of the main attraction was the “Apple” brand icon, a cinematic rendering of the icon, in fact. This made me feel uneasy. I’d watched Apple TV before. All the productions are so similar, in such cute, useful, non-offensive Apple way, that the achievement in making them appear so, is remarkable actually. Apple productions are currently treated like any other device in their arsenal and Killers of the Flower Moon, despite its cast, subject matter, and creative talent, fits this mold.
After the film revealed itself as an Apple Production, I faced another blind side hit to my expectations. There on the screen in a beautiful medium shot, poised and direct to camera, Martin Scorcese himself was speaking to me about the film I was about to see. What the F***, I didn’t actually know what was happening. He was well-lit, comfortable, and very Marlon Perkins introducing Mutual of Omaha’s “Wild Kingdom” or the beginning to Frankenstein. It was just so odd. He basically says, “This is an important story, a tough story for me, and before you jump down my throat, please know, I’ve done my best. And oh yeah, I’m Martin Scorcese, I’ve made a lot of great pictures.” This vibe would portend the comfort, fluidity, and general neither here nor there sentiment that the film finds. Perhaps he was feeling doubt about the material? Or how he handled it?
So while one set of expectations might suggest that the film would be a harrowing tale of one of the most sociopathic genocidal events in the history of the world, the film shuns this prickly and disagreeable reality and instead resides in cinematic comfort zone; one in which Scorcese, and his long time colleagues, De Niro and DiCaprio, can make a picture–an Apple approved picture–and do so without raising too many red flags. Scorcese pleading with us at the beginning was like he was asking for forgiveness; maybe wondering if he did this subject matter justice. But you know, if you have to ask….
Recently the new President of the Museum of Natural History in New York announced that they would be pulling all of the human remains from their exhibits in order to determine where these bones came from and to whom these bodies belonged. Finally complying with a legal ruling 30 years old now, the Museum was taking a stand against presenting anonymous bodies of Native Americans and other enslaved peoples. I’m not sure Killers of of the Flower Moon got the memo. A little harsh, I understand, but while the white characters are also roughly sketched as if with chunks of charcoal, they are photographed beautifully and have space in the story (too much space mostly) to act and be characters. The Osage characters, on the other hand, aren’t just underwritten, they’re photographed with a certain distance and anonymity. Even in the scenes in which the film proudly gives the Osage screen time, sometimes for traditional ceremony and customs, and sometimes for characters in the story, they are presented two-dimensionally; as if they belonged to no one from nowhere.
During a scene with female lead, Osage tribe member, Mollie, played by Lily Gladstone, and Ernest Burkhart, a white man, and her suitor and car driver, played by Leonardo DiCaprio, we get to see what’s not there. She has invited him in for dinner and then a drink of whiskey. Why? We have no idea. What’s at stake except the unexplained tension of a white man being alone with an Osage woman? We have no idea. A storm is rolling in and the rain can be heard outside on the porch and against the windows. Burkhart goes to close the window, but Mollie instructs him to leave it open to let the sound of the storm percolate their beings. He starts talking, and Mollie needs to instruct him to be quiet, so that they can experience the fullness of the storm. They sit at the dinner table experiencing the storm in the quiet, dry, candlelit spot inside the cozy house. This film, Killers of the Flower Moon is kind of like this; the world of the film is a safe and sound, well-lit raindrop, that found refuge from the storm. In fact, if you are watching this film, it’s hard to imagine there’s a storm at all. The storm has no presence physically, and no presence emotionally–despite what the characters are doing and saying. Continually, the film feels like one thing, while telling me another. Talking out of both sides of its mouth one might say.
Picking at this scene a little further, it begins when Burkhart drops Mollie at home as usual. He’s tried to flirt with her once before and in a wink at the audience, they agreed it was pointless but he would keep trying. Mollie’s feelings were best expressed by her comments to her sister in an earlier scene when she calls Burkhart a “coyote”–only interested in her money. This self awareness proves both meaningless and pointless. It’s about as far as the film goes to explore the nature of preying upon the Osage, and Mollie’s statement is apparently without much gravity. When Burkhart drops Mollie off, she gifts him a hat that she would like him to wear. She wants to see him as a cowboy apparently. Then she invites him in for dinner. Why she gave him a gift, and why he was invited in, let alone given dinner and a drink, is not explained, eluded to, or suggested in a way that could be inferred by even the most astute viewer. Mostly, I just felt uncomfortable. It seems in this lawless world, preying white men and Osage women shouldn’t be left alone together. But this tension never really exists either. In fact many “rules” of the world of the film and the historical real world aren’t explained, shown, felt, or defined. This is a story about the systematic disappearance of the Osage people. But in this film they never seem to exist in the first place, which is odd given that this is a film of realistic fiction, a story ripped from the headlines; at least that’s how this film is presented to us…
If you listen to the book’s author, David Grann, he poignantly says (in an Apple News Podcast…Hmmm) that, “…These crimes, what they were, were inheritance schemes. So they required and extraordinary level of intimacy and betrayal.” He goes on to explain that this was a culture of killing where everyone was complicit. I don’t see or feel any of this in this film.
Scorcese’s on-screen “pre-opening” was as off-putting as the actual opening. The film opens on a train filled with Indians (as we will call Native Americans here in keeping with the film. To refer to these people as Native Americans, while more honest and appropriate, feels like it would give the film too much credit). Leonardo DiCaprio is also on the train. He’s the one who looks smarmy and conniving, kind of like Leonardo DiCaprio. It’s a nice shot, not too heavy handed, but pointed and somewhat graceful. But it’s met with a quick “rescue” cut–a cut to escape a scene or moment that didn’t work as planned. Just as DiCaprio seems to set himself up for a cigarette and like that, we are in a crane shot as the train pulls into a western frontier station filled with people acting chaotically. This is the first moment when, if and only if, we could have gotten one ounce of character development, maybe linger on DiCaprio while he lights up? See his POV of the others on the train? Maybe look out the window (as he starts to do when the shot cuts)? Anything that would have allowed us into this character. Who is he? why is he here? What’s his state of mind?
Instead, the opening scene felt like a suburban teenage comedy from the ’80’s, say, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off or Home Alone, where the family getting ready for school and work in the morning is like a clown car fire drill. Shots adhere to only of the most general of communication constructs. After the first ten minutes, I learned that a man played by Leonardo DiCaprio has arrived in a nondescript western town where a lot of people seem to have a lot of energy and few rules of decorum exist.
Leaving the train station scene, DiCaprio is driven somewhere by someone who apparently knows him and knows where they are going. For some reason we settle on an anonymous POV from the car windshield looking over the road for much of the trip. The camera may be in his head but the audience surely is not. Alas, we arrive at a home with a hell of a lot of cattle and we meet Max Cady, I mean, Al Capone, I mean William Hale, played by Robert De Niro. I barely have enough time to judge his age, and mannerism, and ability to move physically (he’s Robert De Niro and he’s 80ish), let alone his speaking in Osage dialect to someone, before he is having an intimate conversation with DiCaprio, playing his nephew Ernest Burkhart. It seems like there was more meat on the bone for these two powerful character (and actor) introductions, but I guess not.
Finally, as we were purposefully confused and exhausted by the opening sequence, the two famous actors get to sit together properly framed in a beautifully lit scene. There’s merit to entering into a scene or a character’s life as late as possible (I just watched a great example of this in Little Fish, an Australian Film from 2005) but when we are asked to somehow process the aimless chaos of what it took to get here and then be in a very formal setting, I think the dialogue and drama needs to be extra particular, in a word, more active. But here it feels like it’s an episode of the actors studio, and I found myself struggling to follow the dramatic stakes of the scene. I get that Hale is trying to determine how much Burkart likes women or entice him in particular to “red” women, and he’s trying to remind everyone of his power by asking to be called “king.” It is clear that we are being promised that Hale will be the string puller and Burkhart the marionette. But the scene feels largely informational without really giving too much information. It’s a little unsettling. I’m still unclear about the dynamics of the place. Who’s doing what and why, and what’s at stake. What role do the cattle play? Hale eludes to the greater merits of cattle versus oil, but this never pans out. Hale gives Burkhart a book on the Osage and says he can learn something. I could have used that.
The disinformation information campaign continues with the next sequence weaving in points of view–historical, and Osage, and of course that of Hale’s. But similar to the opening sequence, the rendering of such events feels a little sloppy. I mean for Scorsese, “sloppy” actually means completely cinematic and thought-out, but in this case just not adding up to much; like loose ends of string that may or may not be part of the same rope and the magician holding them just took the night off.
This contextual sequence includes an introduction to the “unexplained” deaths that is the basis for the film. These images are rendered in cinematic ways that are inorganic to the film, so that it’s hard to care or understand the importance and magnitude and drama of them. They are like shots from a different Scorcese film. This sequence should be important. It’s probably misplaced structurally, but no doubt these images should mean something. They don’t, and this will be proven to me later. The sequence ends abruptly with the Osage dancing in slow motion while being covered in oil from a surprise gusher. This is especially perplexing being on the heels of the images of death but also how it was shot. I could not pinpoint how I was supposed to feel. Was this portending doom? Were they happy? Did they think this was from the Gods? Or did they already know about the oil? If only Marty or someone from Apple could have told me.
Well before you know it, old Burkhart, and I do mean kind of old, as the New York Observer review accurately pointed out, is connected with Mollie. Burkhart courts her with the grace of bludgeoning a stone, and for some reason she responds (see previously described rain storm scene). This pleases Hale and he encourages Burkhart to marry her. So they get married and have a child. This is all part of a complicated, or not so complicated, scheme (it’s really never explained who’s who or what’s what) to inherit the rights to the oil land when the Osage women die. The next part of the scheme, of course, is to kill them. This also occurs without much push back, dramatically or otherwise.
It’s said that the most dramatic question you can answer in film is the “how” (or at least I think that’s said). It is more cinematic and dramatic and interesting than answering the “why.” Mostly this is because you can watch a “how” but you can only explain a “why,” take Riffifi or the Primitive Technology channel on YouTube for example. Killers of the Flower Moon is an entire film about people talking about how they will do something. It’s kind of the worst of both worlds. I wonder if this is Apple’s doing, to, you know, kind of keep things clean and tidy…or if it’s also a comfortable place for Scorcese to exist with a sort of hands-off approach to some confusing material? I mean the Osage are cool and all, but let’s not get in too deep. There were murders, and murders are bad. Let’s leave it at that. I’m not suggesting needing anything graphic, quite the contrary (take Fritz Lang’s M), but any emotional component, any life in the plight of the Osage would have been welcome.
Indeed, perhaps the most important fallacy of this film, and part of the crossroads of American history, in which we find ourselves. Mollie and the Osage people, have almost no voice whatsoever in this film. Ironically(?) or curiously(?), the handful of reviews I’ve looked at on this film all reference what an absolute performance to end all performances, Lily Gladstone gives as Mollie. “She absolutely radiates on the screen…” Talk about imbuing something on something that doesn’t exist….Lily Gladstone looks good on camera and has a sense of grace, don’t get me wrong, but she unfortunately doesn’t have much of a role and is not photographed with any meaningful presence by the director. So the reviews that praise her are seeing something that is not there. Let’s jump back to Al Capone’s film The Untouchables. When Sean Connery is in scenes with Kevin Costner, Connery is able to command the screen. His presence affects the main character. It is his very demeanor and actions that provide insight into the feelings of the main character, and by extension, the audience. This way of showing a character, the way of writing a scene and staging a scene, accentuates the actors portrayal. Here, except for an almost great scene when Mollie refuses to have the doctors administer her the insulin, she has no influence on Burkhart. She has no influence on the film. In fact, none of the Osage have a voice here. As I mentioned in the opening sequences, I don’t know how they feel, or why they are complicit to the white men marrying their women or being around? I’m shown their customs, but I’m not given a chance to appreciate their customs. The essence of the life that is being taken here is invisible, and so when it is taken, it’s easy, and not memorable or impactful. When about an hour or so into the film, the Osage tribe finally get a scene to say, “uh, seems like people are dying a lot,” it does not get the Scorcese treatment. It gets indecisive proscenium camera angles, unflattering framing, and dialogue that feels more like, let’s let the Osage write this themselves. In fact, later, in the same podcast I heard Osage Nation Principal Chief Geoffrey Standing Bear, who had intimate knowledge of the film, praise Scorcese for letting the Osage speak that scene from the heart. It was not written, he added. So I guess, depriving the Osage of a professional writer and a dramatic scene was another gift from the white man? When the film deals with Hale’s great Osage friend, Henry, who turns out is the fleeting character he speaks Osage dialect to in the early scene, Henry is almost always in the background. It feels like his presence is too much for Scorcese’s camera, so he’s better off to be avoided. This frankly goes for most of the Osage characters’ filming. They are either shot bluntly in two dimensions, or they are disappeared somewhere in the nether regions of the frame. This film makes me think of Birth of a Nation or Gone With the Wind. But what the film lacks in overt racism it makes up for with an inability to deal with the material. It lies somewhere in between. In this day and age of social media parroting this film as triumphant, isn’t this just as bad?
I think what we have here is not how to best tell this story, but rather how can this story fit into the actors and scenes and camera angles that Scorcese is comfortable with and Apple has approved of. Take the scene of Hale burning his land for insurance, aside from the arguable irrelevancy of this scene, it becomes something it’s not. Scorcese falls in love with the image heat drenched long lenses, shooting fire to the detriment of anything germane to the story. Or the tracking shot that gracefully moves throughout the Copacabana, I mean, Mollie’s house and all of the inhabitants. I still can’t understand who these people are, why they are together, or the point of this scene, but oy, that camera move, people will surely talk about it. Or the shot of Mollie arriving to confirm the death of Anna as the camera floats through the crowd, where have we seen this move before? All of these shots, I would suggest, are fine, but as applied, they take us out of the actual drama and point of view of the film. Am I feeling Mollie walking through the crowd of onlookers or am I watching onlookers sense when to move for the camera? Look, like I hope I conveyed, this is Scorcese. It’s not like he didn’t think about things and doesn’t know what he’s doing. A POV shot of Mollie walking through town, used a couple times was affective in communicating “white men, white men, everywhere.” But for me the scene of Mollie making Burkhart send the doctors away and Burkhart flipping out at her, was a good example of the tension of the filmmaker and the material. This scene made use of wonderful staging and camera placement and as written, it could have worked. But the dramatic emphasis needed for Burkhart’s outburst wasn’t properly handled and their relationship was left without being defined. Mollie’s angst and fear was interestingly conveyed with her in shadow and Burkhart hovering over her. But all in all the scene was unrefined. It’s like the standard places where the director would shine the light or place an accent mark or point our attention were just left out. This seemed like a crucial scene. The entire film could have turned on it. But I’m left asking, What am I supposed to pay attention to? What’s important here? With which character should I empathize and root for?
Unmercifully the film doesn’t end with the images of the flames or its various incarnations, it continues for another hour or so. Again, ignoring the crucial aspects of the story that was not told to us, we are now asked to sit through an indexing of who did what to whom. As an aside, Brendan Fraser as the defense attorney made me laugh, though he was a little bit hung out to dry for lacking context. But the idea that we were asked to care about the prosecution of these crimes known to be horrible, but in a film in which, well, they didn’t seem that bad, I found objectionable, or at the very least prolonged my trip to the bathroom. But I’m starting to think that Apple must have caved on the runtime as part of the negotiation, thinking a long runtime could seem like “art.”
But the real reason I know this film is unsuccessful, if not just downright offensive, is because of what I was told. Scorcese told me in the preamble that he was unsure of this film. Then he decided to end the film with another self-reflexive schtick; apropos of nothing, an old time radio show. It’s a little unclear if the entire film was meant to be a radio show or if this was just a radio show glued to the previous scene. However, in the end Scorcese appears again. This time delivering us the message that this story was just an actual accounting of real events, and the outcome of justice, or lack thereof (hey, he’s just a filmmaker shining a light on this, we are all complicit), was how this thing wrapped up. But most of all, I listened to my fellow movie goers for the real real…The only scenes that got a reaction in the theatre I was sitting in, were the very Scorcese ones; the ones where De Niro was being De Niro and bit characters where mucking it up for camera in a way that only Joe Pesce could accurately pull off if he was going to shoot Michael Imperioli in the foot, for example. Even though the characters were joking about violence towards the Osage these scenes got the theatre to react and laugh at their stupidity. One character in particular, John Ramsey, gets a lot of screen time and many scenes, and all the while, even he, is just a cardboard cut-out of a character Scorcese once had in a previous film. And when there was a dog left dead on a character’s doorstep as a threat, the crowd let out a gasp. This gasp revealed more emotion cast upon this dog’s life than any of the lives of the dead Osage tribespeople. The Osage people were denied the cinematic treatment afforded a dog in this film. Osage characters were in particular handled in a way that one does when they don’t know how to give any direction to the actors, so they just let them be, with enough rope to hang themselves. I was watching a film about the disappearance of the Osage in a film in which they never had a chance to exist.
Unfortunately, this film in many ways finds itself at the crossroads of many tropes and pitfalls of present day media while it simultaneously grapples with our morally corrupt history. It can easily find a way to light and frame a scene with friendly actors, and sketch caricature with rehashed mise en scene, but ask it to give voice to “the other” and it’s lost.