Guilt, Redemption, and Killers: ‘Flower Moon’ Continues Scorsese’s Story

“Margie Bernhart got up and said… what you must remember is, yes there were villains and good guys and bad guys, but Molly and Earnest were in love… so then you’re investigating love. Love. Trust. Betrayal. Then I realized, that’s the story.”

Martin Scorsese, director of Killers of the Flower Moon

—

“When someone conspires to murder your entire family, that’s not love… but this film wasn’t made for an Osage audience it was made for everyone not Osage.”

Christopher Cote, Osage language consultant for Killers of the Flower Moon.

—

“A person should not be instructed that he or she must feel guilt, anguish, or other forms of psychological distress for actions, in which he or she played no part, committed in the past by other members of the same race or sex.”

Florida’s Stop W.O.K.E. Act

Killers of the Flower Moon is a nuanced film that arrives in a headstrong county.  It’s based on David Grann’s book of the same name, a procedural telling of a string of murders on the Osage reservation in 1920s Oklahoma.

The victims were members of the tribe forced onto a barren parcel of land that—unbeknownst to everyone at the time—happened to sit on oil deposits. Once discovered, the Osage became the the wealthiest people in the United States and soon found out that Manifest Destiny applied to oil money, too.

Grann’s book is a palpitating whodunnit that documents the slayings and the federal investigation that gradually uncovered the depths of the conspiracy that underwrote them. Scorsese and screenwriter Eric Roth initially took a similar approach with the screenplay, but it wasn’t clicking for them or star Leonardo DiCaprio who was initially tabbed to play Tom White, the former Texas Ranger who led the nascent F.B.I.’s investigation.

That version of the script might be what Cote was looking for—a documentation of an American tragedy that, like the Tulsa Massacre that occurred concurrently, was whitewashed from history.

But this is where Cote’s words are insightful. Scorsese and Co. weren’t making a movie for an Osage audience. Or perhaps more to the point, they aren’t Osage.

The writer, director, and star of the film wanted to explore how something like this could happen. How could these white men systematically gained the trust of the Osage in order to marry them, murder them, and steal their money.

Martin Scorsese is Guilty

...If I'm going to do penance at

all, I'll do it the way I think it

would be done...by me, that

is...according to my own trespasses.

You know what I mean.

Charlie, Mean Streets

As fitting for a Catholic boy who once considered the priesthood, duality and sinfulness has been themes in Scorsese’s films since the beginning. Mean Streets, his breakout, follows Charlie, an Italian American torn between his Catholic faith and earning a living working for his gangster uncle. He believes he’ll find redemption by saving his friend Johnny Boy from his self-destructive tendencies.  His declaration to God early in the film could easily double as a summation of Scorsese’s approach to filmmaking:

“You don't make up for your sins in church. You do it in the streets. You do it at home. The rest is bullshit and you know it.”

Scorsese grew up in the Lower East Side of New York in a heavily Sicilian neighborhood still run in the manner of the Old Country—a capo system that would settle disputes in lieu of going to the police. Them men in charge were a figures of respect who brought peace and justice to the neighborhood, protectors and friends to young Scorsese. But as Scorsese learned, they had a dark side.

“I grew up with a lot of tough guys. They took care of me, and later, after they died, I found out they were monsters—bloodsuckers, horrible! But they were very sweet to me.”

Through his faith and in his neighborhood, Scorsese saw nuance in the evils men do. In order to gain redemption, man must be redeemed from something. Characters like Charlie, Travis Bickel, Jake LaMotta, Henry Hill, and Sebastian Rodrigues are all men struggling in the carnality of the material world, in need of absolution.

Cowboys and Indians

Scorsese’s second home as a child was the Loews Cinema on Second Street. “The first five or six years of my life, I was mainly in the movie theatre.”

His asthma prohibited him from playing sports, so his father took him the dark palace of light where “cowboy movies” were his favorite and John Wayne his idol.

Seventy years later when it came time for him to depict his own righteous lawman on screen (Tom White, the former Texas Ranger who led the nascent F.B.I.’s investigation into the murders), something wasn’t working.

“He was a good man… not usually the characters I work with.  I could do that but I’m doing what somebody else did. All those films I saw as a teenager and as a young person. There’s so many people who can do that thing, and they have so beautifully, so where the hell am I on this?”

At the same time, he didn’t want to do what some have accused him of doing with Killers of the Flower Moon: make a “woke” film that pandered to the plight of the Osage.

“I didn’t want to present them as victims. They tried that in the late 60s, early 70s revisionism. But all that is is people saying, oh it’s terrible what we did, now lets move on. And they don’t understand how and why things like this happen, how things like this are possible in our human nature.”

Is That Love?

Scorsese abandoned making the lawman the hero of the story after a conversation with DiCaprio.

“We were facing the issue of how to direct him as Tom White… and he says to me where’s the heart of the movie? And I said the heart of the movie is her and him.”

‘Her and him' being Ernest and Molly Berkhart, portrayed by DiCaprio and Lily Gladstone, respectively. The film begins with Ernest just returned from the war in Europe to find work with his uncle, William “King” Hale, local cattle and the unofficial mayor of Gray Horse, one of four towns the founded by the Osage on their reservation. Here, white men are economically subservient to the oil-rich Osage, serving as chauffeurs for and scrambling to sell their wares to the native owners of the land.

But that surface subservience concealed a sinister plot enabled by a bill passed by Congress in 1921. It required the Osage to pass a measure of competency proving they could manage their funds responsibly. In the town of Gray Horse, men like William Hale, Ernest’s uncle, exploited the law to gain guardianship of the Osage and swindle them out of their money.

That swindle involved Hale encouraging Ernest to marry Molly, an full-blooded Osage, then enlisting him to plot the murders of her sisters so that their white husbands would inherit their oil wealth.

In the film, Ernest is a dim charmer. Perhaps not unlike those gangsters on the Lower East Side, he deludes himself into believing that if he loves him family, if he loves his wife, he was a good person. Or at least good enough.  Scorsese explores his (limited) psyche and the paradoxical love his Molly kept for him even when it became clear that, yeah, he really might be poisoning her.

Ernest is not portrayed as a good man. In fact, a scene in which he casually asks an acquaintance to kill his sister- and brother-in-law is as clear-cut a depiction of evil as Scorsese has put on screen.

But what’s daring—and perhaps controversial—about the film is its portrayal of love and evil co-existing so closely. It’s a testament to Scorsese, Roth, DiCaprio, and Gladstone that we believe Ernest of Molly did love each other, as Ernest’s descendent Maggie claimed.

The two leads have real chemistry, with Gladstone the rare actor who can bend DiCaprio to her will. Roth and Scorsese ground their relationship in real affection that remains throughout the film thanks to the delusions of both parties. If willful ignorance is not love, what is?

Release, Reaction, and Redemption

Killers of the Flower Moon was released in October to near-universal acclaim from critics and a somewhat surprisingly enthusiastic audience scores, given it’s three-and-a-half-hour runtime and the fact that, while there are plenty of murders, none are scored by the Stones.

The ‘near’ qualifier is necessary because of reviews like Anthony Lane’s in The New Yorker, who questions the decision to focus on Ernest over Tom White by writing:

“Huh? This dumb dolt, with bran for brains? Why should he take center stage?”

Kyle Smith of the Wall Street Journal also wishes DiCaprio were in the Tom White role so the film could take on a more traditional cops-and-robbers approach:

“It makes no sense for Mr. DiCaprio to seek out the soul of this despicable fellow, and a better film would have had him switch roles with Jesse Plemons… Mr. Plemons has a gift for playing two-faced creeps and would have given the audience a rooting interest in witnessing Ernest’s comeuppance.”

Both seem to want the John Wayne version of Killers of the Flower Moon, where bad things happen but good wins out in the end. In this telling, both the good and the bad are represented by white men. A story like that could be read, on a macro level, as saying, ‘sure, we did some bad things during the birth of our nation, but we’re good now.’

That kind of atonement seemingly falls flat to the altar boy in Scorsese. He doesn’t deliver a ‘comeuppance moment’ because to so would insert a satisfactory element into a story that doesn’t deserve one.

When we look at the founding of our nation and the sins that allowed us to swiftly ascend as a world power—the southern plantation system run on slave labor and the Western expansion fueled by the killing and displacement of indigenous peoples who had lived on this land for millennia—there is and was no comeuppance. Just the aftermath and a struggle to define ourselves as a nation, especially now that the John Wayne myth has faded and our country struggles to find its defining heroes.

A hero is someone who, by definition, navigates obstacles both externally and, especially, internally to become a better person. Scorsese dropping a 100-year-old American tragedy in our laps and our reactions to it have shown us that, as a country, we have plenty of both to overcome. That's a heroic act if you ask me.