Killers of the Flower Moon Review

A critique of Scorsese's new epic and what was transferred and left out from Grann's book on the Osage murders

       Killers of the Flower Moon directed by Martin Scorsese begins with the recitation of a passage from David Grann’s book of the same name, and from which the film was adapted. The passage, that is read aloud by DiCaprio in an interview with Scorsese, is one that explains how the story of the Osage murders is a critical chapter of American history that has long been erased from our nation’s history books. Upon finishing Grann’s book, and glimpsing how prodigious a tragedy the Osage murders were, I was quite struck that I had never encountered the historical account before, in a classroom or a newspaper or a conversation. I discovered that I was not alone in this feeling and sense of surprise, as many friends and family members that I later asked about the murders also had never heard of them - the closest thing to the event that they had studied being the Trail of Tears, or the forced displacement of a massive number of Indigenous people that occurred in the U.S. in the mid-nineteenth century, which is an account unrelated to the Osage murders. Grann’s work, and too Scorsese and his team’s, in excavating such a rich piece of history reawakens in their audiences a curious contemplation of the mysteries of the past and an awareness of how much its truth can redeem us if only we probe deeply enough into its secrets.

       Because I read the book prior to the movie showing, the murder plot wasn’t startling to me upon a second interaction with the material, and I wonder about how the process of evaluating the telling of a story and an adaptation gets in its own way. What I mean is how the manipulation of our attention as we study a work in a certain linear, serial fashion (i.e., book – then – movie as opposed to movie – then - book) affects what components of each work we see and observe, when we do, and the way we do. What might have happened if I had watched the Scorsese film and then read Grann’s book? Is that an improper way to study the adaptation as the book came first? Would I have reacted differently to how the story was told by Grann? Of course, these are important questions for critics to keep in mind as each artist, in this case Grann and Scorsese, deserve equal attention.

       One significant artistic license taken by Scorsese and the writing team on the film was the decision to build out a narrative of a possible scenario surrounding Burkhart’s testimony. The film suggests that Tom White (played by Jesse Plemons) and the rest of the Bureau of Investigation team bribed Burkhart to testify (so that they would have sufficient ground to convict Hale), whereas the book sets forth no such idea; Grann’s book explains Burkhart’s decision to testify as proceeding from his own volition. The fabricated, imagined scenario in the film works well, especially to draw out the dramatic tension at the end between Hale and Burkhart in the prison scene, but it is a noteworthy departure from Grann’s narrative which ennobled White’s investigative team, the predecessor to the contemporary FBI, and veered away from discussion of any potentially controversial compromises taken by the early federal bureau system.

      

In a similar vein, the BOI’s presence in the film was limited, and Tom White’s character did not show up until the very end. In the book, however, discussion of White’s assignment to investigate the Osage murders for the FBI is foregrounded, as is the process of the investigation and the development of the bureau. The subtitle of the book, that is left out of the movie title, is “The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI” – Scorsese did not transfer Grann’s emphasis on the development of the FBI and instead emphasized the great scale of the Osage murders to a degree that Grann did not. The film starts with a voiceover by Mollie Burkhart, Lily Gladstone’s character, mentioning a series of Osage deaths that were separate from Mollie’s family; Grann’s narrative mostly left these out and focused strictly on the murder plot carried out among Mollie and her sisters. I think it was very effective for Scorsese to show the magnitude of these deaths as the murders were akin to a genocide, and somehow, unfortunately, a reader of Grann’s book could miss out on drawing that comparison of the Osage murders to a genocide.

       I thought the film did exceptionally well with certain cinematography choices. The opening establishing shots and the aerial shots sprinkled throughout were powerful in conveying the particular landscape of the narrative world that may have otherwise been difficult to visualize, especially for someone unfamiliar with the territory. For instance, Grann writes:

“When the undercover operative (who was pretending to be an insurance salesman) told her that he was looking to buy a house in the vicinity, she mentioned that William Hale ‘controlled everything’ in these parts.” (157)

The role of Hale’s character in both the narrative of the book and the film was monstrous and the establishing shot of the William Hale cattle ranch in Osage country is very moving and serves as a dramatic underscore to the picture of Hale’s character and dominance in the Osage community, a detail that has a ripple effect on the viewer’s understanding of the characters that surround him in the story, especially Ernest Burkhart.

       I found the film overly graphic, and while I understood that the gore was all part of a concerted effort to pay proper respect to the horror that was the Osage murders, I wonder if more delicate and creative ways to tell without showing it, through direct onscreen violence, would have made the story more impactful and memorable. I did find it compelling that neither the book nor the film offers a conclusive stance on whether Burkhart knew that he was poisoning Mollie. Grann writes:

”Burkhart never admitted having any knowledge that Mollie was being poisoned. Perhaps this was the one sin he couldn’t bear to admit. Or perhaps Hale had not trusted him to kill his own wife.” (192)

In the film, the final exchange between Mollie and Ernest, when she asks him directly what was in her medicine, is left as a mystery. This final note works well as Scorsese properly imbues the history of the Osage murders with an air of mystery – the mystery of why the Osage were left out of America’s history, as much as the mystery of what we still don’t know about the truth of the atrocities committed on American soil against Indigenous people.