Shine On, Flower Moon: Scorsese on the Prairie

Recently I’ve heard from several admirers of David Grann’s 2017 bestseller, Killers of the Flower Moon: the Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI. These readers—including Jack El-Hai, a colleague known for his work as a biographer—are disappointed by Martin Scorsese’s new film adaptation of Grann’s book. They find the film, among other things, too long, too lacking in sympathetic characters, and too focused on one family’s egregious behavior to capture the magnitude of the problem the book confronts.

 I can’t agree with them, partly because I’ve never read Grann’s book. So I don’t exactly know what was lost in the transfer from page to screen. I do know that the filmmakers, deeply aware of the strong emotions invested in this project by indigenous groups, worked hard to avoid any accusation that this was a “white savior” project. They didn’t want this, in other words, to be one of those movies in which white-skinned men of good conscience rescue suffering Native Americans from their oppressors. Scorsese even goes so far as to make an appearance at the beginning of the film, spelling out his intentions. And I’ve heard that star Leonardo DiCaprio, a longtime Scorsese collaborator, made the gutsy decision not to star as an heroic FBI agent but rather to play a not-too-bright World War I veteran whose credulous nature contributes to the disastrous love story at the center of the film version.

 Taking the film as a film—and not as an adaptation of an important book—I have to say that I found it enthralling. Though well over three hours long, it caught me in its grip and wouldn’t let go. Partly this is a matter of a brilliant production design, best appreciated on an IMAX screen. I will long be haunted by the memory of Osage men, having sadly concluded that their traditional way of life is dead and buried, suddenly reveling in a spurting plume of crude oil on their land. And there’s a stunning moment much later in the film when firefighters battling an arson blaze seem like inhabitants of Dante’s Inferno.

 Moviegoers who have watched loads of classic westerns will be enthralled by this apparently authentic look at the Osage people, circa 1920, following the discovery of oil. These Native Americans do not live in wigwams or hogans, nor do they dress in buckskin and wear feathers in their hair. Now wealthy because of their land rights, they speak good English, attend the local Catholic church, and glide into their squalid Oklahoma town in taxis driven by white men. Young women like Mollie may proudly wrap themselves in tribal blankets, but also cover their heads in stylish chapeaux. Played by rising star Lily Gladstone, Mollie is hardly the pathetic little squaw of many a western. Strong and spirited, she has no problem in choosing DiCaprio’s Ernest as her husband, and sharing with him (at least at first) an intense connubial life.

 If Ernest doesn’t seem worthy of his bride, it’s at least partly because of his allegiance to his uncle, played by Scorsese regular Robert De Niro as William King Hale. In his illustrious career, De Niro has played many bad hombres. But there must be a special circle of hell for the man he portrays here. King Hale speaks the Osage language and loudly touts his friendship with the Osage people. But ultimately his eye is on those lucrative Osage land rights, and the devil take the consequences.

 A clever (though controversial) device at the film’s end invites us to put this tragic story into perspective. Bravo, Mr. Scorsese.