Leonardo DiCaprio’s Killers Of The Flower Moon: Hollywood acknowledges White atrocities on Native Americans

Cast: Leonardo DiCaprio, Robert De Niro, Lily Gladstone, Jesse Plemons, Brendan Fraser

Director: Martin Scorsese

You know, you got a nice colour of skin. What colour would you say that is?” Leonardo DiCaprio as the White protagonist Ernest Burkhart asks Mollie, a Native American woman he’ll eventually marry, in Martin Scorsese’s new film, Killers Of The Flower Moon. “My colour,” replies Mollie, played to perfection by Lily Gladstone. You note the assertion of pride in the words as she lightly stresses on “my” preceding “colour”. It is a pride that Hollywood rarely accorded to the Native American identity, for long generically labelled as ‘Red Indian’.

With time, Hollywood, in a reflection of the American society it primarily caters to and also represents, has entered a phase where the industry wants to acknowledge the wrongs inflicted in real life by the nation’s forefathers, particularly the White entitled male, upon other communities. A laudable mission to promote inclusivity has lately focused on stories of Blaxploitation, besides the necessity to empower women, and address marginalised sexualities and gender identities. In all this, however, focus on the indigenous American has never seemed a priority for big studio film productions, although there have been a few brilliant series including Basketball Or Nothing (2019), Dark Winds (2022), Mohawk Girls (2014) and Reservation Dogs (2021-2022).

Killers Of The Flower Moon is a remarkable big screen venture, in this context. Scorsese’s period Western drama narrates a blood-soaked true story that begins in 1921 and spans around five years, during which a wealthy White man named William Hale (Robert De Niro) had many Native Americans killed in Osage County, Oklahoma, in order to wrest their oil-rich land. Scorsese’s screenplay, co-written with Eric Roth, is based on journalist David Grann’s 2017 non-fiction book, Killers Of The Flower Moon: The Osage Murders And The Birth Of The FBI.

Hollywood screenplays have featured Native American characters in the past, since the time of DW Griffith made The Red Man And The Child in 1908. The silent era film is believed to have kickstarted the projection of the White man as a being superior to the Native American. Glorified period fiction wrongly gets accepted as true history and clichés depicted becomes culture prototypes in the minds of the larger audience. Over time, the Native American on the Hollywood screen largely got stereotyped either as marauding killers with a fetish for collecting scalps of White men, or other-worldly healers with magical powers and detached from modern civilisation. Scorsese’s 206-minute opus moves beyond such clichés to acknowledge the human face of a people whose legacy and culture were left in shambles owing to atrocities committed by the powerful White that included racism, greed, exploitation and widespread killings. The film is, as DiCaprio described its significance from the White viewpoint at Cannes 2023, “a reckoning with our past”.

Killers Of The Flower Moon is unlike most Hollywood productions featuring Native American characters that way. The film is structured to serve as an apology for the ills that the White American inflicted upon the indigenous people who originally belonged to the land. For this reason, Scorsese and Roth’s screenplay restructures the narrative of Grann’s book without losing the essence of its storyline. Grann’s written work tells the horrific story from the perspective of investigating officer Tom White, sent to Osage County to investigate the series of killings. The film on the other hand looks at incidents from the perspective of the Osage people, particularly Mollie.

DiCaprio’s opinion that the film is a reckoning with the American past finds resonance in his choice of role, too. The actor was originally slated to play the investigating officer Tom White but ultimately settled for Ernest Burkhart, the weak-willed nephew of William Hale. Unlike Tom White, eventually played by Jessie Plemons, who intrepidly goes about probing for clues against the mighty William Hale in the latter’s home turf, there is no heroism about DiCaprio’s Ernest, nor does the role elicit much of audience sympathy. Ernest is manipulated into marrying the wealthy Osage woman Mollie by his uncle Hale, and soon sucked into Hale’s deadly schemes.

The world of Ernest, Mollie and William Hale comes alive through Scorsese’s signature slant at provocative storytelling. It is a violent world, typically brimming with the sort of angst you have come to expect from the master filmmaker. The treatment reminds of Gangs Of New York or The Irishman. Only, while these films looked at America as a White civilisation from the perspective of Irish immigrants, Killers Of The Flower Moon makes its audience realise America was a civilisation long before the Whites arrived. “The Osage are the finest, wealthiest and the most beautiful people on Earth,” the ruthless Hale cannot help but concede.

If Ernest is a weakling, Scorsese’s imagination of William Hale is aptly that of a monster. History has it that Hale was ultimately convicted in 1929 and sentenced to life in prison (he was, however, released on parole in 1947). In the film, Everett Waller as the tribesman Paul Red Eagle says Hale and his ilk are “like buzzards circling our people”, ready to swoop for the kill at the opportune moment. De Niro, a regular collaborator with Scorsese, has traditionally excelled in portraying the sinister in the filmmaker’s works, from the time he played the titular role in the 1976 neo-noir thriller Taxi Driver to as recently as The Irishman in 2019, where he brought to life the real-life hitman Frank Sheeran.

The film, though is not just about acknowledging the White man’s foibles and crimes against the Native American. What makes Killers Of The Flower Moon interesting is also the way Scorsese invests depth and drama in the female characters. Gladstone’s Mollie is easily the most impressively written and acted-out character of the film. The actress hails from an ethnically mixed lineage — her father, an indigenous American, is part-Nez Perce and part-Blackfeet, while her mother is Dutch-Cajun — and she adds an understated intensity to her character. Also impressive is Cara Jade Myers as Mollie’s sister Anna, adding a spot of chaos to the screenplay.

Actresses as Gladstone and Myers will perhaps still have to wait for their turn in Hollywood despite revealing talent. Casting is becoming more inclusive, with more lead roles accorded to the ethnically diverse — particularly the Blacks — but the scene hasn’t changed much for Native American actors. A Hollywood Diversity Report of 2022 shows Native Americans represent less than one per cent of lead roles in broadcast, cable, and digital scripted shows, and around two per cent of overall acting roles in those categories. Scorsese’s Killers Of The Flower Moon could mark the start of a change on and off the screen.

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