"Killers of the Flower Moon": The Violence of Complacency

Scorsese's epic examines how a failure to recognize tragedy sanctions the repetition of it

WARNING: This review contains spoilers 

It has been weeks since I first watched Killers of the Flower Moon, and I still struggle to find the words to properly capture the film. Martin Scorsese’s latest is a massive blow to the mind and body, a film that leaves you with your heart aching and the wind knocked out of you. It is Scorsese at his most desperate, grief-stricken, and hopeless — a departure from the social context in which he finds himself most comfortable, but nonetheless a steady invigoration of the themes he has always played with.

Scorsese’s filmmaking has always considered the dynamics required in the American search for capital: monetary, social, or cultural. America’s systems create life for those who disseminate the violence necessary to maintain them, but that life is short-lived, and gratification one receives comes at the expense of turning a blind-eye to indescribable pain. Scorsese’s early work focuses on the life that power grants — “As far back as I can remember, I’ve always wanted to become a gangster” — but his later work is far more concerned with the life that it takes. 

Killers of the Flower Moon goes right to the source of the crime that constitutes American history as it follows the murders unfolding in the Osage community after oil is discovered on their land. The story is generally seen through the eyes of Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio), a white opportunist who, after serving in WWI, finds employment with his uncle William Hale (Robert DeNiro). Hale encourages Burkhart to marry an Osage woman, Mollie Kyle (Lily Gladstone), in order to obtain access to her family’s headrights. Posing as benefactors to the Osage nation, Hale and Burkhart are able to bring about the deaths of many wealthy Osage people, in order to have their white spouses inherit their headrights and to methodically establish white sovereignty over oil capital. 

Though Killers of the Flower Moon focuses on Burkhart, it confronts the asymmetric structure universally inherent in the American search for capital — institutionalized wealth must always come at the cost of human sacrifice, and capitalism designates a person’s worthiness of ownership based on caste, class, and racial stratification. Burkhart does not simply want wealth for himself — his relentless quest for capital hinges on the deep-seated belief that the Osage are inherently undeserving of it. Any dimensions of institutionalized justice, as demonstrated by the FBI involvement, will not accomplish anything meaningful because they exist within this structure and therefore cannot undo it. 

It is easy to mischaracterize Scorsese’s work by claiming that his focus on embodiments of American disease like Burkhart suggest a glorification and endorsement of them. But his choice to center the antagonist of a story serves to question the complacency of the audience in the process as they watch evil reveal itself. The reality of evil is not always explicit — it is welcoming, elusive, and convincing. Evil takes hold because it gains trust. 

By questioning complacency, Killers of the Flower Moon examines how failing to come face to face with tragedy inadvertently sanctions the repetition of it. A complex moral question targeted at a non-Osage audience that does not use the Osage nation as an anthropological tool to examine the guilt of white Americans is a tricky proposition, but Scorsese tackles the task expertly. 

Strikingly, Scorsese chooses to implicate himself as one of the responsible parties for this complacency. In a brief epilogue, a 1950s true crime radio show provides endnotes for each of the characters. Scorsese himself reads Mollie’s obituary, a soliloquy that contains no mention of the Osage murders and reduces her life to incomplete fiction. 

By reading these words, he is no longer simply illuminating the violence inherent in power structures. As one of the preeminent American storytellers, he is acknowledging his complacency in rationalizing this violence by a collective omission of the extent of genocidal horror. 

Because Killers of the Flower Moon is about a recognition of responsibility rather than an assignment of guilt, it demands an active shift in the way we tell stories. Guilt is a passive and selfish emotion, and focusing on it would arguably turn the Osage murders into a tool to elucidate the white moral conscience, but demonstrating responsibility forces us to sit with lives lived and lives cut short. 

Lily Gladstone’s brilliant performance is the key factor that elevates Killers of the Flower Moon. Gladstone tells a story with her gaze alone, as she maintains her dignity and agency in a story that examines how humanity was forcibly stripped from the Osage. The unbearable pain Mollie experiences posits that the right to continued existence is not equal to the right of survival, which requires access to visibility, to space, and the ability to celebrate life in all of its complexities.

It is in this pain that Killers of the Flower Moon makes its final plea. Following the epilogue, we are left with the image of an Osage drum circle. We are slowly withdrawn from the heart of evil into which we have just been plunged, leaving us with an image of survival that looks us right in the eye. It shows us the generations that have lived through this pain, acknowledges responsibility for complacency, and passes the torch with the demand that future storytellers do the same.

OVERALL SCORE: 10/10

Killers of the Flower Moon was released on October 27 and is currently in US theaters and streaming on demand.