(courtesy IMP Awards)
Though people are apt to embrace the past with its proven ability to soothe with nostalgia and to warm with sweet memories, they are less inclined to wade into its sometimes murky waters when there is an accounting to be made.
Especially when such an accounting lays bare the dark propensity of a people who were in a place of power and authority to exploit, use and abuse with deadly, violent intent, leaving those they preyed upon to suffer scarring, great loss and cultural degradation.
In those instances, and they are sadly accusingly numerous in the history of humanity, people shrink from the exposing light but that is why masterful films like Martin Scorsese’s Flowers of the Killer Moon, based on the non-fiction book of the same name by David Grann, are so necessary.
This sprawling three-and-a-half hour epic lays bare the truth of a terrible period in American, and specifically Oklahoman history, when a significant number of members of the Osage tribe of Native Americans were murdered without any investigation by the relevant authorities, all of whom were complicit in one way or another with an establishment dedicated to white supremacy and the pushing down of everyone else including the country’s First Nations.
The irony here is that the Osage in the 1920s when the murders took place were incredibly wealthy because of these very policies; the government had pushed them across the country through states like Arkansas and Missouri, far from their ancestral lands, until they ended up on land they purchased in Oklahoma where they hoped they would be left alone at last.
The land they ended up on wasn’t seen as worth anything much until one day Osage struck oil, precipitating a change in fortune so seismic that the tribe went from poverty-stricken refugees in their own land to people so wealthy they had the highest per capita of anyone in the world at that time.
This reversal of fortune did not naturally sit well with the powers that be, and while the government found ways to encircle the Osage with conservatorships and other restrictive practices that further diminished already cut down autonomy, grifters and criminals created a putridly thriving industry in taking as much money from the Osage as they possibly could.
These efforts ranged from grave robbing of the ornate intricate jewellery rich with cultural meaning through to over inflated billing for every service imaginable and even marrying Osage for their money.
That alone is reprehensibly predatory but in Flowers of the Killer Moon it is depicted as a crime for which no one paid, and which was only investigated by the Bureau of Investigation (BOI), the forerunner of the FBI, when the body count became too great to ignore.
While the eventual investigation by the BOI, led by a resolute and calmly determined Tom White (Jesse Plemons) does succeed in bringing the central figure in the vast conspiracy to defraud and murder the Osage, William King Hale (Robert De Niro in a jocular guise that disguises a ruthlessly and brutalistically cold heart) to justice, and puts his nephew Ernest (Leonardo DiCaprio in nuanced and muted but powerfully arresting form), who sits at the heart of the film, behind bars, it is interestingly not the narrative or emotional heart of this immensely impressive film.
What stands at its heart, and which is realised with a great deal of cultural sensitivity that speaks of an approach to making Flowers of the Killer Moon that was not even remotely tokenistic in nature, is the way in which it damns, piece by accusatory piece, the way in which white settlers not only stole the land from its Native inhabitants but then proceeded to exploit them still further in violently degrading ways once they had succeeded in corralling to somewhere they perceived as out of the way and useless.
The fact that this land ended up being the source of great wealth to the Osage notwithstanding, what really strikes you is the way in which Flowers of the Killer Moon, which places Osage cultural practices from naming rites to funeral practices front and centre along with its language, much of which is not translated since one thing the film isn’t interested in is making us comfortable – we are meant to feel lost and thrown and distressed and the movie does try to lessen that impact in any way – points a finger at everyone of us who witnesses racism and does nothing to stand against it.
While there are people like Hale and his nephew Ernest who are wildly and cold-bloodedly complicit in the crimes against the Osage to the point where Ernest even poisons his own wife, Mollie (Lily Gladstone who is phenomenally good, even when her character undergoes travesty upon tragedy), a “full-blood” Osage whose money is the sole focus of Ernest’s moronically cold and cruel efforts, there are also a great many people who willingly allow themselves to be used and nothing to sop the exploitation of the tribe. (You get the feeling he does love Mollie in his own twisted way but it’s obscured by a greed that will do whatever is needed to enrich himself, all while rationalising some grievously awful acts.
Possessed of a quiet, purposeful intensity that juxtaposes terrible murders against the quiet of various scenes of everyday life – at no point is the violence gratuitous; rather it always serves as an an exclamation point to the way in which the veil of normalcy hides a dark and bloody underbelly which everyone knows is there but which no one in power moves to stop even as the Osage plead for help – Flowers of the Killer Moon lets no one off the hook, essentially saying that when we look at the past, all of us have a responsibility not to shrink from its lessons but to robustly ask ourself why this was able to happen at all.
Here were a proud and resolute people reduced to nothing and then elevated by the very thing white people worshipped above all else, power, money and success, who were diminished again and again by a system that turned a blind eye to evil piled upon evil and by people who claimed to be friends who were nothing of the sort.
Flowers of the Killer Moon is one of the greatest films you will likely ever see because not only is its narrative epic and expansively intense, held up by brilliant performances by Gladstone, De Niro and DiCaprio and by a willingness to take the time it needs to tell its story properly and with appropriately damning impact, but it delivers its message with power and conviction, threading it through a story that asks every person in the ruling elite, and yes if you’re white in a country like America (or Australia, that is exactly what you are, to look at the past, learn and interrogate its lessons and to everything in our power to never let anything like this happen again.