Against this background, Martin Scorsese’s new film, with a running time of 206 minutes, appears to be very lush Killer of the Flower Moon almost like a journey back in time to the early history of fossil capitalism, although of course something completely different is the focus of the real story. In 1870, after losing their ancestral land to white settlers, the Osage tribe purchased an area of around 5,700 square kilometers near the border with Canada as a new settlement area at the ridiculous price of $1.90 per hectare and settled there. In 1897, oil was discovered in this very area, making the Osage rich people from one day to the next.
Accordingly, the envy of their white fellow citizens quickly set in, which quickly resulted in accusations that the Osage were unable to deal with their sudden wealth. So in 1921, the U.S. Congress passed a law requiring courts to appoint a guardian for every Osage and anyone who was at least half-descended. This was then supposed to manage their royalties and financial affairs until they had proven their “maturity”. The guardians were chosen and named by the courts from white lawyers or businessmen living locally. A system of oppression and control that opened the door to criminal abuse of loopholes for personal gain. As a result of this legislation, there were at least sixty violent murders of Osage members up to 1925, all of which were aimed at gaining possession of the mining rights.
The journalist David Grann worked on this other inglorious chapter of American history in the non-fiction book Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI which was published in 2017. Martin Scorsese ultimately took over the adaptation of the material for the screen together with Eric Roth. And so it turns out Killers of the Flower Moon a film that makes a great effort to achieve historical accuracy, which repeatedly incorporates historical archive material and thus paints an accurate picture of that time.
In addition, the film is reminiscent of Scorsese’s great works, and not just because of its epic length (Taxi Driver, GoodFellas, Casino). One can certainly see numerous variations of his stories about rise and fall, about greed and power, about powerful men who pull the strings and others who are subordinate to them and who lose all morality under the influence of their mentor.
Leonardo DiCaprio plays Ernest Burkhart, a returnee from World War I who comes to Oklahoma to seek his fortune. His uncle William Hale (Robert De Niro), a rich farmer, gives him a hand and instructs his not exactly bright nephew about the special features of the area, about the wealth of the Osage and how to capitalize on it. Burkhart quickly gains the trust of Osage Mollie (outstanding: Lily Gladstone) and the two eventually marry.
However, deaths in the area were increasing at the time, so Washington sent an investigator (Jesse Plemons) from the newly founded Bureau of Investigation (which later became the FBI) to the area to investigate the background to the murders. At the same time, Ernest comes more and more under his uncle’s influence and is no longer afraid of slowly poisoning his own wife.
Martin Scorsese tells all of this with a lot of sympathy for even the most hideous villains, a good eye, and a lot of empathy for the stark contrasts that culturally clash here. There are repeated passages in the film in which the Osage language is spoken and even Ernest manages to utter a few sentences over the course of the film. And so the film becomes not only a moral history of the USA, but also a meticulously staged period piece, a thriller, a Great American Story, of which Scorsese has already realized so many over the course of his career.
After a running time of more than three hours, which hardly ever allows for lengths, Martin Scorsese finally finds a final and wonderfully tongue-in-cheek volte that almost seems like a charming apology for all the deaths and cruelties that the director caused in the decades of his work audience: “Look, it’s all just entertainment and show, smoke and mirrors and orchestral music, presented to you as a distraction,” he seems to call out to us – and it is to be hoped that this is not the farewell greeting of a great old master .
#Killers #Flower #Moon
