A Southwest town crackles with toxic cowboy culture. A racial minority comes into money after centuries of oppression. Envious and rapacious whites commit vile racist acts. A slew of unsolved murders leads to stalled investigations. Local officials pledge, and fail, to re-establish law and order. The F.B.I. sweeps into action and uncovers an extensive network of corrupt movers and shakers.
Naturally, I’m talking about Martin Scorsese’s adaptation of David Grann’s nonfiction best-seller Killers of the Flower Moon, a major contender for the 2024 Oscars. I’m also describing Damon Lindelof’s HBO mini-series, Watchmen, the sequel to Dave Gibbons and Alan Moore’s blockbuster 1986 graphic novel, which became, in 2020, the first comic-book adaptation to win an Emmy Award for best limited series (along with 10 other Emmys).
Both take place in Oklahoma. That’s a big surprise for audiences who still swear by the hale assembly of cowmen and farmers in the 1943 musical Oklahoma!—“a parliament of man where folks might all behave theirsel’s and act like brothers,” as Todd S. Purdum put it in his book Something Wonderful (2018).
That vision of the state as the folksy essence of America, produced just three years after the demise of the Dust Bowl, in 1940, has survived ravaging tornadoes and the Oklahoma City bombing. Even the funky Indigenous dramedy series Reservation Dogs (2021–23) salutes the enduring fraternal and sororal bonds of Oklahoma natives who merge tribal legacies with American pop culture.
But there’s brotherhood no more in Lindelof’s and Scorsese’s epics. In Watchmen, white mobs destroy the flourishing Black neighborhood of Greenwood and slaughter its inhabitants in the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921. In Killers of the Flower Moon, greedy whites coolly execute men and women of the oil-rich Osage Nation in the post–World War I era. Grann doesn’t mention the Tulsa Race Massacre in his book, but in Scorsese’s movie we see newsreel footage of the aftermath, with Greenwood looking like a war zone. When an explosion rocks an Osage neighborhood, the heroine says, “It’s just like Tulsa.”
Contemporary angst accounts for some of this focus on Oklahoman atrocities. Yet elements of the state’s pop-culture legacy have always been complex and edgy. James Cagney, in the title role of The Oklahoma Kid (1939), says, “The white people steal the land from the Indians…. A measly dollar and 44 cents an acre, price agreed to at the point of a gun.”
Still, in the resilient melting-pot culture of the 30s and 40s, filmmakers and audiences viewed social-political catastrophes as obstacles inevitably surmounted by Truth, Justice, and the American Way. The films of that period have an underlying momentum, a forward push, that feels part of Manifest Destiny. In Killers of the Flower Moon, Scorsese keeps pulling back and saying, “Not so fast.”
Edna Ferber created the pop urtext for the Sooner State in her blockbuster novel Cimarron, the source of the Academy’s 1931 best picture. (A tepid remake bombed in 1960.) Ferber ties the lure of the Oklahoma frontier to Americans’ impatience and love for speed. The roistering hero with the flamboyant name Yancey Cravat establishes a newspaper, The Oklahoma Wigwam, that pillories white plutocrats and champions the Osage against racists and exploiters, especially after oil is tapped on Osage land.
Yancey’s love of adventure and truth-telling scotch his chances for a high-powered political life. His racist, propriety-driven white wife, who runs the newspaper whenever he goes AWOL, tolerates his campaign for equal rights for Indians because his editorials generate headlines nationwide. She gradually accepts their son’s Osage wife as part of a new status quo.
As in Show Boat and Giant, Ferber uses intermarriage—in Cimarron, between Blacks and Osage, and whites and Osage—as a lightning rod for bigotry. Her books lampoon American prejudice, opportunism, conformity, and materialism. The relatively drab and conventional movie version of Cimarron favors romance over iconoclasm. Both high-minded and hammy, it pounds Ferber’s spiky story into that “arc of the moral universe” that supposedly “bends toward justice.” But it doesn’t entirely obscure the democratic vitality at Ferber’s core.
Elements of the state’s pop-culture legacy have always been complex and edgy.
Intermarriage, money, and empire-building mingle once again in Killers of the Flower Moon. Justice? That’s harder to find. White men and women marry and murder Osage spouses to inherit the mineral headrights to their land. Mayhem and mysterious diseases riddle the family of the Osage heroine, Mollie Burkhart (Lily Gladstone), before she begs President Coolidge for help. It arrives in the form of F.B.I. agent Tom White (Jesse Plemons, who commits grand-theft scene-stealing with micro-expressions of discomfort and disbelief).
Mervyn LeRoy’s episodic 1959 feature, The FBI Story (based on Don Whitehead’s book), compressed this saga to a quarter of an hour. Scorsese slices off a piece of it and still stretches it out to 206 minutes. He struggles to contrast the rapidity of American change and calamity with the persistence of Osage mysticism and folkways. With startling beauty and lucidity, Scorsese introduces spirit animals and spirit humans into the narrative. He directs the Osage-centric scenes at different tempi than the ones featuring conspiratorial whites. But the film rarely conjures a satisfying rhythm of its own.
Scorsese’s most successful counterpoint comes early: Gladstone, a deceptively generous performer with a sly intelligence and a wonderful shy smile, pulls off a game of emotional peekaboo with the audience and her husband-to-be, Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio, playing greedy, uxorious, and dumb to comic, and then pathetic, effect). Gladstone’s Mollie isn’t just hard to get—she’s hard for him to understand. She mutters private jokes in Osage and seems to drawl with her face.
The film lurches forward in a dogged sprawl as Scorsese maps the high-society influencers who shield the killers and serve as white “guardians” to the Osage, meting out their money in humiliating ways. When Ernest gets ushered into the assembly of bigwigs who protect the system, the setup recalls the Satanists nudging Mia Farrow’s Rosemary into their enclave at the Dakota in Rosemary’s Baby. It’s both a great shot and an insufficient payoff for three hours of preparation. We’ve had enough of hypocritical bores—we want more of the grungy rogues’ gallery of unreliable assassins who communicate, and shoot, in staccato bursts.
Scorsese and his stars are at their best when they depict a cultural kind of brainwashing. Ernest loves Mollie and their children, but his uncle, William Hale (Robert De Niro), “King of the Osage Hills,” drums into him the idea that the time has passed for the Osage people, as if swindling them and murdering them will position Ernest and himself on the right side of history. De Niro does his damnedest to pick up the movie when it sags. He’s affable yet sharp. He looks like F.D.R. and operates like a slick, fork-tongued version of Oklahoma’s favorite son, the part-Cherokee comedian Will Rogers. De Niro’s Hale beams with the confidence of someone who’s never met a man he didn’t like or couldn’t swindle.
Aside from Mollie and her dying mother, Lizzie Q (Tantoo Cardinal), and her depressive cousin, Henry Roan (William Belleau), few Osage register as fully imagined characters. The final overhead shot of contemporary drummers and dancers promises to capture the Osage Nation’s enduring vitality but ultimately reduces it to an abstraction. There’s no climactic surge of fellow feeling.
Scorsese and co-writer Eric Roth likewise limit the F.B.I. men to a series of vignettes. It wouldn’t denigrate the Osage Nation to celebrate the group of lawmen that handed them some answers about the murders of so many of their tribespeople. Yet only the professional camaraderie of Tom White and the part–Ute Indian agent John Wren (Tatanka Means) provides a pinch of optimism or catharsis. Scorsese doesn’t even give White a proper send-off: the F.B.I. man literally retreats from the camera.
The great Black novelist Ralph Ellison, who grew up in Jim Crow Oklahoma and witnessed the aftermath of the Tulsa Race Massacre, nonetheless strove, as he put it, “to get at the Americanness of all Americans and how the races fit together or don’t fit together; how the ideals of democracy were sometimes attained and very often ignored.” Scorsese fails to achieve that kind of inclusiveness and complexity.
Without supplying a rich, original vision, the movie abjures the artful, exciting information-gathering of Grann’s book—a page-turner that is also a mind-opener, unveiling a vast conspiracy that covers up dozens or hundreds of murders, while fleshing out the Osage so that every killing counts. Scorsese wallows in the tortured feelings of a handful of varmints and victims. In Grann’s case, more is more.
Michael Sragow has been a film critic for Rolling Stone, Salon, and Film Comment, among other publications, and is the author of Victor Fleming: An American Movie Master