Watching Killers of the Flower Moon? Here’s what to know

Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon, a three-and-a-half-hour historical film, centers on a wave of brutal murders against members of the Osage Nation, a Native American tribe based in northeast Oklahoma. As depicted in the movie, a great number of these murders were of Osage women, many of whom were married to white settlers, and all of whom were killed in a bid to obtain the rights to their land.

The film is founded upon a real-life investigation by journalist David Grann, who examined dozens of murders of Osage people that took place in the 1910s to 1930s during a time that became known as the Reign of Terror. The Osage were oil-rich, but were barred from using their own money, and Grann concluded that this wave of violence was the result of an expansive conspiracy of the Osage’s white financial “guardians.”

Growing up, Welana Queton never talked about the Reign of Terror with outsiders. As a young girl, Queton learned about the protracted murder spree which saw the deaths of more than 60 Osage Natives between 1918 and 1931, but she says the murders were “only talked about amongst your immediate family; it never was talked about outside of those circles.” Now, in 2023, the story is being told on the widest stage possible with some of the biggest names in Hollywood.

Queton is one of many Osage citizens who worked as an extra on Killers of the Flower Moon. The movie raises questions about who can tell a story like this, but that doesn’t mean it’s equipped to answer them. I can imagine, for Osage people, it must feel good to have their story on film. I can imagine if someone were to make a movie about my great-great-grandfather Quanah Parker, a well-known warrior and leader of one of my tribes, the Comanches, that I’d be at least interested in seeing how that story was portrayed. I could understand how one might want the story to come out simply because it hadn’t been acknowledged for far too long.

To paraphrase Soren Kierkegaard: A movie must be watched forward, but the best movies beg to be understood backward. Killers of the Flower Moon, Martin Scorsese’s latest epic, is such a movie. What he’s really doing isn’t evident until the film’s very final moments. The last scenes are a rhetorical gesture calculated to knock us flat.

This is not unusual for Scorsese throughout his career — people have argued about the ending of Taxi Driver for longer than I’ve been alive — but something’s been going on with him in the last decade or so. The last few shots of movies like Silence and The Irishman are revelatory filters for the hours of drama that have just transpired. Scorsese has arguably been the greatest living American filmmaker for a long time, but his late work is almost painfully reflective, introspective in a way that invites viewers to look inside themselves, if they’re willing.

The neighborhood dogs had all begun to die, and that was why Rita Smith’s husband was sure they’d be next.

Rita was one of the few remaining members of the Osage Nation following nearly a century of brutal displacement. Throughout the 19th century, the government repeatedly forced the Osage to relocate from their current lands in Kansas to, finally, a much smaller, desolate reservation in northern Oklahoma. With the discovery of oil on Osage land in the late 1890s, however, the 2,229 tribe members who were left suddenly came into tremendous amounts of personal wealth, and prosperity finally seemed to be once more within the community’s grasp. But now, a ring of unknown murderers had begun to target members of the tribe — including Rita’s family.

There are many ways to tell a story, especially one that really happened, and this fact has lately tugged at Martin Scorsese’s mind. In movies like The Irishman and The Wolf of Wall Street, he carefully remolds his protagonists’ true stories — or at least, they say they’re true — into a new angle on their tales, subtly repositioning the men at their center (a mob hitman, a Wall Street gangster) to reveal new angles and undermine their self-aggrandizement. The results are revelatory portraits of ego and self-delusion, unpacked by a filmmaker who’s plenty familiar with those traits. How you tell a story determines what it’s about — far more than the facts themselves.

Killers of the Flower Moon, Scorsese’s newest epic, is based on an exceptionally well-told nonfiction book by the journalist David Grann. The book’s narrative structure is built into the subtitle: “The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI.” Much of the book, indeed, centers on the crime and the newly formed FBI’s investigation, unpacking the origins of the bureau and the men who conducted the investigation along with the perpetrators and the victims. It’s effective storytelling, history coupled with mystery.