Movie Review: Killers of the Flower Moon!

My eyes were glued to the big screen every minute of this very interesting film 'Killers of the Flower Moon', masterpiece of director Martin Scorcese. I didn't even take a toilet break, even though the movie is almost three and a half hours long. I hardly took a breath, or blinked my eyes, for fear of missing something important in the story. 'Yes – this film is so enthralling.

The film is based on the popular book 'Killers of the Flower Moon', written in 2017 by journalist David Grann. The book tells the true story of a white businessman and self-proclaimed "true friend" of the Osage Nation (a native tribe). The tribe became rich when oil was discovered on their reservation. The scheme devised by some white men was to marry landowners and then kill them to get their estates. Women were the owners for the most part, as the Osage tribe was a matriarchal one. The story focuses on one native family – the mother (played by Tantoo Cardinal as Lizzie Q) and her four daughters, and what happens to them, especially one daughter who is not yet married.

There are three main characters in this film – Robert de Niro as William Hale, Leonardo diCaprio as Hale's nephew, Ernest Burkhart, and Lily Gladstone as Mollie Kyle – Burkhart's wife. All three give an excellent performance, and in my opinion, Lily Gladstone is on a par with de Niro and diCaprio. Ernest Burkhart is a dullard, and Hale cleverly exploits him, exerting his influence on him strongly. Mollie meets Ernest, her handsome taxi driver, and they fall in love. Therefore, it was not difficult for Hale to convince Ernest to marry Mollie. One by one, her mother and sisters die so that only Mollie is left alive.

Hale then plans to kill Mollie Kyle, and get her estate for his own family through Ernest. There is a twist in the story because Ernest and Mollie are in love, and the relationship between them is central to the story. I will not tell you more about this story now, but you will see the rotten corruption that the Americans, and especially the farmer Hale, played on the natives in the twenties in the past century, through the lens of this horrible story.

Gladstone's opinion

Lily Gladstone (Mollie in the film) has aboriginal blood, so her opinion about the film is very interesting.

“I struggle to think of another film that has been so true to indigenous women. I love my sisters in the film, and they are like family to me,” said Lily.

Mollie's sisters, native actresses Cara Jade Myers as Anna Brown, JaNae Collins as Reta Smith and Jillion Dion as Minnie Smith, are killed for their money.

The scenes with the sisters and their mother speaking their native language together are very powerful. In fact, every scene that shows the Osage language and culture is exciting. Rarely do you see such a realistic representation of the native people in Hollywood.

“Mollie survived but Kyle's three sisters did not. We all know someone, someone in our family, someone in our inner circles, someone we grew up with and we don't know where they are,” Lily said poignantly. With that, they connect the life as shown in the film and the life as it is today, in terms of mistreatment of indigenous people in America.

Conclusion

You can understand this wonderful film on at least two levels. You can take it as it is, that is to say that it features first class actors at work, under the direction of some of the best directors in the world, revealing an interesting story, set in Oklahoma a hundred years ago. It is a tangle of scheming, with love, murder and money as ingredients mixed together to present you with a delicious soup. The audience would be very happy with the film, and that read on it. But another meaning can be superimposed on this original reading, when you recognize that this is not just a work of imagination, but a work based on bitter truth. That is that there was racial and sexual discrimination against the indigenous people, and their lives were of little value. With that background, it was easy for greedy and immoral Americans to kill indigenous women to steal their money. This corruption was widespread, and did not stop until an FBI detective, Tom White (played by Jesse Plemons), came to investigate the murders.

The film steers the light towards the situation of the indigenous people in their own country, almost a hundred years ago. And it raises this question: are the conditions forindigenous people better now than they were then? Unfortunately, that question is not easy to answer! But perhaps, with this film, this important question will be asked more often to the appropriate authorities.

Bottom line: Don't hesitate to see this movie as soon as possible!

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