Opinion: Scorsese’s ‘Killers of the Flower Moon’ does a disservice to its source material

Opinion by Noah Berlatsky

(CNN) — “Killers of the Flower Moon” is about an important topic: a series of horrific murders in the Osage Nation in the 1920s. To convey that gravitas, Martin Scorsese has very self-consciously made an Important Movie. Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro give big, Oscar-eyeing performances. And the runtime is 3 hours and 26 minutes — a marathon apparently designed to bludgeon viewers into submission with meaning.

The heavy-handed approach, unfortunately, tends to squeeze a lot of the nuance and insight out of its source material. David Grann’s thoughtful, painful nonfiction account, which inspired the film, is much more humble in ambition. But for that very reason, it leaves space for a less familiar, and less comforting story about collective, rather than individual; evil; and the petty hatreds, small as life, which enable the accumulation of death.

A finalist for the National Book Award, Grann’s 2017 book is structured more or less as a detective story. The Osage tribe were forced off lands in the Ohio and Mississippi River valleys and settled in supposedly worthless land in Oklahoma. When they discover oil there, however, the Osage people become wealthy. That sets the stage for unscrupulous locals to target many of them for their share of the oil wealth, or “head rights.” Tom White, an agent in the nascent FBI, comes from Washington to investigate deaths that seem to center around the family of Mollie Burkhart. His investigation specifically leads him to Mollie’s husband, Ernest, and Ernest’s uncle, William King Hale, a wealthy community leader and philanthropist.

If that was all there was to the story, it would fit into Hollywood White savior narratives fairly easily, with Tom White as the hero bringing villainous gangsters to justice. But Grann, a staff writer for The New Yorker, very deliberately avoids that route. Instead, the conclusion of his book presents evidence that Hale was far from alone.

Because of racism, the Osage were deemed legally incompetent to handle their own affairs, and forced to get their money only through designated local White guardians. Osage people also had little recourse in the racist court system. This created huge incentives for graft and even for murder.

Hale and Burkhart were caught and sent to prison for a time. But Grann doesn’t believe they were the only killers. Instead, White people cultivated what Grann calls “a culture of murder” involving doctors, judges, sheriffs and virtually everyone at the state level and beyond. Ultimately, various federal officials and Tom White himself were complicit in a system which incentivized the dispossession and brutalization of Osage people, whose wealth was seen as an unacceptable affront by White society.

Grann’s book, with its reliance on a detective genre of singular culprits and courtroom justice, is insufficient to encompass the crime against the Osage. Grann can try to trace the outlines of injustice, but his pages are too small to contain it, or even describe it fully.

Scorsese doesn’t totally abandon those insights. He shows how being forced to go through White guardians to access their money humiliates the Osage and makes them vulnerable. He adds a coda which acknowledges that not every villain in the piece is brought to justice. But he doesn’t really follow up on those threads, or use them to acknowledge the limitations of his own project.

Instead, he defaults to that standard Scorsese genre, the gangster picture. Having cast De Niro as Hale and DiCaprio as Burkhart, the director has committed himself to focusing on the bad guys. And so he does. We’re treated to a lot of De Niro uttering good-natured slick threats as he did in Scorsese’s “Goodfellas.” There’s also a scene with a paddle that more or less consciously evokes one of De Niro’s more famous set pieces with a baseball bat in “The Untouchables.” (This sequence is very much not in the book.)

DiCaprio gets the most screentime in a role that again has precedent in Scorsese’s oeuvre. He’s the conflicted antihero who is maybe little more than a villain, in the tradition of DeNiro in “Taxi Driver” and “Raging Bull” or Ray Liotta in “Goodfellas.” Film Burkhart  truly does love his wife; his relationship with Mollie (Lily Gladstone) is sweetly romantic and also corrupted by greed and abuse in ways that Burkhart isn’t willing to admit even to himself. DiCaprio’s performance is all sideways looks and shuffling evasion, with moments of dashing charm. It’s very well done, and, again, well-designed to wow the Oscar committee.

But should a movie about systemic racist violence really be focused on the Oscar-turn of the White villain? Scorsese has repeatedly, and with some justice, lambasted the sameness of blockbuster superhero films. But “Killers of the Flower Moon” reveals that Scorsese’s narrative, genre-anchored, humanist approach to big, important filmmaking has serious limitations as well.

There are films that deal thoughtfully with genocide and structural violence: For example, Joshua Oppenheimer’s “The Act of Killing,” Paweł Pawlikowski’s “Ida,” Alain Resnais’ “Night and Fog.” Those are all films which resolutely avoid pulp gestures, celebrity turns, and easy questions about the origin of evil, much less easy answers. In contrast, Scorsese’s focus on individual character and internal moral struggle is ill-suited to a story about White supremacy and the way in which individual evil is a collective endeavor — a structure of permission, hate, envy and discrimination which is so horrible in part because it’s so undramatic. Ernest Burkhart isn’t a fascinating conflicted villain; he’s just another White guy whose entire community agrees that he’s entitled to take what he wants from people who aren’t White.

Grann understood that. He doesn’t spend much time speculating in his book about Burkhart’s  motives or Burkhart’s soul. Scorsese, though, wants a sweeping epic; he wants drama, deep character development, profound human insight. “Killers of the Flower Moon” has all the expected hallmarks of a quality Scorsese film. It’s complete; it’s controlled. Which is why, perhaps, it feels like it doesn’t do justice to the Osage’s story, which, as Grann realizes, is defined by absences, erasures and narratives that can never be told now, no matter how long you make a movie’s run time.

Correction: This essay has been updated to correct that the Osage people became wealthy through their discovery of oil in Oklahoma.

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