Editor’s note: The following article is an op-ed, and the views expressed are the author’s own. Read more opinions on theGrio.
Director Martin Scorsese’s “Killers of the Flower Moon” is a flawed masterpiece. It is also important viewing for Black folks.
The film tells the true story of how a white businessman and self-proclaimed “true friend” of the Osage Nation orchestrated the murders of numerous members of the tribe in early 1920s Oklahoma. The Osage were forced to settle on land that happened to have oil on it, and because of the influx of wealth that the oil money brought, they were systematically killed for their “headrights” — their financial inheritance.
Sitting in a nearly full theater in Oklahoma City on a sunny Saturday in October, I was shocked that so many people decided to miss out on the nice weather and, instead, went to see a film whose runtime clocks in at three hours and 26 minutes and details the insidious nature of white supremacy.
Then I remembered who was in the film.
Leonardo DiCaprio is quite good (if not a bit manic) as Ernest Burkhart, a white man who marries an Osage woman. Robert De Niro turns in his best performance in years as William Hale, Ernest’s uncle. He is a man who gives to the right charities, kisses the babies of native people and smiles in the face of the Osage but secretly plots to steal their wealth because, on the one hand, he is money hungry, and, on the other, he believes he is entitled to their wealth because he is white and they are not.
The best part of this film is Lily Gladstone. She plays Mollie Burkhart, an Osage woman who, against her better judgment, marries DiCaprio’s Ernest. She steals every scene she is in, and it is a shame that she is sidelined for the second half of the film, which explains why this is, indeed, a…
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