Scorsese's adaptation of the Osage murders of the 1920s. Three and a half hours that refuse the Western's traditional moral structure.
Oklahoma, 1920s. The Osage Nation has become the wealthiest per-capita group in the United States after oil is discovered on their reservation. The federal government has, in response, instituted a 'guardian' system in which adult Osage are assigned white legal guardians who control their finances. White men have begun to marry Osage women.
Ernest Burkhart returns from World War I and goes to work for his uncle, William Hale, a wealthy rancher who has positioned himself as a friend of the Osage. Ernest is encouraged by Hale to marry Mollie Kyle, an Osage woman from a wealthy family. As Mollie's family members begin to die — by gunshot, by poison, by mysterious illness — the federal Bureau of Investigation eventually arrives. The film follows Ernest, Hale, and Mollie across roughly a decade. The historical death toll of the Osage Reign of Terror is estimated at between 60 and 300, depending on the methodology.
Almost every American Western has, since Stagecoach (1939), been built around the Western's foundational assumption: that white American settlement of the West was difficult, morally complicated, but ultimately legitimate. Killers of the Flower Moon refuses this. The film depicts white American settlement of Osage land as a criminal enterprise, conducted at the scale of a sustained organised-crime operation, with the cooperation of local law enforcement, the federal guardian system, and the broader community.
Scorsese was reportedly aware of the genre problem from the start. The film was rewritten significantly during pre-production; the original screenplay focused on the FBI investigation (the structural frame David Grann uses in his 2017 book). Scorsese and screenwriter Eric Roth, after consultation with Osage Nation representatives, shifted the centre of the film to the marriage between Ernest and Mollie. The decision was structurally important: it forced the audience to identify with the victim rather than the investigator.
Mollie Burkhart is, on the page, an almost impossible role. She has to play a woman who is being slowly poisoned by her own husband, whose family is being murdered around her, whose understanding of what is happening evolves across a decade, and who eventually testifies against her own husband in federal court. The performance has to register tenderness, suspicion, illness, grief, and final clear-eyed knowledge — sometimes within a single scene.
Gladstone, who is of Blackfeet and Nez Perce descent, was the first Native American woman nominated for Best Actress at the Oscars. She did not win — Emma Stone won for Poor Things — in a result widely considered one of the more-debated Academy decisions of recent years. The performance is, by most subsequent critical opinion, the strongest in any 2023 release.
The film closes with a recreation of a 1932 radio drama about the Osage murders, performed live on a soundstage with sound effects, music, and a small studio audience. Scorsese himself appears at the close, reading the historical conclusion of Mollie's life — her remarriage, her death from diabetes, her obituary that did not mention any of the murders.
The choice has been argued about. The defence is that the closing sequence is the film's structural acknowledgement that it is itself a piece of entertainment about an American crime, made by a non-Indigenous director, for distribution on a streaming platform; the radio-drama framing makes that fact visible rather than concealing it. The critique is that the framing also lets Scorsese off the hook — by acknowledging the entertainment frame, the film does not need to fully commit to the moral seriousness of its subject.