White Empathy Gets You Only So Far in Killers of the Flower Moon

Lily Gladstone’s impervious, withholding face: This is the richest terrain in Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon, a crime epic in western drag. Not the dust-riddled, mud-caked land of 1920s Oklahoma. Not the desolate frown Leonardo DiCaprio never wipes off his face. Not the graying force of Robert De Niro. Nothing comes close to what Gladstone reveals in the set of her jaw and the pools of emotion that are her eyes. But this very terrain is what Scorsese is ill-equipped to traverse.

Killers of the Flower Moon seeks to uncover the putrid rationalizations white people used to enact covert cruelties upon the Indigenous Osage population, whose reservation land held oil and therefore incredible wealth. Adapting the true-crime book by David Grann, Scorsese tells his story from the inside out, choosing to piece together a portrait of racism and uniquely American rot by focusing on one family. Ernest Burkhart (DiCaprio) has returned to Oklahoma from the First World War, finding refuge with his esteemed uncle, William Hale (De Niro), a man who prefers to be called “king” or “uncle” by all in his orbit and is drunk on his own power and his belief that the time of the Osage has come to a close — though he wraps this firmly held notion inside a veneer of respectability and interracial niceties. Hale encourages Ernest to take up with Mollie to gain access to her headrights through manipulation and murder. Even then, Ernest believes the relationship he cultivates with Mollie is something approaching love. He starts by driving her around town for her various errands, his eyes glancing toward the mirror to catch the grooves of her impassive visage. Eventually, her chilliness turns to curiosity and she meets his gaze in the mirror.

Soon Mollie is inviting Ernest into the home she shares with her mother and calling him “Coyote” in Osage, a sign of affection but also an acknowledgment that she sees his greed and appetites. One night, a storm roils across the land as they’re having dinner. As she places whiskey on the table, her movements serene and graceful, Mollie advises Ernest not to close the windows. “No, we need to be quiet for a while.” They sit side by side at her long, polished dining-room table, a blanket placed on her body. “Storm … it’s, well, it’s powerful. So we need to be quiet for a while.” Ernest tries to fill the air with idle conversation nonetheless. “Just be still,” she says. Where Mollie is resolute and unbowed, Ernest is blunt and forever trying to feed a hunger it seems impossible to sate.

From the beginning, it’s hard to glean Mollie’s pull toward Ernest, in part because Scorsese is far more interested in another relationship entirely: Ernest and Hale’s fraught familial bond. Meanwhile, there are few scenes of Mollie interacting with her Osage family and their rituals free from the eyes of the white men who seek to leech their riches. We get little insight into Mollie as a mother or a Native woman drawn into a romance with a white man like other Native women before her. Trapped by the gleam of reverence, the filmmaker ends up returning to the same racial stereotypes he sought to avoid: The Osage people are noble and connected to the land, but their personalities, their desires, their joys, and, most crucially, their anger remain in the shadowed hallways of a history Scorsese is too timid to approach.

The director is most comfortable approaching a differently hued history of white male violence, which he has depicted onscreen in other revelatory crime epics like Goodfellas, Casino, and The Wolf of Wall Street. These films feature their own manner of put-upon wives, though they are afforded something Mollie is not: a scene that cracks them apart, allowing their frustration and fears to spill into the open air of the film. For a moment, audiences are forced to bear witness to what white male supremacy can wreak upon an intimate but instructive space. Killers of the Flower Moon never gives Gladstone such a moment. Scorsese is too busy making her a symbol.

Karen Hill, played with guts by Lorraine Bracco in Scorsese’s 1990 classic Goodfellas, is anything but a symbol. She is flesh, blood, and fury with a keen understanding of the man she married (Ray Liotta) — an American mobster and later FBI informant — by the time we get to the iconic scene in which her rage erupts over what she is meant to endure. She’s furious, most pointedly in response to her husband’s infidelity, but her wariness of the violence he engenders thrums in the folds of this scene. “Wake up, Henry,” Karen whispers as she straddles her sleeping husband on their bed, a gun pointed at his head. Henry speaks in calming platitudes as he urges her to put down the weapon. “I couldn’t hurt him,” Karen’s voice-over proclaims, “How could I hurt him? I couldn’t even bring myself to leave him. The truth was that no matter how bad I felt, I was still very attracted to him. Why should I give him to someone else?” The story of their marriage is written on her face. As tears wet her cheeks, it is evident she is fighting between her own self-preservation and a deep love for Henry despite his cruelty. The moment she relinquishes the gun he slams Karen to the bedroom floor and turns the weapon on her. Without such a scene, the movie’s incandescent flair could be mistaken for lavishing praise upon men like Henry, rather than interrogating their flaws.

Then there is 1995’s Casino, in which Sharon Stone is similarly cracked open. Costume designers Rita Ryack and John A. Dunn leaned into the excess of 1970s Las Vegas in charting the rise and fall of showgirl turned gangster moll Ginger McKenna. Stone bodied every sartorial moment, wrestling attention away from De Niro’s Mafia-connected casino bastion. Fur, jewels, sheer dresses, gold appliqués, platinum-blonde hair piled high and taut. In another director’s hands, Ginger might have been a bauble for the thrilling turns of a criminal enterprise. But not here. By the time she is granted a scene that breaks her entirely, the vivid 1970s have cooled into the 1980s. She’s dressed sloppily in a patterned dress and black robe with a tacky haircut that lacks any of her former luster and is scheming to run away. “Yes, I want him fucking killed! I’ve had it,” Ginger whispers forcefully over the phone, unaware that De Niro’s Sam is listening at the door. He slinks behind her. “You want to get rid of me? Here I am,” he says. What follows is vicious. He drags Ginger to her walk-in closets, throws a bag and clothes her way, and when she asks about the money she feels she is owed, he rushes to force it into her hands, saying, “Is this enough money? Is this enough money to last you two fucking days? You greedy bitch!” Stone spits fury and pushes against Sam’s chest as he forces her out of their opulent home. But she ultimately returns, looking all dressed up with nowhere to go in chinchilla fur. Her anger has cooled into loneliness. She lies on their bed, an ocean of emotional distance between her and Sam. He reaches out, clasping her hand gently, a second of softness in a film dominated by hard edges. It’s a picture of a marriage in which both sides are sketched out fully, rather than thinly drawn.

Glamour pulls at audiences, making them wonder what’s underneath the alluring aesthetic. Mollie is afforded no such allure, perhaps because the glamour of a wealthy Osage isn’t legible to the white imagination. In Killers, Mollie is proud and determined, but that’s all we know about her — the surface — and we’re never drawn below it. This becomes painfully obvious as she grows ill, her diabetes being mistreated with poison first by her doctors and then by Ernest. She is bedridden, feverish, beset by visions. Gladstone’s performance is steely and physically reserved throughout; every move she makes speaks to the considerations Mollie must take to survive in a world primed on the genocide of her people. We can understand she is angry and mired in deep grief as her kin are blithely murdered, even though we don’t quite see these emotions wholly. But what is the shape of that anger? When she’s alone with her grief, how does it move through her mind and body?

I can’t answer those questions. Watching another genre film wrapped in the package of a western, the Gladstone-produced movie Quantum Cowboys (in which she also stars), I was transfixed by the actress and what is clearly one of her greatest tools: her voice. It’s mesmerizing in its cadence and emotional force. Quantum Cowboys is an uneven experiment, but it gives Gladstone the space to unleash swagger. In Killers, she’s confined. When Mollie finally forces Ernest to turn away the doctors who have been caring for her and administer the tampered insulin shots himself, he pleads with her — they need the hard-to-get medicine, and King Hale is the only one who can procure it for them. Mollie is in pain at the lip of the bed, barely able to sit up straight, while Ernest stands over her in medium shot. “Stupid, stubborn bitch,” Ernest shouts. “You think you know everything, right?! With your Indian ways. You think you’re gonna get better with all them medicine men, all them roots and all them herbs? All that horseshit.” Ernest brings a hand to his mouth mocking Indigenous ritual before calming his barbs. He feels cracked open and intimately revealed. But Mollie — whose responses in Osage aren’t fully translated during the argument — remains as tightly closed as a fist.

How does she experience her husband’s cruelty? What does she hope to gain by proceeding to be poisoned by him? While Mollie is left to anguish in illness for huge swaths of the film, we never quite understand how she justifies this marriage or what the texture of her love for Ernest really looks like — a love that comes across as wan and foolish despite the character’s capability and intelligence. Ernest’s ignorance, self-justifications, and racism are painstakingly detailed, but the reverberations of his intimate horror are never accounted for. Where Ernest is granted the opportunity for rampage and intensity, Mollie is too sweat-slick for much of a response.

DiCaprio has played the criminal husband before. In The Wolf of Wall Street, he’s the conniving stockbroker Jordan Belfort, who marries the Duchess of Bay Ridge, Margot Robbie’s Naomi Lapaglia. By the end of the film, Robbie plays Naomi as completely checked out of the relationship, desperate for an exit from Jordan’s hopeless reality. (He knows by now he’ll escape jail time for his federal crimes only by ratting on his compatriots.) Nonetheless, Jordan tries to have sex with her and she gives in out of pity, her face a mask of discomfort: “I fucking hate you, Jordan. Get off me.” When he finally finishes his selfish escapade, she’s blunt. “That’s the last time. I want a divorce.” He meets her frustration with outright nastiness. “Jordan, this is how it’s going to go,” she responds, standing above him as he frantically tries to make sense of what’s happening. “I’m gonna take custody of the kids. Don’t try to fight it. It’ll save us both a lot of money, and I have a feeling you’re gonna need it.” Of course, violence erupts. Jordan calls his wife a “vicious cunt” and slaps her face. Hard. But there’s a spark to this woman that Jordan can’t extinguish.

At the very end of Killers, Mollie finally confronts Ernest. The death of their daughter has at last compelled him to testify against Hale and his efforts to extinguish an entire people. (It’s a curious narrative move, considering we never see Ernest interact with his daughter or parent his Native children with any care.) “Have you told all the truths?” Mollie asks him after his testimony. “Yes, I have. My soul is clean now, Mollie. I wasn’t going to let him get anywhere near you and the children.” Mollie’s body is tense, ramrod straight. “What did you give me? What was in the shots?” she asks. Ernest’s face is grim. “Insulin,” he says. Gladstone is pained yet unmoving, as restrained as she has ever been. It’s unreadable what she wants at this moment or how she would hold the truth if it ever slipped from Ernest’s lips. In place of any anger is a void. The camera, ever reverential, doesn’t follow Mollie out of the room and Ernest’s life. It stays with him, fixated on what his racist bloodthirst has cost him. Here is his out. Ernest, played by an actor with over three decades of sympathy behind him, ultimately reads like a patsy rather than an originator of cruelty. White people always give themselves the out.

Even more than Scorsese’s past works, Killers is about the blood in American soil from which the continued horrors of this nation grow. (There’s a brief, intriguing nod to the 1921 Tulsa race massacre that rained hell upon the Black population of Oklahoma, but it’s nothing more than a knowing nod.) The movie is at times an unwitting reminder of how genocide is approved, structured historically, and softened for the white populace. How land acknowledgment is seen as progress because returning that land would be too radical. (I couldn’t help but think of how, decades from now, Hollywood will frame the horror in Palestine as a faraway mistake told through some simplistic interracial love story.) Scorsese is in many ways working within his strengths, examining how white male violence crashes out from domestic spheres and reflects the eroded core of the American project. And he typically avoids demonstrating cloying regard for that violence — no matter the propulsive heat and ecstatically realized grace of his camera. But with Killers, he is far too stuck at the pitch of awe and admiration to interrogate Mollie’s humanity. Gladstone spins gold from a script that passes only a glance at the complications of her character, instead stowing away narrative interest for her oppressors.