OTTplay Reviews: Killers Of The Flower Moon

Killers Of The Flower Moon Scrubs Whitewash Off America's Bloody Past

For most filmmakers, a film like Flower Moon might have been their magnum opus. With Martin Scorsese, it feels like a sign of even better things to come, writes Prahlad Srihari.

Dir: Martin Scorsese

Cast: Lily Gladstone, Leonardo DiCaprio, Robert De Niro

Playing in: Theatres

TikTok star Martin Scorsese returns in some style with Killers of the Flower Moon: a late-career moral reckoning with the myths that defined the Western genre, whitewashed America’s past and fuelled his own love for the movies. The director picks up from where he left off on the introspective path of his previous film. By challenging the violent underpinnings of the Western, as The Irishman did with the mob epic, Flower Moon transcends the limits of its genre.

There is a marked difference between how the West was won and how the West was spun. The myth of the civilised white cowboy dishing out harsh but fair justice against the savage Native American became so powerful it overwrote the truth. History couldn’t compete with the narrative curated by painters, writers and filmmakers who invested the colonisers with all the heroic symbolism they could muster. Scorsese sets the record straight by casting Native Americans not as hurdles but actors in the shaping of the American economy.

(Killers Of The Flower Moon isn't on OTT yet. But John Wick: Chapter 4 is. Stream using the OTTplay Premium Jhakaas pack at Rs 199/month.)

In fact, the Osage nation was one of the wealthiest communities at the start of the 20th century. An introductory mock-newsreel shows how not too long after being stripped of their land in Kansas and sold a part of Oklahoma, the Osage discovered there was black gold beneath their new home. The resulting oil boom brought in millions of dollars which paid for chauffeured cars, mansions, clothes, jewellery, and even white servants. The trouble is it also brought the wolves and the parasites: white opportunists of all stripes eager to get their teeth into the wealth of a burgeoning community. Soon the men and women of the community began dying: some shot, some bombed, some poisoned, some drugged, some lost to a "wasting illness." To paraphrase Ian Fleming, once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, more than three times is conspiracy. It is white interlopers making a concerted attack against Native Americans, cocksure in their belief that history will paint their serial murders as “taming” another frontier.

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