Reservation Dogs star Kawennáhere Devery Jacobs has some thoughts on Martin Scorsese's new film Killers of the Flower Moon.
On October 23, the Indigenous actor and filmmaker — who rose to prominence for playing Elora Danan on Sterlin Harjo and Taika Waititi's FX series — shared her "strong feelings" about Killers of the Flower Moon as a thread on her X/Twitter account and across multiple slides on her Instagram stories, calling out the film for providing surface-level representation of Indigenous communities.
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Killers of the Flower Moon, directed and co-written by Scorsese, stars Leonardo DiCaprio as World War I veteran Ernest Burkhart and Robert De Niro as his uncle William Hale. Set in the 1920s, Killers of the Flower Moon (adapted from David Grann's book of the same name) centers its plot around the Osage Native American murders, also known as the Reign of Terror. The film follows the story of Burkhart after he moves to Oklahoma to work for his uncle and decides to siege the Osage Nation for greed, where oil has been discovered in their lands. While Jacobs praised Lily Gladstone for her portrayal of Burkhart's Osage wife, Mollie, as well as the other "incredible Indigenous actors" involved in the making of the film, she had serious criticisms when it came to the film's execution.
"This film was painful, grueling, unrelenting, and unnecessarily graphic," Jacobs said in her thread. “Being Native, watching this movie was f*cking hellfire. Imagine the worst atrocities committed against [your] ancestors, then having to sit [through] a movie explicitly filled [with] them, [with] the only respite being 30-min long scenes of murderous white guys talking about/planning the killings.”
"While all of the performances were strong, if you look proportionally, each of the Osage characters felt painfully underwritten, while the white men were given way more courtesy and depth," Jacobs continued. “I can understand that Martin Scorsese's technical direction is compelling & seeing $200mil on screen is a sight to behold. I get the goal of this violence is to add brutal shock value that forces people to understand the real horrors that happened to this community, BUT I don't feel that these very real people were shown honor or dignity in the horrific portrayal of their deaths.”
Jacobs argued that "showing more murdered Native women on screen" only further "normalizes the violence committed against us and further dehumanizes our people" and pleaded for the media to perceive Indigenous stories beyond "grief, trauma, and atrocities."
She added: “Our pride for being Native, our languages, cultures, joy, and love are way more interesting [and] humanizing than showing the horrors white men inflicted on us. This is the issue when non-Native directors are given the liberty to tell our stories; they center the white perspective and focus on Native people's pain.”
Despite Jacobs' faults with the film, she took time to praise other general aspects beyond the acting, highlighting how having their "stories and histories finally acknowledged" must have felt "cathartic" for all the Osage people involved in making the film. "There was beautiful work done by so many Wazhazhe on this film," she said. “But admittedly, I would prefer to see a $200 million movie from an Osage filmmaker telling this history, any day of the week.”
Jacobs ended her note by paying tribute to the many real-life Osage folks murdered during the Reign of Terror and remembering those in the communities who outlived the murders. "The pain is real [and it] isn't limited to the film's 3hrs and 26 mins," she added.
Related: Killers of the Flower Moon Is as Much About the Present as It Is the Past
Jacobs's white-centric criticism is more than valid — even still, Scorsese previously admitted the script was actually adapted to focus less on the white characters, sharing that the movie was originally intended to remain faithful to the book, being told exclusively from the POV of the FBI agents sent to Oklahoma to investigate the Osage murders. “Myself and Eric Roth talked about telling the story from the point of view of the bureau agents coming in to investigate,” Scorsese told the Irish Times. “After two years of working on the script, Leo came to me and asked, ‘Where is the heart of this story?’ I had had meetings and dinners with the Osage, and I thought, ‘Well, there’s the story.’ The real story, we felt, was not necessarily coming from the outside, with the bureau, but rather from the inside, from Oklahoma.”
