Killers of the Flower Moon, Martin Scorsese’s highly anticipated adaptation of David Grann’s book of the same name, premieres at Cannes on Saturday. It’s one of the most high-profile films at the festival, reuniting Scorsese with both Robert DeNiro and Leonardo DiCaprio, and also featuring a stacked cast that includes Jesse Plemons, Brendan Fraser, Tantoo Cardinal, John Lithgow, Tatanka Means, and a clutch of musicians in Jack White, Sturgill Simpson, and Jason Isbell.
It also stars THE Lily Gladstone as the woman at the center of the Osage Murders Conspiracy, which was a plot to kill members of the Osage Nation in order to wrench away the rights to the oil beneath their land in Oklahoma.
The trailer looks incredible, of course it does, with Scorsese directing and cinematography by Rodrigo Prieto and THAT cast, and DiCaprio utilizing an accent I’m calling Historic Dude intoning “find the wolves in this picture”. We see Osage men dancing in oil gushing from the earth, and a LOT of frowning, upset white people staring hostilely at Lily Gladstone as she moves through the world. The Osage oil strike promised to make the Osage very wealthy, and of course white people can’t let that stand (see also: the targeted harassment of Black farmers and ranchers today).
Killers of the Flower Moon is a thoroughly researched and brutal read, starkly illustrating the lengths to which white people and the system of America they built atop Native land and resources and bodies will go to preserve their sovereignty in all things, but most especially their sovereignty over Native sovereignty (see also: Lakota Nation vs. United States, this is literally a story with no end). A part of me will always wish that rather than direct it himself, Scorsese threw his weight behind a Native filmmaker, letting an underrepresented voice tell the story of an underrepresented people, but I am at least encouraged by how much of Lily Gladstone we see in this trailer. One, she deserves a huge, splashy breakout role, and two, this is not “just another crime saga” from Scorsese, Flower Moon is just one link in a centuries-long chain in a pattern of subjugation and deprivation that is ongoing today.
And it’s not like Scorsese is hiding who the villain is here. All those stern frowning white people, all those bitter faces, the hints of violence and corruption, it’s all there. The book is gutting, if the film can impart the same sense of injustice and gut-churning shame at this chapter in American history, well, then we’ll be getting somewhere.
Killers of the Flower Moon is set for an October release, putting it early in awards season, setting it up to be The One To Beat from the jump. That’s a long way off, but I am super into the idea of an awards season in which everyone has to constantly confront the legacy of violent racism in America because of this film. Also, I am ready for Lily Gladstone’s Oscar campaign, it is overdue.
