‘Hollywood doesn’t change overnight’: Indigenous viewers on Killers of the Flower Moon

It boasts Hollywood royalty such as Martin Scorsese, Robert De Niro and Leonardo DiCaprio, was backed to the tune of $200m by tech behemoth Apple and has earned the kind of reviews that generate Oscar buzz.

But Killers of the Flower Moon, a western true-crime thriller about the systematic killing of Osage Nation members for their oil-rich land in the 1920s, is generating mixed feelings and opinions among Native American communities.

Related: ‘Who wasn’t complicit?’ How Martin Scorsese won the trust of the Osage Nation

Devery Jacobs, an Indigenous actor who played Elora in the TV drama Reservation Dogs, posted on social media X, formerly known as Twitter: “Being Native, watching this movie was fucking 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 minute long scenes of murderous white guys talking about/planning the killings.”

The film explores the relationship between Mollie Kyle (Lily Gladstone), a member of the Osage nation, and Ernest Burkhart (DiCaprio), a first world war veteran who comes to work for his corrupt uncle (De Niro). The screenplay is adapted from David Grann’s 2017 bestselling nonfiction book of the same title by Scorsese and Eric Roth.

Scorsese, 80, who directed the audacious 206-minute epic, has said the original script, which was told from the perspective of white FBI agents investigating the Osage murders, was overhauled to tell a story closer to the Osage Nation’s perspective. He filmed in Oklahoma and cast Osage and other Indigenous actors. The Osages were involved at every level of production including costumes, sets and the depiction of customs and language.

But Native American viewers interviewed by the Guardian offer a complex set of responses, both celebrating and critiquing Killers of the Flower Moon. They praise the movie’s effort to highlight Osage history with Indigenous actors in prominent roles but express reservations about its graphic violence and lack of historical context, foregrounding of white characters and lack of an Indigenous screenwriter or director.

Elizabeth Rule, a citizen of the Chickasaw Nation and assistant professor at American University in Washington, says: “It was a very difficult film for me personally to watch as a Native viewer. I see that coming through as one of the dominant critiques and that absolutely holds true for me and my experience as well.

“But just because it was challenging to watch doesn’t mean that it isn’t important to witness and bear witness to these devastating stories. We have to remember that these were depictions of true, brutal premeditated murders of Indigenous people and so we should get upset and feel deeply uncomfortable taking in these scenes of violence and especially all the more so because they reflect a true history.

“In this way I do see the value of the film coming from its ability to raise awareness, especially among non-Native viewers, about the violence that our communities face historically and today.”

Indigenous actor Gladstone has been described as “the breakout star” of Killers of the Flower Moon. But some observers find her character less fully and satisfyingly written than those played by DiCaprio and De Niro, meaning that the film ultimately centres on white men and the birth of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

The Root website asked, “Is Killers of the Flower Moon the Indigenous Community’s Green Book?” – a reference to the Oscar winning 2018 film accused of featuring a “magical negro” whose sole purpose was to improve the white protagonist.

Rule, author of Indigenous DC: Native Peoples and the Nation’s Capital, says: “I wanted the perspectives of the Indigenous characters more forefront in the storytelling. But more than that, I wish that there was a message letting audiences know that the violence they witnessed was not the result of individual greed but rather of the systemic devaluing of Indigenous lives under the process of settler colonialism.

“The film gives us a look into one family’s experiences but the story of violence is a common one shared by hundreds of tribes across the US and it also didn’t start or end in the 1920s. This violence began with the very colonisation of this land and it continues today.”

But Rule adds: “I want to uplift and applaud the various Native American contributors to the film – Lily Gladstone, Tantoo Cardinal, Tatanka Means, Robbie Robertson and more – who took on what I understand to be a sacred responsibility of representing the Indigenous lives and community who were targeted in violence precisely because they were Indigenous.

“I want to thank and be very thankful to the Osage community and the Osage family whose story this is. It takes incredible bravery, fortitude and even a sacrifice to share this painful story that still reverberates through their own lived experiences today with millions of viewers.”

The sentiment is shared by Mary Kathryn Nagle of the Cherokee nation, a lawyer, playwright and screenwriter who is from Oklahoma and knows many of the actors well. She says: “The acting in this film is absolutely spectacular. It’s raised awareness of an issue with the American public that a lot of folks were not aware of and that’s critically important.”

But Nagle wishes the screenplay had given more of a character arc and more agency to Mollie Burkhart’s character. “Martin Scorsese was holding up a mirror to white American society to invite a majority white audience to see themselves in the Robert De Niro and Leonardo DiCaprio characters, which is an important thing to do. But I would like to have seen more of Molly’s journey instead of just reacting to the tragedy of it all. There’s a lot of things she was doing off camera that could have been on camera.”

Nagle, whose play Manahatta opens at the Public Theater in New York later this month, adds: “I do believe that Martin Scorsese did his best to work with the Osage community and to honour them in the telling of the story.

“I also at the same time think that, had a Native person been above the line, you probably would have seen more of a character arc in the way that the lead Native character was portrayed. That’s nothing to do with the acting – Lily’s acting was phenomenal – but when Native writers write these stories they tend to give the Native characters a little bit more nuance and depth.”

She concludes on a positive note: “Hollywood doesn’t change overnight. That’s why it’s important for us to reflect on, especially as Native people in the audience, what more we would like to see in terms of storytelling about us. We can also celebrate this film. We can also appreciate the fact that one of America’s best film-makers ever did make a film about this story and worked with the community to such a degree that you see his portrayal didn’t fall into stereotypes.

“We can of course critique the ways in which the main Osage character didn’t have as fully developed a character arc as her white counterparts. However, we also didn’t see a lot of the tropes and stereotypes we would normally see in a film of this genre. We saw a lot of beautiful, authentic portrayals of the Osage people in a way that Hollywood hasn’t given us before and that’s something to celebrate.”

Robert Warrior, a citizen of the Osage nation and professor of American literature and culture at the University of Kansas, argues that Killers of the Flower Moon pays too little attention to how the policies of the federal government enabled Native American dispossession, for example by pressuring the Osage to subdivide their reservation into individual allotments.

The 1920s rush to drill for oil made the Osages spectacularly rich. But they could bequeath their “headright” shares to anyone, including non-Osage people, which drew white people to step in as “guardians” with ulterior motives. This was the backdrop to the murder spree.

Warrior says: “I appreciate the extent to which the external markers of the Osage – language, clothes – are portrayed accurately. The presence of tons of Osage people in the film itself is pretty neat.

“My frustration with the film is similar to my frustration with David Grann’s book, which is it doesn’t provide the context of what enabled these murders and lots of other murders to happen: the federal policy of allotment, including the development of a bureaucracy, which made Native resources available to non-Osagers or non-Natives. Without making that point it doesn’t seem to me that any attempt to understand this particular story does the work that it needs to do or can do as a Hollywood film.”

Dennis McAuliffe, a member of the Osage nation and author The Deaths of Sybil Bolton: Oil, Greed, and Murder on the Osage Reservation, agrees that more context is necessary. He asks: “Where in the movie was there an explanation of headrights? Where in the movie was there an explanation of allotment? Where in the movie was there an explanation for how Osages got guardians and how the guardians were able to steal millions of dollars from them? Nothing.

“The guardians were portrayed as murderers, as they were in real life, but there is no explanation for how it happened. Where was the explanation for the role and fault of the US Congress in all of this by passing the 1906 Osage Allotment Act, which created this system of headrights, the land, as well as the guardians, which led to the murders. I’m not saying it’s an accurate or inaccurate portrayal of Native Americans but it was an inaccurate portrayal of the history and the system that created this disaster.”

McAuliffe notes that both his and Grann’s books drew heavily on FBI files. “If the story were written now by, say, somebody who had not read the FBI files – Native writers, Native directors, Native producers – you have a completely different story.

“I’m not saying the movie was good, bad or indifferent. Actually, to tell you the truth, I was so prepared for the worst that I actually kind of liked it. Let me quote my cousin, who saw it shortly before he died: ‘It wasn’t as bad as I feared.’ That’s exactly what I would say.”