Devery Jacobs is speaking out against Martin Scorsese’s latest film.
Killers of the Flower Moon centers around murders committed in the Osage Nation in the 1920s following the discovery of oil on tribal land in Oklahoma. Jacobs called the depiction “painful, grueling, unrelenting and unnecessarily graphic,” at the start of a lengthy thread on Twitter explaining her reaction to the movie.
“Being Native, watching this movie was fucking hellfire,” she wrote. “Imagine the worst atrocities committed against yr ancestors, then having to sit thru a movie explicitly filled w/ them, w/ the only respite being 30min long scenes of murderous white guys talking about/planning the killings.”
The film always seemed likely to be controversial, centering white characters in a story where Indigenous people are being murdered. And while Jacobs praised the performances of Native actors, such as Lily Gladstone, she expressed frustration over her belief that “the Osage characters felt painfully underwritten, while the white men were given way more courtesy and depth.”
She also acknowledged the perspective that portraying violence realistically “forces people to understand the real horrors that happened to this community,” but ultimately disagreed that it was the right approach.
Jacobs’ grievances mimic those that have frequently been brought up over queer films, as well—the tendency to lean into trauma, particularly when the stories are told by people outside of the community, or in order to gain mainstream appeal.
As Christopher Cote, an Osage language consultant who worked on Killers of the Flower Moon, told The Hollywood Reporter, the “film isn’t made for an Osage audience.”
The film has pulled in a 92% critics score on Rotten Tomatoes, and debuted with a $23 million box office, which AP notes is Scorsese’s third best, so it certainly has an audience — but Jacobs suggested it would have been better for the Osage community to finally have their story told to a mainstream audience in a different way.
“I would prefer to see a $200 million movie from an Osage filmmaker telling this history, any day of the week,” she said.
