How ‘Killers of the Flower Moon’ Presses Up Against the Limits of Empathy

“Can you find the wolves in this picture?” Ernest Burkhart asks, with the faltering pace of a child, from his home within the Osage Nation — lands only recently annexed by the United States to form Oklahoma. Ernest is seemingly reading both to himself and the audience of Martin Scorsese’s monumental “Killers of the Flower Moon,” which was nominated on Tuesday for 10 Academy Awards, including Best Picture. The film offers more than three hours of violent detail from a period in Native American history during the 1920s that newspapers called the “Reign of Terror” — a period that included the slaughter of dozens, possibly hundreds, of the Osage Nation’s citizens by non-Native people.

These non-Native people, we learn throughout the movie, are the wolves in Mr. Scorsese’s “picture” and they are hidden everywhere in plain sight. Some have become intimate with the Osage people, and others, like Mr. Burkhart, played by Leonardo DiCaprio, have married into Osage families and even fathered Osage children.

“Killers of the Flower Moon” is rare in that its filmmakers worked closely with Osage citizens to portray this gruesome, oft-forgotten slice of American history. Despite this collaboration, the film has been criticized for centering on the unsophisticated Ernest Burkhart and for failing to cede precious screen and script time to the Osage protagonist, Mollie Burkhart, played brilliantly by Lily Gladstone (Blackfeet) — a performance that made history by garnering Ms. Gladstone the first Best Actress Oscar nomination for a Native American actor. Of course, centering primarily white and male perspectives in Hollywood is nothing new and is a valid critique of nearly every film about Indian Country.

But there are lessons offered by “Killers” that have been overlooked, unexpected lessons about empathy, the soul of the American public and how a reckoning with American colonialism must begin.