The Deep Contradictions of Our Era Become Personal in Scorsese's "Killers of the Harvest Moon"

If you ever intend to see the movie Killers of the Harvest Moon, you may not want to read these musings. If you've already spent three and a half hours letting it wash over you, then you may, like me, be wondering how there could be love in a marriage in which the husband contracts the killing of others while slowly debilitating his diabetic wife with tainted insulin. In a movie that is part Godfather, part Gaslight, the purpose of all the killing is to get rich during the oil boom in Oklahoma in the 1920s. 

Who knew that the Osage Indians were among the wealthiest people in the world at the time, having been forced onto the most barren land the government could find, only to discover that there was oil in them there hills? While oil companies extracted oil from the reservation to fuel the automobiles of the Roaring Twenties, others were working to extract the oil money that by rights went to the Osage. Since oil rights could not be sold, only inherited, the strategy was to intermarry with Osage women, then hasten them to an early death with the help of slow poison, guns, or even dynamite. Outstanding Osage men, who presumably would have competed with whites for the Osage women, died mysteriously at an early age. 

Just an hour away, in Tulsa, Oklahoma, prosperous blacks were also under attack, most dramatically in the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921. 

The improbable hero of the story is J. Edgar Hoover, who, as head of the newly formed Bureau of Investigation, and at the behest of the Osage, dispatches investigators to break the case and dispense some small measure of justice. 

Somewhat reminiscent of Dustin Hoffman, who played the white man through whom we witnessed the Lakota Sioux in 1970's Little Big Man, Leonardo DiCaprio is the white man through whom we witness the Osage. Director Martin Scorsese presents us with complex characters, where even the contract killers are invested with ambivalence towards their work. But the central character, Earnest, doesn't add up. A love story between a man and the woman he is knowingly poisoning is not a love story. 

I found myself squirming at the movie's seeming disconnects, and yet that depiction of lethal love resonates with our present day relationship with nature. We sing nature's praises even as we knowingly poison it slowly with an overdose of carbon dioxide from our machines. In a weird way, DiCaprio's baffling character captures the essence of our era. His relationship with his fullblood Osage wife Mollie is the personal, domestic equivalent of our collective relationship with the planet we call home. 

One can even see a deep contradiction in Scorsese's relationship to the movie itself. How could he invest so much care in rendering a story, only to insure its early exit from the theaters by making it three and a half hours long?