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Many culturally Catholic men have grown up with arguments about whether, for example, Taxi Driver (1976) is as great a film as Goodfellas (1990) and whether Scorsese’s more recent films are too far away from his natural metier: the destructiveness of male gangster capitalism.
Killers of the Flower Moon (2023) is a film directly about racism, inequality and the native American community being dispossessed from within. It is based on real-life events – almost erased from history but meticulously documented in David Grann’s 2017 book of the same name – in the native American Osage community in 1920s Oklahoma.
Marginalised, dispossessed and confined to arid reservations in Oklahoma, the tribe’s fortunes changed overnight when, during one flower moon, oil gushed from their reservation. Suddenly the Osage people became the richest in the world per capita but use of their wealth overseen by White legal guardians as indigenous people were deemed ‘incompetent’ by the US government of the time.
The film documents the infiltration of the community and local genocide to effect property transfers. Osage people are systematically targeted and killed so a nefarious colonialist can acquire headrights to their land. Legal formalities masking infamy. Coercive preying on the vulnerable. Duress and non est factum. Commercial lawyers should usefully watch this film as Robert De Niro’s grasp of contract negotiation is most instructive.
De Niro, in his greatest psychotic performance because it is so controlled, represents the banality of evil. Posing as a friend and benefactor to the Osage people while plotting to steal their mineral rights, his sadistic use of punishment and rewards, especially towards his nephew for the building of mayhem and murder, is laced with the usual soupcon of family values. Leonardo DiCaprio is the fortune-hunting World War I veteran under his uncle’s sinister influence. He marries into the community, poisoning his oil-rich Osage wife’s insulin to create dependency issues.
Perhaps uniquely in Scorsese’s work, the film features a central all-defining female voice – played by Lily Gladstone to critical acclaim – with a kind of apologia of previous non-recognition of same by the director at the end of the film. Thus, Killers of the Flower Moon rages with injustice but also the female spirit, or Gaia, and the rejection of toxic masculinity – or at least, the rejection of profit over people.
And lawyers? Tom White (played by Jesse Plemons) investigates the murders as an agent of J Edgar Hoover’s Bureau of Investigation and the film culminates with the prosecution of all and sundry. John Lithgow is lead prosecutor Peter Leaward and Brendan Fraser is W S Hamilton, defence lawyer. In one notable scene, Ernest is shocked to learn that lawyers and judges exist who are not corrupt.
In a terrible twist, a 2021 Oklahoma state law (HB 1775) regulating classroom discussions on race and gender led to a high school cancelling lesson plans involving Grann’s book. And with the Trump administration moving to control Harvard’s teaching and enrolment practices by revoking visas of non-national students, there is so much for lawyers to think about in our increasingly tribalistic times.
David Langwallner is a graduate of the Harvard Law School and the London School of Economics. He is a barrister at 1MCB and was 2015 Irish Lawyer of the Year for his work as director of the Irish Innocence Project.
Many culturally Catholic men have grown up with arguments about whether, for example, Taxi Driver (1976) is as great a film as Goodfellas (1990) and whether Scorsese’s more recent films are too far away from his natural metier: the destructiveness of male gangster capitalism.
Killers of the Flower Moon (2023) is a film directly about racism, inequality and the native American community being dispossessed from within. It is based on real-life events – almost erased from history but meticulously documented in David Grann’s 2017 book of the same name – in the native American Osage community in 1920s Oklahoma.
Marginalised, dispossessed and confined to arid reservations in Oklahoma, the tribe’s fortunes changed overnight when, during one flower moon, oil gushed from their reservation. Suddenly the Osage people became the richest in the world per capita but use of their wealth overseen by White legal guardians as indigenous people were deemed ‘incompetent’ by the US government of the time.
The film documents the infiltration of the community and local genocide to effect property transfers. Osage people are systematically targeted and killed so a nefarious colonialist can acquire headrights to their land. Legal formalities masking infamy. Coercive preying on the vulnerable. Duress and non est factum. Commercial lawyers should usefully watch this film as Robert De Niro’s grasp of contract negotiation is most instructive.
De Niro, in his greatest psychotic performance because it is so controlled, represents the banality of evil. Posing as a friend and benefactor to the Osage people while plotting to steal their mineral rights, his sadistic use of punishment and rewards, especially towards his nephew for the building of mayhem and murder, is laced with the usual soupcon of family values. Leonardo DiCaprio is the fortune-hunting World War I veteran under his uncle’s sinister influence. He marries into the community, poisoning his oil-rich Osage wife’s insulin to create dependency issues.
Perhaps uniquely in Scorsese’s work, the film features a central all-defining female voice – played by Lily Gladstone to critical acclaim – with a kind of apologia of previous non-recognition of same by the director at the end of the film. Thus, Killers of the Flower Moon rages with injustice but also the female spirit, or Gaia, and the rejection of toxic masculinity – or at least, the rejection of profit over people.
And lawyers? Tom White (played by Jesse Plemons) investigates the murders as an agent of J Edgar Hoover’s Bureau of Investigation and the film culminates with the prosecution of all and sundry. John Lithgow is lead prosecutor Peter Leaward and Brendan Fraser is W S Hamilton, defence lawyer. In one notable scene, Ernest is shocked to learn that lawyers and judges exist who are not corrupt.
In a terrible twist, a 2021 Oklahoma state law (HB 1775) regulating classroom discussions on race and gender led to a high school cancelling lesson plans involving Grann’s book. And with the Trump administration moving to control Harvard’s teaching and enrolment practices by revoking visas of non-national students, there is so much for lawyers to think about in our increasingly tribalistic times.
The Chair of the Bar reports back
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