“Reservation Dogs” actress Devery Jacobs called out Martin Scorsese’s “Killers of the Flower Moon” on Monday, writing to X that the acclaimed film “painfully” underwrote its Indigenous characters as “helpless victims without agency” and in some ways helped normalize the brutalization of the Native American community.
She also expressed that she’d rather see a film made about Indigenous people’s history by a person who is of and from that racial and ethnic background.
“This film was painful, grueling, unrelenting and unnecessarily graphic,” Jacobs said. In a series of 15 tweets, the actress, best known for starring as Elora Danan Postoak on FX’s comedy “Reservation Dogs,” which is similarly centered on the Indigenous experience in the U.S., expressed the issues she had with “Killers,” which hit theaters Friday.
“Being Native, watching this movie was f–king hellfire,” Jacobs began. “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.”
Before continuing to critique the film, she pointed out that the Indigenous actors were the “only redeeming factors.”
“It must be noted that Lily Gladstone is a an absolute legend and carried Mollie with tremendous grace,” Jacobs said, adding that the actress is worthy of an Academy Award for the performance.
However, Jacobs said that the material they had to work with gave them characters lacking in development when compared to the white men onscreen, like Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro.
“If you look proportionally, each of the Osage characters felt painfully underwritten, while the white men were given way more courtesy and depth,” Jacobs said.
She also touched on the direction on the movie, highlighting how extreme the violence against Native Americans was and how that same violence is a real-life issue.
“Now, I can understand that Martin Scorsese’s technical direction is compelling and seeing $200 million on screen is a sight to behold,” Jacobs said. “I get the goal of this violence is to add brutal shock value that forces people to understand the real horrors that happened to this community, but… I don’t feel that these very real people were shown honor or dignity in the horrific portrayal of their deaths. Contrarily, I believe that by showing more murdered Native women on screen, it normalizes the violence committed against us and further dehumanizes our people.”
Before she ended her post, she explained that the Native American community, their culture and overall history is more than just the trauma and pain they’ve endured, and added that there needs to be more room for Indigenous creatives to tell their own stories in order to combat films like “Killers of the Flower Moon.”
“I would prefer to see a $200 million movie from an Osage filmmaker telling this history, any day of the week,” Jacobs said. “And I’m sorry, but Scorsese choosing to end on a shot of Ilonshka dances and drumming? It doesn’t absolve the film from painting Native folks as helpless victims without agency.”
By the end of it, she condemned the efforts that have been made in Hollywood to depict Native stories, and took shots at white Oklahomans who have benefitted from the actual Osage murders.
“All in all, after 100 years of the way Indigenous communities have been portrayed in film, is this really the representation we needed?” Jacobs questioned. “And a massive f–k you to the real life, white Oklahomans, who still carry and benefit from these blood-stained headrights.”
Adapted from David Grann’s nonfiction book, “Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI,” Scorsese’s feature centers on the murders of members of the Osage Native American tribe after oil was found on their land. The killings were carried out by a group of white men — Ernest Burkhart (DiCaprio), John Ramsey (Ty Mitchell) and others, with William Hale (De Niro) as their leader.
The film was originally set to focus on Tom White, an FBI agent who was sent from Washington, D.C., to investigate the murders. The film was penned by Scorsese and Eric Roth, with Scorsese serving as director.
