Lily Gladstone on Welcoming ‘Flower Moon’ Criticism, Mollie’s Agency and Scorsese’s Limitations While Telling an Osage Story
16.11.2023 - 16:45
/ variety.com
Lily Gladstone likes to tell about a Blackfeet man and a flower. “He pulled it from the ground and shook the dirt off. He exposed the root system,” she says.
“And he said, ‘This is like a story. If this flower is a story, then all of these roots are the different versions. They twist around each other; they go off in opposite directions.
But that’s what gives it its strength. That’s what makes it hard to uproot. That’s what keeps the story going.” The man was speaking to 20th-century historian James Willard Schultz, who was struggling to make sense of the varying ways Blackfeet people had told him the same stories.
In an oral tradition, Gladstone emphasizes, there’s no one way of seeing things; each person’s narrative is the truth. Gladstone returns to the Blackfeet man and the flower, to its roots, as she makes sense of the infinite feelings Native people may have about “Killers of the Flower Moon.” “That’s how reality is shaped. The universe is the shape of all of these different stories, even if they conflict.” She pauses for a sip of her espresso, into which she’s stirred a dollop of honey — “a Montana thing,” she says, then remembers that she’s met people from other places who sweeten their coffee that way.
But it reminds her of home, so it’s a Montana thing nonetheless — another flower root. Gladstone, 37, is the slow-beating heart of “Killers of the Flower Moon,” the Martin Scorsese-directed epic that examines the Reign of Terror, an insidious string of murders in 1920s Osage County. Robert De Niro plays William Hale, the self-proclaimed “King of the Osage Hills” who betrays the tribe he says he loves, leading a crime ring that circles in on their wealth with the help of his nephew, Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo
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