SPOILER REVIEW! Killers of the Flower Moon and How It’s Different from The Book!

00:00:01
Speaker 1: All right, let's get into it now. The spoiler version of our Killers of the Flower Moon review. If you are here, you have either watched the movie already or you don't care about spoilers. But this is your final warning because we're about to get into it all and.

00:00:14
Speaker 2: I'm gonna spoil so much.

00:00:15
Speaker 3: I want you to just to go off right now.

00:00:17
Speaker 2: I'm just gonna give an entire synopsis. I'm sitting here because you read the book from just buckle up people, three hundred pages. I'm just going to read the whole book.

00:00:24
Speaker 3: Do you read the book? I did not, so you started off Okay.

00:00:27
Speaker 2: First of all, I'm really bothered by the fact that his brother's name was Byron in the movie and it's Brian in the book. Why do we need to change that?

00:00:35
Speaker 3: I don't know. Maybe I thought it was an accent thing.

00:00:37
Speaker 2: No, it was larn Byron and in the book it's Brian. Okay, the book. The biggest difference right off the bat is that you know throughout the whole movie that Ernest and his uncle are bad.

00:00:49
Speaker 1: Yeah, so what happens in the movie is Leonardo DiCaprio comes back for more. He was working as like somebody who serves people meals.

00:00:58
Speaker 3: Yeah, it was a cook, it was feeding them, and he comes back.

00:01:01
Speaker 1: De Niro is his uncle and in the so the difference is in the book you don't know the entire time, but in the movie, right at the very beginning, they devised the plan of him to marry Molly and try to get.

00:01:17
Speaker 3: How did they describe it again, her head right.

00:01:19
Speaker 2: So it's called a head right. So it's what each O Sage member gets for like the oil money each year. But some of them were deemed incompetent, meaning that like a guardian would have to help take money out. But the other thing is that Molly is a full blood Osage and so what happens is and this is the same in the book as it is in the movie. Her sister Many dies of what they call wasting illness. Her sister Anna disappears and is found shot. So that's another thing that was different in the movie is that they just like immediately go to finding Anna's body. She's missing for about a week in the book and no one can find her, and then they find her body and then eventually Rita dies and then her or does her mom die before Rita? I don't remember they follow the right order in the movie of how the sisters die, but the idea is that like then Molly's getting each of their head rights and then She's left with all of them. But you don't know who's after them the whole time. And then you find out that William Hale, the uncle, is responsible, and then you find out that Ernest, Molly's husband has been working with him. So you yeah, and the book it's so much more shocking.

00:02:41
Speaker 1: And I think that's what I wanted to get into is after you told me that, I think that would have made a better movie, because there are moments in this film where these murders are happening that you don't realize it's Leonardo DiCaprio at the time that he's there. I think there was one instance where they go back where they killed the detective and you don't see him in his initial killing.

00:02:59
Speaker 2: Yes, and then you see him clear it up after And I.

00:03:01
Speaker 1: Think if they did a movie like this, or if they just would have did the style where you find it all out at the end of it and you go back to all those murders and you see Leo either there involved or him orchestrating it. I think that would have been a great movie. The problem with that it probably would have been an hour thirty an hour forty.

00:03:19
Speaker 2: Five, Yeah, because it's very slow to get there.

00:03:21
Speaker 1: You couldn't have kept that mystery going throughout the entire movie of three and a half hours. So I thought that was interesting to change that entirely and reveal that plan at the very beginning that it's de Niro and DiCaprio working together to devise this plan of essentially what happens in this movie will do a real quick run through. He marries Molli, they get they have some kids, and they start killing off all of her sisters because if they are able to kill everybody in the family and then kill Molli.

00:03:54
Speaker 2: The head rights all go to Leo and then.

00:03:56
Speaker 1: It'll keep it in the family. De Niro gets money and everybody's good good, So they devised this plan. They hire people around the town to kill off each of her.

00:04:06
Speaker 2: Sisters, and but then there's also other people that end up dead. Is like collateral. There was Henry who was good friends with the uncle who also have any Molly's first husband from when they were very young. Yeah, they basically went based on there were how do I say this. There were a lot more people killed than just Molly's family. Yeah, but it does center around the fact that, like her whole family was killed off, but there were a lot more killed off. And even in the movie they talk about how many people died, they weren't investiating in the book, they go into that they were like, there were so many other murders. My other thing that I would have loved to have seen more in the movie, but I feel like it would have been too much of a side plot was more of how the FBI was created with kind of white Jesse Pleman's character, it just kind of glosses over. He shows up and he's like, I'm from the Bureau of Investigations.

00:04:58
Speaker 1: So what happens is mall he gets sick, she gets diabetes and she has to take insulin, which is just created around this time, and then Leo's character, her husband is poisoning her through the medication.

00:05:11
Speaker 2: With these doctors, these very shady doctors that were responsible for a lot of help assistance with the murders. They would sign off on insurance policies as well for people because William the uncle would take out entrance policies on people and he'd be like, oh, they're my friends, but he was really like then plotting to murder them and the would get the money the entrance policy. So yeah, these doctors were so shady.

00:05:33
Speaker 1: So she gets sick with diabetes, thinks she's taken insulin to make her better, but she's getting more and more sick, and there's one scene where she is so sick that jesse Plemon's well, she gathers up the string before she's terribly sick and goes to DC yes to tell the president what is happening. That leads them to sending people down who essentially are the first people in the FBI. And that's when jesse Plemmon's character shows up to DiCaprio's house and says he's there to investigate.

00:06:01
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's actually and I got to tell you this, but Tom White, who jesse Plemmons is playing, he was a former Texas Ranger. His dad was like a Texas Ranger. His dad was actually a ranger in Travis County in Austin, which is really interesting. I might have gone, oh, he mentioned the text, but yes, his dad was in Travis County, which is the Austin area. But he like moves to Oklahoma, moves his family because Jay Edgar Hoover, like who created the FBI, wants him to lead it. And then he brings in all these other people. One poses as like an entrance salesman. One is a Native American, so he blends right in. But yeah, there's a lot more details about the work of the FBI in the book, which I thought was really that was actually the act of the book that I thought was the most fascinating was how they discovered all of it.

00:06:52
Speaker 1: Yeah, I thought the movie was gonna deal with it more. But at that point in the movie, everything is somewhat going according to plan with their entire scheme to get the money, aside from a couple deaths that have left behind a little bit of a trail. And then from there the investigation kind of starts. These members of the FBI start questioning everybody. They start picking up on things that if anybody had gone out there at any point would have picked up on that clearly these people were being murdered so they could take their money, and then it leads to DiCaprio's character and the Nero's character going to court. The part I didn't like was the ending really too, which is also what I held against it in my review.

00:07:37
Speaker 2: Yeah, the ending was.

00:07:38
Speaker 1: The ending was weird because once it gets revealed, whenever Molly finds out that her husband was the one poisoning her, it just kind of ends. And then it goes to this radio show telling all the details of the fallout. And I didn't like that.

00:07:52
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's where we have Jack White by Scorsese. It's very random.

00:07:57
Speaker 1: It's a weird scene and a weird way to end the movies. Orsese has a cameo there, and they essentially just tell you instead of showing you everything that happens. And I thought that was lame. I thought that was such a weak ending for this entire movie. That didn't even fit the style of the entire movie. It's just like, all right, here's a live radio show of all the fallout of it, and then it just kind of ends. How was the ending of the book different as far as Molly figuring that out? Was it still kind of along the same lines because in the movie you don't know anything that really happens.

00:08:31
Speaker 3: Afterwards, we said she ended up divorcing him.

00:08:34
Speaker 2: Yes, she divorced him remarried. I think you they say that in the movie and like the.

00:08:38
Speaker 3: Live radio show Oh yeah, which was dumb, But I.

00:08:40
Speaker 2: Feel like in the movie they like expressed she was like a little more like still loving to earnest her husband, but so she was in denial in the book and then when she found out that it was true, left his ass.

00:08:52
Speaker 1: Yeah, I would have too, But I feel like still even now that if it would have focused more on the members of the Osage tribe, it would have been a lot more impactful, because one of my favorite scenes was probably in the third act where they go and talk to everybody and there's a leader there telling them that you know, back in the day, we would have went and killed the people who were doing this to us, but we don't know who the people are now, And it just made me feel so bad for the O Sah people and what they had to go through, and the fact that these people around them wanted nothing to do with them until they had the money. It just feels so slimy and it feels so horrible. And like you said that there was more death in the book that showed you how much of a massacre it was. That the movie didn't really show a whole lot of that you do see murders throughout the film, but as far as making the magnitude of what actually happened in history come across more, they focused so much on Leonardo DiCaprio and his uncle and their plot that it just felt more like a crime epic than it did what actually happened in history.

00:10:04
Speaker 2: I was relooking through the book and I was finding in part three when he talks about how many more deaths there were, David Grant, the author does a little bit more investigation of how many people had guardians, and like how many of those guardians had other words are what they were called. And he found that one guardian around the time of all these deaths had eleven wards, eight of whom died. Another guardian had thirteen wards, more than half of whom had been listed as deceased. One guardian had five wards, all of whom died, and so on it went. The numbers were staggering and clearly defied a natural death rate. And because most of these were never investigated as impossible to determine how many deaths were suspicious, that is crazy.

00:10:50
Speaker 1: That is just crazy to think about, and it also, in a weird way made me think about I'm glad I was born in the time period I did, because, gosh, just the fact that you could get away with this so easily back then, and the fact that it seemed like you didn't really have any security.

00:11:08
Speaker 2: I think about that often, but more from a public health perspective of like having a medicine, yeah, tuberculosis, Oh well.

00:11:14
Speaker 1: I just think of it like at any point, somebody could just come to your house and be like I want this house now and take your house, or burn your house down, or just be brutally murdered somewhere. Not that it can't happen now, but I feel like back in the day there was just so much more fear that I would have living my day to day life. And to feel now like so secure and like there's a normalcy to everything in an order. I don't know, it's just a weird thing I had watching the movie that made me grateful for being born in the time period I did. The other part that excited me is whenever they said the line from the trailer that I keep repeating over and over.

00:11:48
Speaker 2: Can you find the wolves in this picture?

00:11:52
Speaker 1: And I think it's funny just because of all the quotes for me, to stick out from this movie.

00:11:57
Speaker 2: That's that also was a very random plot point. It wasn't even like a big It was from a book that his uncle gave him to learn about the Osage, and that's literally a line and a picture.

00:12:09
Speaker 3: Can you find the wolves in this picture?

00:12:11
Speaker 1: But in the trailer it shows all the people there at the end, whenever they're trying to get him not to testify, I get it against his uncle and you see all these people and you get like a big, grand like old school portrait of these people, and you have to pick out, like who was actually good here and who was actually evil.

00:12:28
Speaker 3: That was another aspect I.

00:12:29
Speaker 1: Liked about this movie, where all the photographs that were taken throughout of the Osage people, and I like those little moments of like them capturing that little small snapshot of remembering it.

00:12:40
Speaker 2: I'm just in shock that. So this is our spoiler of you if you're listening to our regular episode. We forgot Brendan Fraser was in this film.

00:12:47
Speaker 3: Yeah, I was about to get to hear which.

00:12:50
Speaker 1: Yeah, there were so many people that I knew were in it, but I forgot what characters they were going to play. I found Brendan Fraser's character to be a little bit comical because he was so over the top, and that's probably how that person was meant to be portrayed.

00:13:04
Speaker 2: Oh I'm sure, but in John Lithgow sorry.

00:13:06
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, but in my head he was like George at the Jungle acting in that moment John Lithgow was in there.

00:13:12
Speaker 3: There was just so many random cameos.

00:13:15
Speaker 2: My favorite was Barry Corbyn playing the Undertaker, big one Tree Hill fan.

00:13:22
Speaker 1: He was yeah, yeah, there there were so many people in this movie. When yeah, and you have a three and a half hour movie there, you're gonna be a lot of cameos.

00:13:29
Speaker 2: I wanted just more justice for the fact that Mollie was duped by this man her.

00:13:36
Speaker 1: Yeah, entire marriage, that's yeah, that's a hard thing to think about.

00:13:40
Speaker 2: And he was had a hand in the brutally murdering every single one of her family members. Because I don't know if they talked about this in the movie either, but her mom was poisoned. It wasn't a natural death.

00:13:51
Speaker 3: Oh no, Yeah, they didn't mention that.

00:13:53
Speaker 2: Well in the book Bill Smith, her brother in law had a suspicion and they never investigated that. So, yeah, all of them were. I think her sister Minnie's was the only one that was natural causes, and that I read the book like two weeks ago, and you all know I've read like five more books. I think Mini's death may have even been suspicious of the wasting illness.

00:14:14
Speaker 1: The sad part about the mom dying was whenever she was realizing that she was starting to go, she sees the owl, and that was kind of the symbol of you're about to move on to the next life. And then the part where Molly sees the owl, I was like, oh, no, she's gonna die too. But then you realize that she's being poisoned. During that investigation, they take her from the home where Leonardo DiCaprio has kept her and they take her to a hospital. When she gets better able to walk, it's kind of a heroic moment of all the crap that her character goes through, of losing all of her sisters, all of her family, and then her at the point at the brink of death and then comes back from it. I wanted to see more of the rise of her back because that's a major part, and I think sometimes Scorsese, I don't think he does it on purpose, but he kind of minimizes the female figures in his movies, Like even though a lot of his female figures do have this power that is understated and kind of at the bottom of it all, you have these strong women. I feel like you could have really brought her character, like just showcased her a little bit more of all the crack that she has gone through. At the end of it, she should have had like this big triumphant, overarching like I got out of this. But I guess if it doesn't really line up with what happened in history, you couldn't do that.

00:15:30
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, also, I don't really think there was I mean, she remarried, but she still died young, like her whole family had been taken. Okay, I went back to the part in the book.

00:15:38
Speaker 3: One thing I'll say before you get that.

00:15:39
Speaker 1: I wish it would have had the Quentin Tarantino re writing history and she killed Leonardo DiCaprio's character.

00:15:46
Speaker 3: I guess that's what I wanted.

00:15:47
Speaker 2: Oh, that would have been good, like something.

00:15:50
Speaker 1: To wear like, Okay, she's been taking an advantage of and lied to she kills him.

00:15:55
Speaker 2: That would have been really good.

00:15:56
Speaker 1: It would have made for a great movie, but again probably not hystorically accurate anyway.

00:16:00
Speaker 2: Good So, Yeah, her sister Many died like a couple years before all of this started, but her death had come with shocking speed, and Molly harbored doubts. Many had only been twenty seven and had always been in perfect health. And then another thing I found was like figure a number about why they were considered the wealthiest people per capita in the world. In nineteen twenty three alone, the tribe took in more than thirty million, the equivalent today of more than four hundred million. Good God, because of all the oil. Yeah, they didn't really accurately state that either.

00:16:37
Speaker 1: They showed it with the amount of jewelry and nice cars that they had and the fact they had drivers taking them everywhere.

00:16:44
Speaker 2: It was some of the largest oil deposits in the US, and so certain that oil prospectors had to pay the OSAH for leases and royalties.

00:16:51
Speaker 1: Dang, that is crazy. That's why those people were so mad. That is a lot of money.

00:16:57
Speaker 2: Yep, Okay, And that's all I have about the book before I read the whole thing on podcast.

00:17:03
Speaker 3: Anything else you felt about this?

00:17:05
Speaker 2: Still a good job of casting. There are pictures in the book.

00:17:08
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, you're showing me that.

00:17:09
Speaker 2: Real pictures of Molly and her family and Earnest and Tom White, and I thought they did a really good job.

00:17:14
Speaker 1: So I feel like this is a movie that if you go back and read the book, you learn a whole lot more.

00:17:19
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think you can still read the book after.

00:17:22
Speaker 1: I guess it's just different that you it spoils itself because you already know that he is behind it.

00:17:29
Speaker 2: But you learn more how they figured it out. The investigation process is cool. They use well, they have an informant, but he's like double timing them.

00:17:39
Speaker 1: Fact that the FBI wasn't created till the nineteen twenties, Yeah, that's also bizarre.

00:17:43
Speaker 2: It is really bizarre.

00:17:45
Speaker 3: But yeah, I.

00:17:45
Speaker 1: Still stand by my four out of five rating. You stand by yours.

00:17:49
Speaker 2: Four out of five for the movie, four point five out of five for the book.

00:17:51
Speaker 3: Well, there you go.

00:17:54
Speaker 2: That's it. That's all we have.

00:17:56
Speaker 3: All Right, we'll talk to you next time.

00:17:57
Speaker 1: Until then, go out and watch good movies and I will talk to you later.