‘Reservation Dogs’ Star Devery Jacobs Slams ‘Flower Moon’ for Osage Characters Who Are ‘Underwritten’ and ‘Helpless Victims’: ‘Watching This Was F—ing Hellfire’
variety.comZack Sharf Digital News Director Devery Jacobs, the Indigenous actor best known for playing Elora on three seasons of FX and Hulu’s “Reservation Dogs,” took to X (formerly Twitter) to share the “strong feelings” she had about Martin Scorsese’s “Killers of the Flower Moon.” She called out the $200 million Western crime epic for not portraying its Osage characters with “honor or dignity” and for further dehumanizing them by depicting their deaths.
The film is based on a true story and centers around the Reign of Terror, a term given to the murders of at least 60 members of the Osage nation in the late 1920s. “Being Native, watching this movie was fucking hellfire,” Jacobs wrote. “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.” The film stars Leonardo DiCaprio as Ernest Burkhart, a World War I veteran who moves to Oklahoma to find work under his uncle William Hale (Robert De Niro).
It doesn’t take long for William to convince Ernest to join his scheme to rob the Osage of their extraordinary wealth. Ernest marries an Osage women, Mollie (Lily Gladstone), and her family members become murder targets in William’s scheme. “It must be noted that Lily Gladstone is an absolute legend and carried Mollie with tremendous grace,” Jacobs wrote. “All the incredible Indigenous actors were the only redeeming factors of this film.
Give Lily her goddamn Oscar. But while all of the performances were strong, if you look proportionally, each of the Osage characters felt painfully underwritten, while the white men were given way more courtesy and.
Read more on variety.com