Less than a month away from his 81st birthday, Martin Scorsese has released his 27th feature film: Killers of the Flower Moon. If you haven’t heard of Scorsese, I can almost guarantee you have heard of one of his movies. One of the most important American filmmakers of all time, he directed movies such as Goodfellas, The Wolf of Wall Street, and Taxi Driver.
Killers of the Flower Moon is a film about an under-talked-about American tragedy. Based on the exceptional nonfiction novel by David Grann, Killers details the period of time in the 1920s after oil was discovered on Osage Land in Oklahoma. Osage people became the richest per capita in the world, which led to them beginning to be murdered one by one, before the FBI stepped in to solve the mystery.
While this movie has a lot of Scorsese’s signature flairs, like whip-pans, long oners, and voiceover narration, it is also new territory for him. The film starts in classic Scorsese fashion: through chaotic cutting, energetic music, and a constantly rolling camera, Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio) arrives on Osage land to work for his uncle (Robert De Niro). Very quickly, however, Killers becomes different from most Scorsese movies. Although it is filled with gruesome violence, as many of Scorsese’s movies are, Killers uses a slower pace to convey the manipulative and harrowing ‘love’ story at the center of the film, that of Burkhart and Mollie Kyle (Lily Gladstone). Gladstone isn’t the film’s central character, but its emotional weight rests on her shoulders. She plays an Osage woman whose life is riddled with unspeakable tragedy that is caused by people she has grown to trust, and she gives one of the most devastating performances in recent memory.
A big discussion point online has been the film’s exuberant, 206-minute runtime. Scorsese is at the point of his career in which he should be allowed to do whatever he wants to, he has earned it over 50+ years of moviemaking. As Roger Ebert once said, “No good movie is too long and no bad movie is short enough.” In this day and age, I’m sure that many who consider seeing the movie ultimately won’t due to its runtime. Even though it was long, I was utterly captivated from start to finish; I could’ve watched another hour.
The out-of-left-field ending won’t work for everybody, but it did for me. It smartly critiques the consumption of true-crime stories, which had real consequences for real people, as entertainment. I walked into the theater expecting an entertaining movie about conflicted criminals, and instead I got a melancholic and grim epic about how America was built upon the evil deeds committed by those in power. Despite my expectations not coming true, I wouldn’t have it any other way. If anyone has doubted whether Scorsese is one of the best filmmakers of all time, let Killers of the Flower Moon be your answer.
