[6.3/10] There’s a story worth telling in *Killers of the Flower Moon*. The tale of an indigenous population being murdered for their oil money, of state and local authorities ignoring blatant murders because it serves their prejudices and interests, and the feds finally stepping in after so much blood has already been shed, is ripe for the cinematic treatment. What such an event in the not-so-distant past says about our society, and the people involved, could make for an incredible film.
This is not that film. It has the wrong protagonist, the wrong pacing, and only intermittently hits the most fascinating and poignant parts of the story.
The film centers on Ernest Burkhart, a suggestible numbskull. Ernest deliberately and unwittingly does the bidding of his uncle, W.K. Hale, a local operator who’s ingratiated himself into the Osage Nation in Oklahoma at the same time he’s conniving ways to knock them off so he and his family can inherit their oil rights. As part of these machinations, Hale nudges Ernest to court and eventually marry Molly Kyle, an Osage woman with full rights and a family full of people who’ve been the target of Hale’s murderous plots.
Burkhart is our entree into this world and the fulcrum at the center of the movie, and the big problem is that he’s not especially deep or interesting. At best, he evokes the same sense of co-star Robert de Niro’s character in *The Irishman*, a hapless but good-natured goon who finds himself falling into bad company and regretting where his “just do what your told and keep your head down” mentality leads him.
But there’s very little depth to Ernest. He’s a dope at the beginning, and he’s a dope at the end. He seems to harbor genuine love for Mollie and his children with her, but otherwise he’s just a schmuck who seems too stupid and influenced to fully comprehend his choices or their consequences, which makes him pretty tepid and unengaging as a central character. That might be overcome by the acting, but star Leonardo DiCaprio gives the same affected, labored performance you’ve seen him give in a dozen other movies. While not bad, necessarily, it doesn’t have the lived-in character to make you invest in a thin, flat character who takes up too much of the spotlight.
It’s especially frustrating when Lily Gladstone’s Mollie is right there. The tale of a woman who loves her husband, but knows he’s connected to people who only want her family’s money, while trying to convince stodgy government officials to intercede on behalf of a group they either don’t care about or are actively working against, could be incredible. In places, we see glimpses from her perspective, or delve deeper into how the Osage Nation of 1920s Oklahoma reacted to all of this, and it’s the best part of the movie. Filtering it through Ernest’s perspective instead feels like a sad, missed opportunity.
It doesn’t hurt that in a film with multiple Oscar-winning actors, Gladstone gives the best performance in the film. There’s an understated subtlety to Mollie’s responses and reactions that evinces a sense of layers otherwise missing from most of the film’s players. A minor change in her expression, a simple shift in her gaze, can communicate more than the film’s bigger stars can in dramatic monologues. Gladstone steals the show, and the only shame in it is that director/co-writer Martin Scorsese doesn’t lean more into her character as the focus of the piece.
That assumes there is a focus to the piece. While ostensibly adapting the story of the Osage murders, Scorsese and company leave no bit of texture excluded, no cinematic cul de sac unexamined, no narrative rabbit hole unexplored. Some of the inclusions are good! The chance to see glimpses of Osage rituals and traditions amid the broader events is engrossing, and you can understand the filmmakers’ desire to share them with a bigger audience.
But many of them feel like wheel-spinning in a film that barely gets going until it’s two-thirds of the way through. Unlike Scorsese’s best films, this is not a movie with a sense of build or progression. *Killers of the Flower Moon* establishes early that Ernest, Hale, and Hale’s operatives are steadily taking out those with oil rights, and then it just keeps happening for two hours.
There’s very little difference, very little progression, very little interest as Burkhart acts the fool and Hale and enacts his plan in the same, undifferentiated fashion for the bulk of the movie. There’s no tension or intrigue to it, because there’s little sense of growth or change, let alone mystery, as to what’s happening. The notion of Ernest feeling divided loyalties to the woman he loves and the complicated father figure doing some bad things could be worthwhile! (Hello *Departed* fans!) The notion of him feeling trapped by the authorities but unsure how to unravel the net with either family could also be an idea worth exploring. (Hello *Goodfellas* fans!) Sadly, *Killers of the Flower Moon* never really capitalizes on any of this, instead offering reheated versions of the same thing for much of the movie with little in the way of differentiation or momentum.
To the point, god help the pacing here. Even in the film’s most interesting stretch (which is basically when the feds are working through their investigation and tightening the net), Scorsese and company let scenes drag and drag. You could fairly argue that Scorsese needs to trim the fat at a big picture level, jettisoning scenes and sequences that might be alright on their own but don’t add much to *Killer of the Flower Moon*’s larger project. But even in important, meaningful, gotta-have-’em scenes, the conversations lurch and lumber on, while the emotion and energy in any given moment drains away. Tighter discipline in the editing bay could have salvaged some of these scenes, but as is, they, and the movie as a whole, feel bloated and ungainly.
This all makes me sound more down on the movie than I really am. Most of the film is solid at worst, with a few keen bright spots. (The clever radio show epilogue is the most inventive and affecting highlight on that front.) At this stage in his career, Scorsese is a master of his craft able to attract some of the best talents in the business. As a result, there’s some memorable, textured performances in even smaller roles, impressive imagery in sequences like the ones where Hale burns up his property for the insurance proceeds, and even a few piercing human moments between Mollie and Ernest as they weather this storm together and then apart.
In that vein, Scorsese also deserves credit for telling the story, with his heart clearly in the right place even if his focus isn’t. Apart from the quality of the art, using your clout and platform to shine a light on an under-recognized injustice that is a metonym for broader problems in the treatment of indigenous communities is commendable. The events depicted here are both galling and horrifying, and the subject matter is worth the time, even if the execution leaves much to be desired.
But you do a disservice to that worthy cause by centering its fictionalization on an uninteresting dolt, and burying it in three-and-a-half hours’ worth of turgid cinematic bloat. *Killers of the Flower Moon* isn’t outright bad by any stretch. There’s too many talented people across the production for that to happen. But what’s maddening about the film is that amid its missteps and flaws, you can glimpse the outline of a better movie, one which shifts its perspective, kills its darlings, and honors the tragedy, but also the humanity, of the people unjustly cut down, rather than laying its focus on shaming their betrayers.
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