As my 164th movie of 2023, I have finally seen Killers of the Flower Moon.
There was a chance I would have seen it nearly 70 2023 movies ago. It was in line to be my 95th 2023 viewing back on October 21st, when there was a chance I would have seen it just two days after it was released in Australia. You may recall me mentioning that when we were in Sydney for my 50th birthday, my wife had originally described the day after my birthday as a free day where we could do whatever, including me going to a movie, before our flight later that night. She meant a 90-minute movie, not one more than twice that length, so it seemed too cruel to push it through even though I could play the birthday card.
The 206-minute length continued to keep it off my list of theatrical priorities, once I'd missed my initial chance to see it and turned reviewing duties over to one of my other writers. Eight o'clock was about the latest any theater was starting it, which meant it would take me out of play for dinner with my family, unlike those movies I sneak out to at 9:20. I could have pushed it through but it just seemed too daunting.
Besides, I knew it was coming to AppleTV+. I just didn't know when.
Some movies that have an exclusive relationship with a streamer have only a short theatrical run before debuting on the streamer. David Fincher's The Killer would be a good 2023 example of that. It was on Netflix about two weeks after it debuted in theaters. (I did end up seeing it during its theatrical run, as you will recall from this post, and that was in part due to missing out on the similar scenario with Martin Scorsese's latest.)
But two weeks passed, four weeks passed, six weeks passed, and only then did I hear that Killers of the Flower Moon was available -- and still only for the premium $19.99 rental.
You might have thought me a bit panicked by this point. I had already heard one of the most talked about movies of the year discussed on several podcasts, trying desperately to avoid spoilers but also getting more of a sense of what to expect from the movie than I might have liked. I also, of course, had to edit my own critic's review of the movie. Which told me some things but thankfully did not include spoilers. (I knew that Lily Gladstone's character was "sidelined" for the second half of the movie, which caused me to wonder if that were a euphemism for "dead.")
But I held strong. I knew the AppleTV+ premiere was looming. I was just playing a game of chicken to see whether it would be before my January 23rd ranking deadline. If I knew it wouldn't be, I could always pay the $19.99 rental fee.
Finally I won out. I learned that Killers was finally coming to AppleTV+ on January 12th, and the only reason I didn't carve out the time for it last weekend was that I was out of town. I finally did that yesterday, setting up the projector in my garage and starting it around 4:20 in the afternoon. I only paused long enough for bathroom breaks and the like and finished it just before 8. (I was told not to break it up. I usually only break up a movie when it's unpremeditated and I've fallen asleep.) Yes I know that's a lot of uses of the word "finally" in one paragraph, but it's designed to show you how long the wait felt.
And because this was my white whale, I'll write now to tell you what I thought about it, even with my finalized rankings set to reveal all in just a few days. And because I assume I am, indeed, the last cinephile on earth to see this movie, the following will include SPOILERS.
For most of its running time, I thought Killers of the Flower Moon was a 3.5-star movie. I didn't take any issue with Scorsese's filmmaking, and in fact, I felt like I was in the hands of classic Scorsese in his depiction of characters being abruptly shot when they didn't imagine they were in any danger. That's Goodfellas all over.
What bothered me was the constant menace posed by the white characters, and the extreme trusting nature of the Osage, who failed to identify that menace in a timely manner.
It occurs to me that because a film shows us what's happening, it makes it seem like this should have been plain as day to the people it was happening to. Obviously that was not the case with the Osage, who certainly had historical reasons to distrust whites but may have been genuinely placated by the idea that white men were marrying their women. Who would go so far as to marry someone just to pull off a scam? Isn't there too much sanctity to marriage to do this?
Then you've got characters like Bill Hale (Robert De Niro), learning and voluntarily communicating in the Osage language, demonstrating a very overt friendship to the Osage and constantly positioning himself as their alley. He wouldn't do that just to profit off the Osage, would he?
I don't think the Osage were that naive, but Scorsese only documents brief scenes of elders showing general wariness of the intentions of the white man. These elders did not translate this to wariness about the specific white men who were actually robbing and killing them, despite what seems like ample evidence that they should have. Again, it's difficult to tell whether this is because they were too trusting, or because a film with an omniscient perspective allows us to see things that they could not see.
Still, the result was for me to feel almost as frustrated with the Osage as I was disgusted with the evil men who preyed on them. This was especially the case with Gladstone's Molly Burkhart. Gladstone's inarguably excellent performance is undermined by the fact that even among all these deaths of her people, and specifically her people (as in the people in her own immediate family), she was unable or unwilling to see the danger under her own nose. Even as her own husband was mixing her insulin with another substance that was meant to "slow her down," and quite obviously did.
I get that this is Scorsese's point. In what is ultimately a bracing indictment of colonialism and atrocities carried out by white people throughout history, we are meant to understand the powerlessness of their victims, which enabled them to ransack and spread across the face of the earth. But maybe this is where the length of the film comes into play. Because this goes on for so long on screen, we are aching for some sort of agency on the part of the Osage, some moment when they won't stand for this shit anymore. It is a long, long time in coming, and even the early attempts showcase a blindness to the true villains that seems irresponsible in its failure to analyze the available evidence.
Part of the problem with this is that I did not find the relationship between Leonardo DiCaprio's Ernest Burkhart and Molly convincing enough. I didn't believe that they had some amazing connection based on a true alignment of their souls. Probably in part because Gladstone is such an intelligent actor, Molly projects an intelligence vastly superior to that of Ernest, which suggests she should see right through him and not be wooed by his dopey charms. And in case you think she's just drawn to the handsomeness of Leonardo DiCaprio, he's got bad enough teeth to offset most of that. If we are to believe she really failed to identify the culpability of her own husband for so long, it can only be because she is head over heels for him and believes the same to be true of him. The evidence of this is just not there, so it looks like she's just gullible.
Then of course I was just put off by the thing that Scorsese executes exactly as he intended to, which is to show how brash these white men were about killing the Osage without consequence. Ultimately there is a consequence, of course, but before then these killings go uninvestigated for so long, and are carried out with such indifference to making them seem like something other than what they are, that it balled my fists. We see Hale and Burkhart freak out when some woebegone underling botches a killing that was meant to look like a suicide, but even the consequences of this sort of screw-up take a lot longer to arrive than I would have thought. And then there are times when they just don't care how it looks and damn the consequences. I get it: This is the point. This is what white Americans could get away with in the 1920s. That didn't make it extremely frustrating to watch, almost as though it was a fault of the way the story was being told.
Of course, in its final hour, as the consequences start rolling in, I did find that the justice I was seeking made the experience of watching Killers of the Flower Moon more satisfying. But it wasn't until the final ten minutes that this thing really jumped forward by leaps and bounds.
First there are, of course, the two big scenes between two of the three leads, where Ernest finally stands up to Bill and Molly gives Ernest the chance to come clean with all his truths. One of these gives Ernest a temporary moral high ground, and the other pulls it away from him again. This is a very satisfying turn of events for all the characters involved, as we finally see some long-desired agency from Molly as well.
Then there's the radio play, which had never been spoiled for me in all I had heard about this movie. What an interesting and potent way to bring this into more modern times, both in the world of the film and in our world. I never would have guessed that Scorsese would have pointed a finger at us for our love of true crime podcasts in a movie set in the 1920s. I was floored by this way of closing the film, as it wraps up all the characters with the frivolous productions values of radio entertainment, and also leaves us with a lasting thought to ponder from the director himself.
Then there's the image of the drum circle, that pulls out to the final height, looking down on presumably today's surviving Osage. Incredibly profound. My only disappointment with this had to do with the fact that when the credits began rolling, AppleTV+ immediately offered up a trailer for Ted Lasso, and though I moved quickly to click on the now-shrunken credits window, it played the trailer anyway. Because it would have taken a couple minutes to get back into that place in the credits, and because I was now late for making dinner for my kids, I didn't get to see more than ten seconds of the credits of this film, when I'm sure I would have liked to linger in that Osage drum music for another five minutes as I let the film's ultimate conclusions wash over me.
Two other thoughts before I leave you.
1) Although many of us thought of The Irishman as Scorsese's big career retrospective statement, I liked what this one was doing as well, in the obvious ways related to themes but also in the pitting of DiCaprio and De Niro against each other on screen. When I looked it up just now, I was hoping that the actors had appeared in an equal number of Scorsese films. In actuality, De Niro still has an edge by four movies over DiCaprio, 10-6. But putting them together for the first time in one of his films seems like an intentional way to honor his two great collaborators, and put me a little in mind of that moment when De Niro and Al Pacino finally shared their first scene together in Heat. That said, I find only one of these actors really good in the film. I was glad to see De Niro still capable of so much, at a time when he is making a lot of films that are beneath him, while I found Leo doing a fair bit of play-acting here, most notably as he juts out his jaw in a fashion that seemed very artificial and very try-hard.
2) Getting back to Fraser, mentioned in the opening line of this piece, I was surprised at how little he was used, and how bad he was. One of the first things I ever heard about Killers of the Flower Moon was that Fraser was in it, and I think in some version of the timeline, Killers would have come out first and been the movie that announced Fraser's return, and The Whale would have followed. If that had been the case, I can't help wondering whether Fraser would have lost Oscar votes for his performance in The Whale because of how bad this performance is.
So I told you that for a long time, I thought this was a 3.5-star movie. You now know I think it's more than that.
How much more?
Well, I'm still wrestling with that, and I don't have a lot of time.
I have given the movie a gut star rating on Letterboxd, as I require myself to do. But as I see how I continue to think about it over the next few days -- and maybe as I listen to the spoiler portion of one podcast that I avoided listening to at the time -- I will have a truer understanding of my feelings on the film and where it should go in my rankings.
I guess you'll have your answer by Tuesday.
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