'Killers of the Flower Moon' briefing

3 (out of 4)

            Man, Marty, no director’s cuts for you, just raw, uncut slabs of cinema, roadshows with no snack breaks! At least that’s how it’s been exclusively since Hugo — his one commendable kids movie I always forget exists — seeing as The Wolf of Wall Street was three hours long, Silence was just shy, and now Killers of the Flower Moon meets his last, The Irishman, for that 3 1/2 hour mark and sadly, for most, the runtime drowns out any discussion of the film’s spacious content.

Whereas my way of avoiding discourse about the cinematic present is to properly peruse a cinematic past. Scorsese is nothing less than a living legend, with hardly a misfire or mistake in the whole oeuvre stretching back damn near 60 years. Maybe New York, New York’s combo of Martin’s more realistic, meticulously rehearsed yet loose and unpredictable rhythm directing performance and dialogue with more classical Broadway theatricality felt like oil and water, and Gangs of New York is riding on the passion of Daniel Day-Lewis almost exclusively. Sure, Who’s That Knocking At My Door? felt like a film school warm-up for Mean Streets and The Color of Money doesn’t quite hit like a classic as The Hustler does. His second film, the sprightly caper Boxcar Bertha, was a little toothless, the first evidence of a career that would consistently return to criminal consciousness, but in general I think it unfair to boil Scorsese down to the guy who makes mobster movies — his religious corner (Silence, The Last Temptation of Christ and even Kundun’s spiritual reflections) is home to some of the best he’s ever committed to film history. And while I admit that Goodfellas, The Departed and Wolf are in my top 10, the fact that the same man is responsible for Raging Bull’s old-fashioned rebound (and textbook troubling De Niro-anchored character study, almost more than Taxi Driver), The King of Comedy’s still-scaly satire of our fame-obsessed culture, After Hours’ near-perfect night gone wrong, another biopic to put all others to shame in The Aviator, the pervasive psychological shivers of Shutter Island (let alone his insistently scary Cape Fear remake), the existential experiments in Bringing Out the Dead, the romantic refinement of The Age of Innocence and the sheer modesty of Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, is more than evidence enough of a creator of pretty unmitigated capacity.

In my earned familiarity I was hoping Killers of the Flower Moon would go from vexing vilification to the extra large masterpiece critical consensus has deemed it. My main gripe is how little else besides the epic framework seems to compel curiosity, fear or contemplation about the Osage County murders from about a century ago, as accounted in David Grann’s book of the same name subtitled The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI. While there are interwoven figures and newly forming family trees to keep a tally of, the moral suggestions of this film are unspeakably obvious. Is there room for the grey between good and evil when it comes to covering up dozens of targeted murders for money? This movie takes about five minutes to digest its thematic subtlety and, unfortunately for the dumbass casuals stumbling into a 210-minute movie, doesn’t stock the rest of the runtime with shootouts or showdowns or anything other than mournful semi-sour romantic tragedy.

While I was anticipating some dramatically delicious Neo-Western, what I ended up with is yet another Scorsese crime period picture, sprinkled with the blunt, unflinching splashes of violence, simple human comedy and Brando-like, in-the-moment re-acting. I wish Scorsese had actually strayed into a new genre instead of an updated shade of despicable criminal deconstruction that still somehow just about fits the qualifications for some tough guy’s go-to hangout movie. Like The Irishman, Killers is also a movie made to fall asleep to, unless you can really stick it out, feel the movie’s insistently ponderous energy and finally let some last moments level you like a truck — respectively, a hitman’s heavy regret and the peculiar “true crime” radio show epilogue along with Leo’s last squirm-worthy soul-cleansing. Each denouement lands so much better because the rest isn’t narratively reduced or grandly overwrought but rather carefully mounted.

Lily Gladstone’s fortitude is unspeakably apparent even as you watch her character succumb to secret poisoning — her compounding grief is the fundamental, singular soul of a heartless movie. Scorsese has most directly sampled story-wise from William Wyler’s The Heiress and George Stevens’ A Place in the Sun (Stevens’ Giant, just after Shane, too was a 20th century-set epic Western plus racial tension and oil fortunes), with Leo in Montgomery Clift’s place, taking his respective female co-stars (Olivia de Havilland, Shelley Winters more than Elizabeth Taylor) for a rollercoaster ride of romantic doubt. I think Scorsese saw a lot of de Havilland in Gladstone, the same tempered, simmering disquiet and discontent, though Molly is the far fiercer creature if just as passive — Lily’s performance must double down on the “sickly” in a remarkable, tremendously wrenching display of exponential anguish backed by reserved talent. For Leo’s Ernest, as one questionably taking up a particularly wealthy single woman’s interest, Scorsese’s fresh angle is flipping Clift’s completely cruel characters, instead testing out if a greedy, horrible, dumb asshole really is in love, does that make him less of an asshole or an even bigger one? Sure he just saves his wife from death, but lying about it just the same kinda cancels out the minimum mercy. DiCaprio and his unruly underbite aren’t helping the shortage of subtlety.

So while Gladstone works out bedridden miracles, frankly for such a stupendous set of sparring leads this has got to be the least entertaining Leo/Scorsese affair, though it’s surely better than Gangs of New York at least. But my God, for the FIRST TIME Scorsese has directed DiCaprio AND De Niro together, it should be somewhat more momentous than this, especially for how often they share the screen. Their characters’ final dialogue fills out one of the film’s best scenes, the sole instance worthy of a once in a blue moon cinematic pairing. I almost want to say De Niro is phoning it but maybe I’m not used to a Bobby DN role where he hides behind benevolence, usually he’s playing just as much as dick on the outside as in. This has nothing on his most of his Scorsese roles, classic or otherwise, even the weirder ones like Cape Fear — he’ll never get better than The King of Comedy but Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, Goodfellas and The Irishman (sorry Casino) are untouchable acts as well. King’s character dynamics don’t confirm De Niro as the GOAT but he still runs circles around Leo and his try-hard Revenant-reminiscent jaw-jutting like he’s Keira Knightly in A Dangerous Method. John Lithgow, Brendan Fraser and Jack White make for unexpected final reel appearances.

Whatever backlash is coming from the side of “NOT ENOUGH NATIVE REPRESENTATION” somehow missed the film’s plain-as-day preaching which for sure AIN’T OUT TO PLEASE NON-NATIVE FOLKS. The white devil is in the details, Scorsese couldn’t make that clearer — and I’m all for dramatic irony in the name of pit-in your-stomach, secondhand suspense but in Killers of the Flower Moon the Hitchcockian, proverbial bomb under the table sits there ticking much too long. I love that Marty isn’t holding back anything, his style is simple enough, oscillating between panoramic portraiture and more recognizable, sweeping semi-long takes with active, astounding editing — as always, from the berserk energy of Cape Fear or Wolf of Wall Street to something as cold, reserved and mature as this or say The Age of Innocence and Silence, he only stylizes when the subject demands, or at least suggests it.

Like The Irishman, his 26th feature film (not to mention over a dozen docs) skirts around greatness the entire time — whereas the de-aging and been-there done-that feel kept his grandiose 2019 gangster picture from all-timer status, here too the meandering meditation on evil doesn’t explore moral slipknots and quandaries enough for 200 plus minutes. Given all the time spent on the ins and outs of deplorable backwoods carnage I can actually understand anyone who questions why the Osage don’t have more of their side of the story told, ‘specially since the killer side has specifically been made unexciting. I don’t need good guys, but I do need durable, long-lasting drama that doesn’t just meld into some kind of interrogation with audience — The Irishman lets you decide if you feel bad for Frank Sheeran, and it’s cumulative revelations truly steamroll you given it actually adds up to something greater than the sum of its parts. I don’t find Killers to be a waste, but it's his weakest epic in 20 years.

Though the historical dynamic between European immigrants and the Native American people is such rich soil and decadent tapestry for a revisionist Western historical behemoth of rare might, this is only Scorsese’s most important movie in a long time, far from his most functional, let alone entertaining. But it was a true epic, a work that feels remote and subdued until it all aligns — if it had the poetic subtly, transcendent sense of wide-canvas tragedy and the similarly stone-set sympathy and respect for Natives emitting from Terrence Malick’s The New World, this could easily be named among 2023’s most exceptional. Instead Scorsese’s most ambitious feature yet is up to his steady, assured benchmark and not much else.

"Can you spot the wolves in this picture?" Yeah they’re right fucking there.