Killers of the Flower Moon | Review
Marty Has Done It Again, Folks
Cinemantic’s *second* most anticipated weekend of the 2023 movie calendar has arrived! Luckily for all of you, your friendly neighborhood movie nerds took time this past week to watch Martin Scorcese’s western crime epic Killers of the Flower Moon in its 207-minute glory.
Graham, Caleb, Daniel, and Tyler break down their thoughts on a movie.
Graham’s Review
The Big Picture — The Opening Scene Is Scorsese’s Biggest Risk, and It Works Like a Charm
Tyler discusses the film’s ending below, so I want to talk about the film’s beginning.
It seemed obvious to me reading David Grann’s book how the filmed adaptation of Killers of the Flower Moon would start. After all, the book’s first chapter tells the story of Anna Brown’s (Cara Jade Myers) murder told from the perspective of Mollie Burkhart (Lily Gladstone). The chapter introduces major characters and culminates in the discovery of Anna’s body.
Grann’s writing is so cinematic and suspenseful that the entire time, I was envisioning how Scorsese would bring this sequence to life in a gripping opening set piece to grab viewers immediately.
Scorsese resists this temptation, though. In a lesser director’s hands, that’s the obvious start, and the rest of the film likely plays out as a procedural focused on Tom White’s (Jesse Plemmons) investigation or a slow burn whodunnit that reveals William Hale (Robert DeNiro) as the man masterminding the killings.
But Scorsese doesn’t do that. He trusts the audience enough to take his time laying out the story of the Osage and centering the storytelling on the relationships between Hale, Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio), and Mollie Burkhardt.
The opening scene instead lingers on a depiction of the burial of a ceremonial pipe. It’s not nearly as flashy an opening as I was picturing – but it’s even more poignant and powerful as it sets the stage for the death and transformations to come.
Killers never once drags or feels like Scorsese is grasping at momentum. He is such a masterful storyteller and director of actors that every scene feels like it has some beautiful actorly moment to study, some composition to dwell on.
He lets his performers tell the story.
Between this, Oppenheimer, and Barbie, we’ve got a barnburner on our hands for the Best Picture race.
Caleb’s Review
The Big Picture — Ernest Burkhart Reveals the Root of All Kinds of Evil
Martin Scorsese’s long and meandering epic, Killers of the Flower Moon, unveils the sinister depths of greed in the cold, calculated serial murder of Osage Indians during the early 20th century.
The tragic true story leaves you numb. The 207-minute runtime will slowly take all the feeling out of your legs, and the movement and choices of its characters will overwhelm your thoughts and emotions.
In a New York Times opinion piece, Scorsese wrote that “cinema was about revelation — aesthetic, emotional and spiritual revelation. It was about characters — the complexity of people and their contradictory and sometimes paradoxical natures, the way they can hurt one another and love one another and suddenly come face to face with themselves.”
I suspect Scorsese chose to put Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio) at the film's center because his desires and choices often conflict.
Diverging from David Grann's presentation of the story, Scorsese reveals the primary masterminds and perpetrators of the Osage murders at the film's outset.
We, as the audience, witness the years of collaboration between William Hale (Robert De Niro), his nephew, Ernest, and many other townspeople in orchestrating the “Reign of Terror.”
Our complete visibility into the planning of these atrocities drives home the deliberate integration into and elimination of Osage families to inherit “headrights” to large oil fortunes. Nothing is left to the imagination, which makes these methodical, malevolent crimes all the more terrible to behold.
The building tension and suspense of the film proceeds from the movements of the plot without but also the movements of Ernest within as he is divided between his greed and his love for Mollie (Lily Gladstone) his Osage wife.
We are constantly left to wonder how far his contradictory and paradoxical nature will take him as he hurts and loves those closest to him.
Aligned with Scorsese’s understanding of cinema, Ernest comes face to face with himself, and we, too, must come face to face with a disturbing reality: ordinary people can commit extraordinary evil when they succumb to their basest desires.
Daniel’s Review
The Big Picture — Cinema’s Caretaker Has A New Muse
Killers of the Flower Moon has been on my radar for a few years. Any news of “Martin Scorsese to direct” or “Leonardo Dicaprio to star” has my attention. Throw in Robert De Niro as well, and it’s almost too good to be true.
I pictured how Scorsese would tell this story. He’s no stranger to the themes of striving, conspiracy, excess, and betrayal (GoodFellas, The Departed, The Wolf of Wall Street, Casino, etc.). The heart of this story is what fascinated me as I read the book, learning more about the relationship between Mollie Kyle and Ernest Burkhart and the tragedy of the Osage murders.
For months all we had was one promo image. You’ve seen it.
Lily Gladstone was mostly an unknown, and she was about to share the screen with one of the biggest movie stars of the century. Gladstone didn’t just share the screen, she swallowed up the entire frame and her soulful and heart wrenching performance will be etched in my memory for a long time.
The depths she portrayed as Mollie Kyle – from a woman falling in love (with her guard up), to grieving the loss of her family members – only to come to the devastating knowledge that her husband has been central in the demise of her health and her family.
Gladstone haunts the audience with the weight of that betrayal, and she carries the emotional center of this tragedy right to the final quiet moments between her and DiCaprio.
It’s a performance that we will be talking about for years, and could very well win her a Best Actress Oscar.
Down the line, the craftsmanship of Killers of the Flower Moon was top-notch, and I would love to see another statue (or two) make its way to the Scorsese residence this spring.
Given Scorsese’s age, there is not likely time for him to collaborate with Lily Gladstone much more often, if at all.
I would love to see Lily Gladstone become one of Scorsese’s muses. How I wish there was time to see a few more performances together. He has worked with DiCaprio and De Niro on six and ten features, respectively, several of which sit in the canon of cinema.
I have many more thoughts on Martin Scorsese and will be sharing that soon. While in the later stages of his career, Martin Scorsese is still operating at an extremely high level, and every picture he makes deserves to be seen and deeply considered.
Tyler’s Review
The Big Picture — In Scorsese We Trust
It’s the ending I didn’t see coming. After Leonardo DiCaprio’s dim-witted Ernest Burkhart confesses to (almost) all of the crimes he committed on behalf of his evil uncle, played by Robert DeNiro, the movie jumps forward in time. It’s a jarring transition.
Gone are the windswept plains of Osage Nation, Oklahoma, 1920s. Instead, we’re dropped into a 1940s or 50s radio hall where a live radio broadcast is performed on the stage. The topic of the evening? The “Reign of Terror” at the heart of Killers of the Flower Moon, sponsored by J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI.
A narrator updates the audience on the fates and fortunes of the film’s characters. A brass band creates tension with each musical cue. A sound engineer’s table of curiosities produces each gunshot and doorbell. Performers' voice acting resurrects the movie’s departed.
An audience eats up the murder and misfortune with glee.
We think we’ve seen it all.
Then, the moment that left a lump in my throat and a tear in my eye.
A producer walks on stage to the microphone and reads, word-for-word, Molly Burkhart’s (an Oscar-worthy Lilly Gladstone) obituary — in which there is no mention of the murders.
The producer is played by Martin Scorsese.
It might initially seem corny or self-aggrandizing, but it’s true to the film and the filmmaker.
At age 80, we don’t know how many other Martin Scorsese pictures will be. He seems to understand that, too. In putting himself in this epilogue, he allows himself to reflect on one of the biggest themes of not just Killers of the Flower Moon but of his entire career: the glorification of evil and its corrosive effect on the soul. We’ve seen him tackle it in Goodfellas, Casino, and The Wolf of Wall Street, but never so matter-of-factly or so poignant as in this film.
If Scorsese’s career is to end with this picture, then he goes out on a sustained high note. It's a profound and moving coda at the end of an unrivaled masterclass.
Readers, have you had a chance to watch Killers of the Flower Moon? What were your thoughts on Marty’s latest? Let us know in the comments below!
One of the finest aspects of the movie is the editing. Did it feel like a 3 hour 26 minute movie? Nope sir. It felt more like 2 hours and 2 minutes. I was hoping the movie to drag like most movies above the 3 hour mark usually do but the screenplay was thoroughly engaging.
Never has a three hours plus movie gone by so quickly—at least not since The Right Stuff. KFM definitely gives Oppenheimer a run for its money. There has to be an Academy award nomination in there for Robert De Niro, who gives one of his best performances. . The screenplay—also by Scorsese—is Oscar-worthy as I think that Scorsese does a brilliant job of synthesizing the complicated storylines of David Grann’s book. But he also tells the story visually, cutting between the murders and the Osage efforts to save their culture. The movie is 3 1/2 hours long but it never drags. The cinematography is outstanding, particularly the fire scene at Robert De Niro‘s farm with Leo DiCaprio and his wife, looking out the window seeing the orange flames, suggesting DiCaprio has descended into hell. Jesse Plemmons nicely underplays the role of the FBI agent with an attitude that says he knows who did it and is just waiting to find him. And of course Lily Gladstone is the moral center of the story. All in all and subject to further review by the Rewatch Official, KFM edges out Oppenheimer for Best Picture.