Martin Scorsese Eats His Vegetables

Handsome, majestic, heartbreaking, earnest, Killers of the Flower Moon is also—brace for it—fitfully turgid, a devastating consideration of a national tragedy that has an epic scope but plays more like a loping chamber piece and will leave some moviegoers feeling winded. It’s an important film about an important subject, which might be why the $200 million production feels so overdetermined, overthought, and at times even overwrought.

KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON  ★★★★ (4/5 stars)
Directed by: Martin Scorsese
Written by: Eric Roth, Martin Scorsese
Starring: Leonardo DiCaprio, Robert De Niro, Lily Gladstone, Jesse Plemons, Scott Shepherd
Running time: 206 mins

There’s a self-conscious reverence infusing its too-generous running time, oddly undermining an otherwise nuanced true story with characters that too often default to being either sanctified victims or despicable villains. Based on David Grann’s searing true-crime bestseller, Martin Scorsese’s adaptation is a richly deserving but somewhat fatiguing tribute to the Osage Nation, victims of a secret genocide in 1920s Oklahoma when unexpected oil rights briefly made them the wealthiest people per capita in the world.

Their deaths, among young and old alike, from unusually pervasive illnesses and supposed suicides, raise suspicion among their brethren. As for the local white lawmen envious of their fortune? “No Investigation” is their official retort. “Half-assed savages!” is their dismissive sotto-voce refrain. A more polite assessment comes from William King Hale (Robert De Niro), the menacingly avuncular civic leader and aggressive friend to the moneyed Native Americans. “Osage are the finest and most beautiful people on earth,” he crows to his simpleton nephew Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio). But then, in the same breath: “They’re a sickly people.” His disdain is palpable. “Time will run out,” he adds. “Their oil will run dry”

Burkhart, a felonious beige-colored oaf with yellowed teeth and a busted gut from his stint in The Great War, makes no bones about his lust for easy living and a quick buck. He’s also an equal-opportunity lover. “You like red?” King asks Ernest. “I like the white, red, and blue,” he replies with a grinning grunt. “I like the heavy ones.” King tells him outright that the fastest way to the good life is to marry an Osage and inherit the headrights to their gushing rigs. “We mix these families together,” he strategizes. “That money flows in the right direction.”

“I love money!” says Earnest. Just so we understand this point, he makes it two more times. “That money’s real nice—especially if you’re lazy like me,” he says to his future wife, Mollie (Lily Gladstone). And then, after they’re married, he makes sure to explain this again. “I just love money. I damn near love it as much as my wife.” Mollie’s no fool. “Coyote wants money,” she sneers at him. Amen, sister. But she lets herself fall in love anyway.

Their courtship is brief and a bit too presumptive, which is a shame considering how the entire conflict hinges on believing that these two people really care for each other. They even have kids, who appear briefly and function more like props than people. And when King nudges Ernest more and more into helping eliminate the Osage—eventually even getting him to personally poison his dear diabetic Mollie with tainted insulin—the horror feels oddly muted. DiCaprio and Gladstone, both phenomenal actors, infuse Ernest and Mollie with as much wrenching pathos as they can. And yet too often Ernest defaults to a depressed scowl, while the bedridden Mollie is all furrowed brows and pleading eyes.

Casting De Niro as King is even more of a head-scratcher, since his steely determination comes through even in the most banal dialogue. He’s never not an intense figure, far from the warm, reassuring presence that could have made his role truly insidious. So of course it’s not a shock when he shows himself more and more to be the mastermind behind the serial homicides plaguing the Osage.

Grann’s superb work of investigative journalism, darkly poetic and dripping with dread, is essentially a murder mystery. He wrote Killers as a fact-finding narrative that reveals its sprawling menace with exquisite precision. Scorsese wisely jettisons this approach, rightly assuming that the audience will suss out the clumsy culprits fairly quickly. There’s little sophistication to the thuggish murders, which in its way echoes the mid-century mafioso world that the virtuosic director has often brought to life. And it makes sense to pivot the attention away from a whodunnit to what he has called a “who-didn’t-do-it.”

The decision to explore Ernest and Mollie’s relationship is structurally inspired, but somehow doesn’t feel completely convincing—until the very end. After the law has caught up with King, and all his accomplices, the once-jailed Ernest finally meets with Mollie face-to-face and, professing to be a changed man, admits how liberating it was to confess his crimes. “Have you told all the truths?” she calmy replies, knowing he’s still harboring a pitch-black secret. Ernest’s response, and the way DiCaprio embodies it—emotionally, physically, verbally—is astounding.

The film’s great redeeming moment, after a ponderous courtroom anti-climax and some extended prison-bar banter, is its coda. Suddenly the action switches to an onstage radio show already in progress. “True Crime Stories,” presented by Lucky Strikes, retells the story of the Osage murders, re-enacting its aftermath in the hokey manner of 1930s wireless genre fodder—an early mainstream instance of the grisly events being packaged into reductive entertainment. And Killers switches its dutifully mournful drama into one that’s beguilingly irreverent, unexpectedly moving, and profoundly inventive in a way that’s too often muted in the 200 minutes that preceded it. It’s the pitch-perfect ending to a film that otherwise chooses respect over inspiration.