KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON (Martin Scorsese 2023)

[Chris Knipp]

MARTIN SCORSESE: KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON (2023)


ROBERT DENIRO AND LEONARDO DICAPRIO IN KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON

Scorsese's new film is powerful and insistent, but a numbing artistic disappointment

Featured at Cannes, London, and Athens, but notably not at the New York Film Festival, now in theaters and soon to be online via AppleTV, Scosese's new movie is based on a compelling work, David Grann's 2017 Times bestseller, Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI. This book - not the movie - is, in the blurb's description, "A twisting, haunting true-life murder mystery about one of the most monstrous crimes in American history."

Specifically, the book concerns the serial killing of oil-rich Native Americans of the Osage Nation in Oklahoma the 1920's to gain control of their wealth. It's a forever timely work because the subject is so rich in American evils: racism, hatred of the Indians, greed, frontier lawlessness. This is immensely important material and it's not surprising that the great American director, who spent a lot of his career spinning out tales of American evil, usually of the gangster kind, would have decided that he wanted to make an epic film about this subject. And to some extent, given his extraordinary skill set and physical and human resources, Scorsese has been able to make such a film.

But not quite. Though there is much to admire, and this May 2023 Cannes Competition film has gained many accolades, there are problems with format and approach that seriously mar the result.

An excessive length, by ordinary mortals' standards, of three and a half hours makes Killers unsuitable for a theatrical watch. But the fun has been drained out of the storytelling for any kind of watch. Grann's book remember, was a "twisting, haunting true-life murder mystery." His text is suspenseful, presenting a series of unexplained events whose secrets are only slowly revealed. (The fledgling FBI, then known only as the Bureau of Investigation, is working on them, with a star detective, Tom White played in the movie by Jesse Plemons) The screenplay adaptation takes out the mystery, closely following the main perpetrators from the beginning and giving away what they are up to. What's left is just one long, flat, obvious unravelment, a revelation of what we already know, hitting us over and over with the same dull blows of dreary and inescapable fact.

Those guilty parties are Robert DeNiro, as the slick and slimy motormouthed William "King" Hale, and now six-time Scorsese star Leonardo DiCapro as Hale's slow-witted ex-Army cook, malleable nephew Ernest Burkhart. ("This dumb dolt, with bran for brains? Why should he take center stage?" asks Anthony Lane.) We know these guys, the actors, anyway, all too well. They've never been so drab and ugly, though. In these roles, they're the last pair you'll want to spend three-plus hours with. As Kyle Smith in the Wall Street Journal put it, "experiencing the film is akin to being locked in a room with a pair of soulless sadists."

The balance or contrast comes from an impressive newcomer, Lily Gladstone as Molly, Earnest Burkhart's Osage wife. But Gladsone, a forceful but stolid presence, provides no relief from the numbness and grimness. The systematic murder of one relative or family member after another is repeated over and over again in constant repetitions of the same depressing mistreatment. It's underlined all the while by the late Robbie Robertson's repetitious and thudding score, consisting of an endlessly repeated guitar or bass note to echo what Smith calls the "Soul-deadening" events onscreen.

This is another time Scorsese has turned away from the Hollywood system. He went to Netflix for his repetitious and boring 2019 The Irishman (3 hours, 29 minutes), and now resorts similarly to Apple (3 hours, 26 minutes), perhaps because the studios, still thinking of people sitting in movie seats, would have urged him to trim his material down to theatrical-watching size.

Much that is quality in Killers gets lost in the numbing repetition-with-variation of events. Plot winds up weighing much more heavily than character development. However polished the two big star's schtick is, it's really just repeated over and over.

An astonishing effect is how little sense of place there is. Only occasionally we get the feel of being among oil wells and newly rich settlements, the kind of place depicted so memorably in Edna Ferber's Giant as filmed in George Stevens' epic 1956 realization. (Stevens gave us three hours and twenty minutes too, but they were thrilling, and still are.) Scorsese's film is claustrophobic and dark, with glimpses of a frontier town and lots of little cars tooling around. How do these people live? The film is so focused on planning and executing the killing of Osage people and the obsession of Earnest Burckhart with his Osage wife Molly and his subjugation to William Hale, whose patsy and enforcer he becomes; it's all close-ups and interiors.

In the context of place it's surprising to learn that the Osage are not deeply connected with Oklahoma where they're suddenly grown so rich with the discovery of rich oil sources, but had already been shunted from region to region, state to state, before this. It's almost as a mere footnote that the 1921 Tulsa Race Riot of Black Wall Street Massacre is mentioned, as also Hale briefly mumbles about the Ku Klux Klan, whom he seems not to disapprove but merely find unsatisfactory for his purposes. It's also notable, again only in passing, that he uses the racist white southern formula "nigra," a once-familiar blending of "Negro" and the "N-word."

These are all subjects that might have been explored more fully in a film that opened up in stead of narrowing down its treatment.

The use of Brendan Fraser and John Lithgow toward the end in legal roles only adds a stagey and artificial effect.

Direction, cinematography and other technical features are fine. It's ranking high as an Oscar hopeful, below Poor things and Oppenheimer and just above Barbie, at the moment.

Killers of the Flower Moon, 146 mins., debuted at Cannes in Competition May 2023; also BFI London and Athens. Wide release worldwide Oct. 18 and 20, 2023 in theaters and on streaming. Metacritic rating: 89%.