Flower Power?

Over the years, I've changed things here on the blog when it comes to movie reviews. I used to post about basically everything I watched, whether I liked it or not. But these days, I tend to bother with the negative reviews only when it's a buzzed-about movie. It's in that spirit that I feel compelled to offer my $0.02 about Martin Scorsese's three-and-a-half-hour epic, Killers of the Flower Moon. (And given most people's rapturous response to the film, my take is coming in hot.)

Based on the non-fiction book by David Grann, the movie tells the story of a series of murders of Osage Nation members in the 1920s, to appropriate their vast oil wealth. It's a shocking true story that isn't nearly as well known as it should be (much like another event referenced in the film, the 1921 Tulsa race massacre). I didn't know the story myself, until a podcast that I love covered it a few months ago, around the time the film was released.

My sense is that because the story is an important one, combined with the fact that Scorsese made it, combined with the big names in the cast -- this is what has critics anointing it as the only film with any chance of challenging Oppenheimer for the Best Picture Oscar this year. But I feel that while all those things make the movie deserving on paper, the actual sum is unfortunately less than its parts.

It probably won't surprise anyone to hear that a 206-minute movie might be a bit long-winded, but I'll say it anyway. The languid pacing may sound like a reasonable choice for recounting events that unfold over years and years -- but to me it seemed to highlight a "slow descent into evil" for the perpetrators. And the choice to make Ernest Burkhart the main "character" of the story feels like the wrong one to me, or at least to spend so much of the movie trying to engender any sympathy for him when he's ultimately such a villain. For me, that podcast (Cautionary Tales) served up a much more potent version of this story -- and it condensed it into just two 40-minute episodes.

But in my view, worse than any "dramaturgical" concerns about Ernest Burkhart was casting Leonardo DiCaprio to play him. DiCaprio gives a performance that's far too internalized. You see him thinking far too much for a character that the script is constantly telling us is dumb and manipulable. And whether you like DiCaprio's interpretation or not, he's simply too old for the role. For the events portrayed in this movie, the real-life Burkhart was in his late 20s and early 30s. DiCaprio may still look like a movie star, but a movie star pushing 50 and by no means the young heartthrob he once was. The idea that we're supposed to believe him as a grunt returning home from World War I, or a rube without enough worldliness to stand up to his controlling uncle? Ridiculous. DiCaprio reportedly lobbied for the role after originally being cast in the part that ended up going to Jesse Plemons; I think Scorsese made the wrong call in going along with it.

Yes, Lily Gladstone is as good in the movie as they say -- though to me it's very much a "Supporting" role that vanishes for the middle of the movie. (It's being celebrated in the "Lead" award categories because this does feel like a huge role compared to what performers of Indigenous heritage have historically been cast to play.) Robert De Niro gives a fine villain performance, perfectly hateable -- though I might have wished for it to feel more dangerous.

But by and large, I was disappointed at how dry this telling of the story felt. I wish that, rather than devoting so much of my time to the movie, that I'd started reading the original book instead. (I could have read a lot of it in the same amount of time.) I give the movie a D-.