Before I get into the review itself, I want to do what I can to make sure you’re prepared for this movie. I’ve been excited for Killers of the Flower Moon for a long time now. Scorsese is a true master of the medium and has been for fifty (yes that is FIVE-ZERO) years now. Couple those skills with having Robert De Niro and Leonardo DiCaprio as your two most frequent collaborators and you’ve got a recipe for some fine damn motion pictures.
Fairly early on in this movie though my excitement was hit by a Mack truck of emotions. This movie is bleak and the story is heartbreaking. This is a far cry from something like Wolf of Wall Street tonally, so just make sure you’re prepared for what you’re in for.
My Thoughts
I think it’s good to go into this movie with as little information as possible so I will be very light on the setup. This is based on a true story that took place in Oklahoma in the 1920s and is about a series of murders of the Osage people, a Midwestern American tribe of the Great Plains. The film stars Leonardo DiCaprio as Ernest Burkhart, Robert De Niro as William King Hale who is Ernest’s uncle, and Lily Gladstone as Mollie an Osage Native American. There’s also an impressive supporting cast as well but to avoid spoilers I will leave them out of this review.
It’s impossible to talk much about the performances in the movie without giving too much detail away here, but it should surprise absolute nobody that DiCaprio is fantastic as Ernest. He’s our main character in the movie and much of the events are told from his perspective.
However, I was most impressed with Lily Gladstone and Robert De Niro in this one. Even though DiCaprio is the lead, Gladstone carries the heavy emotions of this movie on her back for nearly the whole film. Her character is quite reserved throughout the movie and her performance is understated most of the time. I heard Scorsese mention how much she can convey with just her eyes and he managed to capture that aspect of her performance beautifully. Overall, it’s a heartbreaking performance that was solely responsible for snapping me back to attention from my giddy excitement of a new Scorsese picture. I can’t heap enough praise on her and I expect some buzz for her come awards season.
De Niro is interesting because I think there is a whole generation of people around my age that may not know just how good De Niro actually is. For most of my life De Niro has been in a lot of movies with some highs and lows and everything in between. For people older than me, you might be more familiar with his work in Goodfellas, Mean Streets, Casino, Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, and The King of Comedy to just name the masterful performances he’s given in other Scorsese pictures. If you’re my age though, you may remember him from much worse movies like Little Fockers and Dirty Grandpa.
If you either forgot or didn’t know how good Robert De Niro is, you’ll see exactly what he is capable of in this movie. At 80 years old De Niro still manages to just disappear into this role and deliver an unsettling portray of William Hale. The way that he so effortlessly switches between the supportive and caring face of this character to someone so cold and calculated truly induced genuine awe in me.
I want to briefly pivot though from these performances to talk about the importance of the story that unfolds here. I consider myself something of a history buff and I’m an avid consumer of true crime stories (another thing gifted to me by my Gram) and it’s concerning how little I knew about this story. It was to my benefit as the events of the movie unfolded, but that benefit pales in comparison to the cost of this story not being more widely known. It really is heartbreaking and horrific and I felt Scorsese in this film do the best he could to handle the material and do justice to the Osage people.
Even if you don’t watch many movies, I think this should be considered mandatory viewing just to know what travesties occurred here. The fact this is made by some of the most talented people on the planet is honestly just an added bonus.
I also briefly want to talk about the runtime. I’m personally not a fan of this discourse because to me a bad movie is a bad movie and a good movie is a good movie. I’ve watched garbage movies that only clocked in at ninety minutes and I’ve watched perfect movies that were over four hours long. Just a few weekends ago I did a marathon of the extended versions of The Lord of the Rings Trilogy with my friends Abby and Sam which took us over twelve hours to complete and I could’ve stayed in Middle Earth longer if Peter Jackson had made more movie for me to watch.
Listen, the point is that runtime doesn’t determine the quality of a movie. There is a lot packed into this movie but one thing in particular that adds so much weight to this story is just how much time passes from the first of these suspicious deaths before anyone does anything meaningful to figure out just what the hell is actually going on. When someone finally starts seriously investigating these crimes, it hits you how much has happened and how much time has passed while these crimes went on completely uninvestigated.
Finally, one last thing I want to discuss is the way that Scorse shows violence in his films. There were similarities to the violence in this and the violence in Scorsese’s last film The Irishman. Now this could be just me, but what I felt during these moments is just how easy committing these violent acts are for his characters. I don’t mean that it’s easy to simply pull a trigger, but it’s so easy morally for these characters to take life. It’s as if it means nothing to them and the way in which these acts are shown I think is a deliberate choice. I grew up on slasher movies, the Saw franchise, and Tarantino movies where violence can range from absurd and almost funny to brutal and horrifying. But to some of the characters in this movie, violence is just part of life. A means to an end. It’s not flashy or stylized. It’s even almost sloppy and amateurish sometimes.
To put it another way, these awful killings are treated as casually as one ties their shoe and the movie doesn’t rely on over the top gore, loud sounds, or other cheap ways to make you feel a certain way. What makes you feel unsettled is just how matter of fact it all is. I found myself unsettled by this and it added to the emotional trauma of this story because of that, which is increasingly rare with modern cinema.
Verdict
This is a special movie for so many reasons. I’m writing this review just a few hours after I’ve seen the movie for the first time. I will need to sit with this more to just take in what I’ve seen, but I know I will be watching this one again to really feel it.
Also, I’m not the most qualified to speak on all of the creative choices made on a technical level but in Scorsese’s hands, he uses the medium to help enhance every feeling and emotion throughout the entire runtime. Every aspect of this movie feesl so deliberate that once the movie grabs ahold of you, you’re locked in until it releases you with the credits.
It pains me that someday I will be watching Martin Scorsese’s last picture. I hope that doesn’t come for a long time, but we shouldn’t take it for granted while he’s here.
Run, don’t walk, to the theater to see this one!
Adriana Wiszniewska
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