Martin Scorsese’s latest film, Killers of the Flower Moon, arrived over the weekend with plenty of fanfare from cinephiles. (My condolences to anyone watching the movie next to a rowdy screening of the Eras Tour experience.) But while most of the discussion around Killers of the Flower Moon has been positive, a familiar critique has reared its ugly head. As with The Irishman, the biggest point of contention surrounding Killers of the Flower Moon has nothing to do with the plot, performances, or artistic choices: It’s all about the run time.
One of the masters of American cinema is back in theaters this Friday. In celebration of the release of Killers of the Flower Moon, The Ringer welcomes you to Scorsese Week.
- The 20th Century, as Told by Martin Scorsese
- Martin Scorsese’s 81 Greatest Movie Characters, Ranked
- The Story of Martin Scorsese’s Most Forgotten Film
- The Subtle Art of the Scorsese Cameo
- Martin Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio: An Essential Pairing
- Martin Scorsese’s Great Crossroads
- The Legend of John Joseph Mathews
In a year when many franchises—and blockbuster auteur Christopher Nolan—are putting out their longest installments to date, Killers of the Flower Moon clocks in at 206 minutes. It’s a meaty movie, to be sure, but the notion that its run time is inherently off-putting has little historical basis. After all, three of the four highest-grossing movies of all time—Titanic, Avatar: The Way of Water, and Avengers: Endgame—go past the three-hour mark. (If you adjust for inflation, Gone With the Wind is the most successful movie ever made, and it’s nearly four hours long.) There’s no need to fret over a movie’s run time: To paraphrase Field of Dreams, if you build a good film—especially one that deals with important and enduring issues like the exploitation of marginalized communities in the United States—moviegoers will come. Killers of the Flower Moon certainly fits the bill, and it makes every minute count in its harrowing tale of greed, cruelty, and violence.
Based on the journalist David Grann’s nonfiction book of the same name, Killers of the Flower Moon covers a disturbing period in the 20th century sometimes referred to as the Reign of Terror. After the United States forcibly displaced the Osage Nation from Kansas and sold the tribe seemingly worthless land in Oklahoma, a rich reservoir of oil was discovered beneath the ground. As a result, the Osage became the wealthiest people per capita on earth by the 1920s, which also put a target on their backs. Dozens—if not hundreds—of the Osage were killed because of the tribe’s ties to oil, as many of the perpetrators sought to obtain the headrights to their fortune. (Compounding the injustices the Osage suffered was a federal policy requiring white “guardians” to manage their financial accounts because they were deemed incompetent.) The murders eventually drew the attention of the newly formed Bureau of Investigation, the government agency that preceded the FBI.
Grann’s book initially frames the killings as something of a mystery and spends a lot of time on the investigation led by BOI agent Tom White (Jesse Plemons), which was how Scorsese and cowriter Eric Roth first approached tackling the film adaptation. However, after consulting with star Leonardo DiCaprio—who was originally cast as White—and more than 200 Osage people, the script was reworked so that the story centered on the tragedy of one family in particular. As Scorsese explained to Time, “After a certain point, I realized I was making a movie about all the white guys. ... I was taking the approach from the outside in, which concerned me.”
The Ringer’s Streaming Guide
There’s a lot of TV out there. We want to help: Every week, we’ll tell you the best and most urgent shows to stream so you can stay on top of the ever-expanding heap of Peak TV.
The film begins with World War I veteran Ernest Burkhart (DiCaprio) moving to Osage County, Oklahoma, to work for his uncle, William “King” Hale (Robert De Niro), a local godfather type who has befriended many of the Osage. As a town chauffeur, Ernest meets Mollie Kyle (Lily Gladstone), a member of a wealthy Osage family who also happens to be single. One thing leads to another, and soon Ernest and Mollie get married and start a family. While they don’t deny that Ernest is attracted to her money, the affection they have for each other appears to be quite genuine. (There is more tension around their relationship from both of their families: Mollie’s mother chastises her for marrying an opportunistic white man, while Ernest’s relatives are appallingly racist and judge the couple’s children by the color of their skin.)
From the onset of Killers of the Flower Moon, it’s clear that Hale sees his nephew as a means to an end: a handsome, affable bachelor who can tie their family to an even greater fortune. But it’s not enough for Ernest to marry into Mollie’s family: In order for him to claim the all-important headrights, her sisters must be removed from the equation. As Mollie mourns one relative’s death after another, she’s also slowly withering away from diabetes, even though Hale has procured insulin, which is being administered to her by Ernest—something is amiss. Mollie’s plight is a microcosm of what the Osage experienced: sudden, unexplained deaths that were treated as tragic, random occurrences, even as more and more evidence suggested there was a larger conspiracy.
What makes Killers of the Flower Moon such an excruciating watch is the way these killings drag on, and how indifferent the rest of the community is to the tribe’s suffering. (The Osage ended up traveling to Washington, D.C., to raise awareness of what was happening to their people.) And these murders weren’t an isolated incident: The film also invokes the 1921 Tulsa race massacre, which was spurred by the prosperity of the district known as Black Wall Street. The common thread across these atrocities is white people who feel threatened by thriving minority communities, and the fact that those violent acts were carried out under the assumption that the people responsible would never be punished.
For a while, that holds true: Killers of the Flower Moon spends much of its run time showing the perpetrators of the Osage murders—particularly Hale as the conniving architect—getting exactly what they want. What’s more, what Hale and people like him were doing echoes the colonizer mindset; the white Oklahomans in the movie act as if the Osage aren’t entitled to what they inherited, and that taking their money away from them is merely a corrective action. That Ernest actively participates in the eradication of Mollie’s family—and, eventually, even the tainting of her insulin shots—is the most devastating development of all. Mollie is naturally skeptical of all the outsiders circling her people like vultures, but can you blame her for trusting the father of her children?
As a viewer, it’s shocking to see how long it takes for the Osage to receive even the smallest measure of justice. By the time the BOI begins looking into the killings, two-plus hours of the movie have elapsed, and Mollie is on the brink of death. The fact that the BOI show up so late in Killers of the Flower Moon is a point unto itself. These killings aren’t the work of complex criminal masterminds, but rather of people who earnestly believe they’ll be shielded from any accountability. The investigation, in turn, is hardly an investigation at all: Agent White and his men quickly identify many of the culprits, which include the local doctors who handled the autopsies of the victims and poisoned many of the Osage with tainted medication. But regardless of which individuals were ultimately brought to justice—and there weren’t many—you’re left with the sense that the entire community is complicit. Evil was allowed to operate in plain sight.
While his filmography spans many genres, Scorsese has long been our finest chronicler of American crime epics: stories that explain how greedy, corrupt men throughout history have made our country what it is today. In its empathetic, unflinching portrayal of what the Osage went through, Killers of the Flower Moon is no exception, and it more than earns its extravagant run time. Films that spend time on such depth and detail for important yet overlooked stories like this should be celebrated, rather than criticized or approached with trepidation. The Reign of Terror is almost impossible to fathom in its cruelty: white men brazenly attempted a transfer of wealth through mass murder they barely bothered to cover up. Unfortunately, these crimes aren’t exactly an aberration, either. The kind of violence and racial animus that the Osage experienced a century ago still reverberates today—something that’s as intrinsic to our nation’s DNA as the oil lying underneath its soil.
