For his latest film, the 80-year-old Oscar winning director delivers 206 minutes of systemic and systematic racism, brutality, betrayal and genocide as a white family of privilege does everything in its power to destroy one particular Native American family in order to steal its claim to oil fields in Oklahoma.
Trust me when I say that even though “Killers of the Flower Moon” doesn’t feel like three-and-a-half hours, it’s still a tough slog, if only because it’s like watching a serial killer in real time, only you can’t warn the unsuspecting victims and you can’t look away.Scorsese reteams with his favorite actors, Robert DeNiro (11 films together) and Leonardo DiCaprio (seven films together), and while both deliver exceptional performances, I don’t see any chance for either to come out on top over the cast of “Oppenheimer” in any acting category at next year’s Academy Awards.
Speaking of “Oppenheimer,” there’s a striking contrast to be made between these two movies that should be near the top of most Best-of-2023 ballots come December.
Christopher Nolan’s 180-minute retelling of the birth of our atomic nightmare is harrowing and impactful, but entirely captivating. Every performance adds an intangible, indelible spark.
Ironically, there are long stretches of “Killers” where the last thing you want to do is spend more time with DiCaprio’s Ernest Burkhart because the way he plays the character is so method that it’s almost unbearable to watch.
By that, I mean, Burkhart is not the brightest bulb or the sharpest tool; he even tells Mollie, the Osage woman he courts and marries at the insistence of his uncle Bill (De Niro), that he prefers to be lazy.
There’s not a ton of room for personal growth when you start that far below the ground floor in a subspace basement reserved for dim personalities, and with a three-plus-hour movie, sometimes those personal growth arcs can make the difference.
If anything, I wish Scorsese had spent more time telling Mollie’s story from her own perspective, instead of filtering much of the action through Ernest’s POV. In part, this is selfish because Lily Gladstone is so damn good as Mollie, you just want to see her more and more.
“Killers of the Flower Moon” is a fitting late October release, even if it wasn’t intended to be a horror movie, but because it focuses so heavily on Bill and Ernest’s ill-fated plan to slowly eradicate all of Mollie’s relatives and then even more slowly poison her in order to steal her oil rights, it hits all the notes that horror fans are accustomed to seeing.
Deceit. Death. Despair. Repeat.
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This article appears in Oct 19-25, 2023.