Killers of the Flower Moon

I'm somewhat swamped with paid work right now, but I needed to jot down some of my thoughts about Martin Scorsese's latest juggernaut of a film.

And by "jot", I mean I'm mostly just going to expand slightly on the comment that I already made on Mark Kermode's review of the film on YouTube.

In very short, I think there's a brilliant two-hour, even two-and-a-half, long movie buried in here, but I found the punishing runtime to be very much to the film's detriment. Especially the middle section, which focuses almost entirely on a succession of murders, which just dragged and dragged. It also had a major problem in that Lily Gladstone's character, Molly, was the only really sympathetic or, to be honest, well-drawn character out of the main cast. Frankly it was only in the final hour that I became at all invested in DiCaprio's Eugene, which is a major problem considering he's clearly the film's main protagonist and POV character. And while De Niro is clearly having a ball as the film's Big Bad (and he's pretty fun to watch too), there's really not much there in the way of depth.

So, the more the film sidelined Gladstone, the more it became about horrible people doing horrible things, which I get is very much a Martin Scorsese thing, but I found it incredibly hard to care for a large portion of the film. And when I didn't care, I became increasingly bored. There is something clinical and forensic about the depictions of the killings, so along with not caring about the people doing the killings, I didn't feel too much emotional attachment to those being killed either - except for the times when Gladstone is there to bring a much-needed human response to these deaths. 

And this is all the more frustrating because when the film works, it works brilliantly. From the bluesy score by The Band's Robbie Robertson (his final work, I assume?) to the uniformly excellent performances to the beautiful cinematography, it's a triumph on a purely cinematic level. The (true) story itself is also quite compelling, but arguably even more so is the very specific cultural milieu in which the story unfolds: an Indian reservation in the 1920s, where the Native American tribe living there suddenly became rich beyond their wildest dreams after accidentally discovering huge reservoirs of oil beneath their land. It creates such an interesting dynamic between the Native Americans and the white people who are inevitably drawn to the area. Sadly, the rather familiar crime-movie tropes get in the way of all this once the film enters its second act - and it never fully recovers from this.     

Clearly, there is plenty that's genuinely great about the film, so it's a real pity that I was left rather underwhelmed and frustrated by it overall. It's too long, for sure, but more importantly, it needed to spend less time on plot and more on character development, especially on those characters played by the film's two biggest stars. It's hard not to wonder what this same story might have looked like had it been told less from the point of view of view of the largely uninteresting murderers than from that of the murder victims, their families and their community. I'm almost certain that it would have been a whole lot better.

7/10