Even for Martin Scorsese, a master of turning true stories into hot movies, “Killers of the Flower Moon” is a high-wire act of filmmaking.
Its subject is a lot trickier than the rise and fall of Howard Hughes or the stock market shenanigans of Jordan Belfort. The serious drama is about the horrific Osage Nation murders of the early 20th century, in which many wealthy Native Americans in Oklahoma were slain by conniving men who wanted their money and oil-rich land.
KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON
Running time: 206 minutes. <br>Rated R (violence, grisly images and language.) In theaters October 20.
“Hugo,” it ain’t.
And, at three hours and 26 minutes, “Flower Moon,” a captivating blend of true crime and Western, is only 180 seconds shorter than the notoriously long “The Irishman.” Runtime, of course, was the at-home audience’s No. 1 beef with the Netflix gangster flick.
But good old reliable Marty pulls it off again, addictively unraveling a tale that’s almost too terrible to be true with panache, gusto and just the right amount of cultural respect.
Plus, it’s phenomenally entertaining. Scorsese remains one of the very, very few directors who can craft an “important” movie that’s also stylish and easy to devour.
It’s hard to believe it’s been 10 years since he last teamed up with Leonardo DiCaprio in the much bouncier “The Wolf of Wall Street.” They’re together again — no coke and hookers this time — for their sixth collaboration, which, for DiCaprio, is also his greasiest.
With a shrewd combo of exploded Southern personality and dark realism, he plays Ernest Burkhart, a sniveling sleazeball who comes to Fairfax, Oklahoma, in the 1920s to live with his uncle Bill (Robert De Niro) and work there as a cab driver. Bill is grandly known as King Bill Hale, a powerful and beloved mover and shaker who’s helped build up the town into a Main Street, USA kind of place.
De Niro, excellent, gets to be deceptively two-faced.
That’s because Bill’s nice-guy exterior and generous philanthropy hides a sinister motivation — he enlists his susceptible nephew to marry Mollie (Lily Gladstone), an Osage woman, so he can inherit her lucrative headright to a valuable plot of land once the rest of her immediate family dies.
And how does an entire clan conveniently wind up six feet under? They have to be killed.
This is where Scorsese’s CV comes in handy. “Killers of the Flower Moon” is not a Mafia movie — rural Oklahoma is not exactly a Gambino family stronghold — but it arguably has the DNA of one. Hale’s stooges, including Ernest and his brother Bryan (Scott Shepherd), shoot Mollie’s sisters one by one and then cover it up.
This director, as to be expected, does not shy away from gruesome violence ever. If somebody is shot in the head, we see it in full view.
What emerges is a decades-old culture of silence and corruption in Osage County, which is far in the periphery of the state and federal government and therefore the wrongdoing is allowed to persist. Everybody’s in on it. The police, the coroners, the doctors and the shop owners all quietly condone these crimes or even help with them.
The heartlessness is heart-wrenching. The luminous Gladstone carries the movie as Mollie agonizingly experiences one sister’s tragic demise after another — an unfathomable amount of loss that really happened.
The actress, sure to be an Oscar favorite, prefers restraint to showboating and she knows exactly the right moment to grab us by the collar. She’s especially brilliant as Mollie’s husband’s misdeeds come to light and she can’t decide if losing him, the man who has caused her so much pain, would actually make her life even more unbearable and lonely.
Jesse Plemons arrives midway through as an FBI agent assigned to finally investigate the inordinate amount of death in Fairfax. And, like “Oppenheimer” earlier this year, Scorsese throws in a lot of celebrity cameos. Brendan Fraser, John Lithgow and Jack White all stop by for a chat.
We meet what seems like a million people over three and a half hours — the acting ensemble is uniformly great — and the effect is a sprawling and complex web of lies that you’ll ponder well after the credits roll.
Just like “The Irishman,” if you experience “Killers of the Flower Moon” in a theater and give it your full attention from start to finish, the rewards are many.
Scorsese, who’s at the top of his game at 80 years old, defended his movie’s length in a recent interview.
“People say it’s three hours, but come on,” the director said. “Give cinema some respect.”
Hear, hear!
