Directing: B+
Acting: B+
Writing: B
Cinematography: B+
Editing: B

I have conflicting feelings about Killers of the Flower Moon. One of the burning questions about it is whether or not it’s a “white savior” movie, and, without contextualization, it absolutely is not. This is a film that easily outclasses any film like The Blind Side or Green Book, and does not deserve to be in the same conversation with them. On the other hand, on a much more meta level, there is an argument to be made that such elements creep in: this is, after all, made by an 80-year-old White man, speaking for the Osage Nation and thereby decentering their very specific point of view.

It’s easy to go back and forth on matters of this sort. This film is telling a vital, American story that has never been told on this scale with this scope of distribution, after all, and a director like Martin Scorsese is one of few with the clout to make it happen. Does that make it right that no Indigenous director has been given the resources to tell such a story to as many people? Of course not.

There is some debate regarding the central character, Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio), and the moral ambiguity with which he is presented and characterized. He has returned home from World War I, and taken into family business by his uncle, William Hale (Robert De Niro), by whom he is easily manipulated. With relative ease, Hale puts Burkhart into the path of an Osage woman named Mollie (a stupendous Lily Gladstone), who is one of the local Native American tribe who struck it rich by discovering oil wells on their reservation land. And this is Hale’s clearly stated intention from the start: to marry his family members to Osage women and thus secure land rights.

Ernest Burkhart, for his part, is a bit o a simpleton, incapable of much in the way of critical thinking. Over time, it becomes less and less clear how much we as viewers are expected to sympathize with him. Is it possible for him genuinely to love his wife, while at the same time taking an active part in the murder of both her people and her siblings? This is where much of the debate and discourse about Killers of the Flower Moon is going, and I am not convinced that was what Scorsese wanted to happen. The more important question regarding Ernest’s capacity for romantic compartmentalization (a concept he would not likely understand) is this: does it matter? The man’s a fucking murderer.

Making Ernest the primary protagonist of this film was a choice. Making him seemingly morally ambiguous, perhaps even vaguely morally conflicted, were also choices. The reasons for these choices may be the central mystery of this film, but to its credit, Killers of the Flower Moon does not let any of its White characters off the hook—least of all Ernest. It could be said that it makes sense for Scorsese to have centered these violent, White men because that is the story of both American history and Scorsese’s own filmography. That still leaves us begging the question as to whether Scorsese was the right choice for telling this story. If nothing else, much like the 1921 Tulsa race massacre—which gets a couple of mentions here—the Osage Nation “Reign of Terror” between 1918 and 1931 are not known to many, but are a deeply important part of American history. Now a lot more people will learn about this tragic chain of events.

How do you characterize how much you “like” a film like this? I find myself comparing it to last year’s The Fabelmans, which was also a late-career project by an iconic director, and which I loved. As cinema, it succeeds to a much greater degree than Killers of the Flower Moon, but it also does as entertainment. Killers of the Flower Moon wants to be more art than entertainment, but can’t escape also being the latter, its subject matter notwithstanding. It’s almost shockingly lacking in the cinematic flair of your typical Martin Scorsese film, which makes sense if he wants you to be paying more attention to all this shit that happened, than to any technical filmmaking achievements.

And on that level, Killers of the Flower Moon really works. This film is already famous for its runtime, at three hours and 26 minutes—although to be fair, that’s still three minutes shorter than The Irishman (which I felt was overrated, as is this film, albeit to a lesser degree). For a film that is pointedly not “propulsive,” with a consistently measured pacing, it’s genuinely impressive that it never lulls or feels tedious. It does not feel three and a half hours long. And the events depicted here are something we should all be sitting with for a while.

The issue, if indeed there is one, is in the point of view offered within that runtime. I happen to agree with the idea that it would be better for the entire story to be told from Mollie’s perspective as opposed to Ernest’s. There’s no reason this couldn’t have been done, skillfully, even with Martin Scorsese as Director. He could have gotten input from Indigeous and particularly Osage people (which, incidentally, he did), and maybe at least hired an Indigenous person to cowrite the script with him—instead, he wrote it with Eric Roth, another White guy (who cowrote both Forrest Gump and Dune, so at least he’s got range, I guess). The final result is at times uneven, as when Ernest is reading a line from a book aloud to say, “Can you find the wolves in this picture?” I thought, That’s a little on the nose.

I’m always interested in the reactions of critics and audiences who are part of the people being depicted onscreen, and in this case reactions have ranged from ambivalent to fawning. I would call Killers of the Flower Moon a solid yet imperfect work of cinema, a genuine achievement, but for now at least, even I fall in the ambivalent category. Subsequent viewings may very well crystalize my feelings, but at least this movie, even at this length, warrants multiple viewings.

Overall: B+