After watching the new release Killers of the Flower Moon in theaters, I kept thinking of a quote by the writer James Baldwin: "People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them."
Adapted from the 2017 non-fiction book of the same name by David Grann, Killers of the Flower Moon explores the premeditated, systematic murders of dozens of Native Americans living on rich oil reserves in the Osage Indian Reservation of northern Oklahoma that happened mainly in the 1920s. These murders catch the attention of leaders in Washington, D.C. at the time and a team of FBI researchers show up in Oklahoma to uncover the force behind the murders. This book is incredibly well-written, because it organizes the complex history of the Osage murders so smoothly and explains them with the right balance of simplicity and intricacy.
Given that Martin Scorsese (The Irishman, 2019) is the director and co-screenwriter of this, I was expecting Killers of the Flower Moon to have a violent, complicated, emotionally charged attitude similar to his famous gangster/mobster crime films Mean Streets (1973), Goodfellas (1990), Casino (1995), The Departed (2006), and most recently The Irishman (2019). But this film does not fit the large-scale historical epic genre like the book does or like the director is comfortable with.
Instead, this filmic treatment of brutal American exploitation is mostly focused on the marriage between a White down-trodden man (Leonardo DiCaprio, The Wolf of Wall Street, 2013) and a wealthy Native young woman (Lily Gladstone, Winter in the Blood, 2013) who gradually find each other on opposite sides of this devastating story. Centering the story around this marriage makes this film feel more intimate and human and less like an academic history lesson. Both DiCaprio and Gladstone give Oscar-worthy performances. They both don't say a lot in this film, but their faces communicate everything.
Killers of the Flower Moon is a quiet, methodical, and patient western that doesn't rely on crescendos of music or emotion. Its vibe is reminiscent of other reserved westerns like Tender Mercies (1983), The Sisters Brothers (2018), and Nomadland (2020). Because it takes its time and gives such a stripped-down, laconic interpretation of David Grann's book, this film's narrative energy is not one of forensic mystery thriller. It's more like a funereal elegy told with dignified honesty.
Being almost three-and-a-half hours long (the exact running time is three hours and 26 minutes including the end credits), this film has a demanding running time and it packs a heart-breaking punch. (Films like this remind viewers American capitalism is not all about ingenuity, hard work, and success.) But because it's so long and has such a consistently restrained energy, the interest in the story slows down noticeably in the last 45 minutes. (Please note I didn't say the interest dragged in the last 45 minutes. That word is too strong for this film. But its energy has a noticeable change in the latter half.)
This could be more accessible to a wider array of audiences if it were shorter. But we should all be thankful this chapter of 20th century America has made it to the big screen. I thought this film tells its story expertly, and I hope many more people make the time to see it.
