![[DISCUSSION] [SPOILERS] - KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON - Leonardo DiCaprio, Robert De Niro, Lily Gladstone](https://deadline.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/killers-of-the-flower-moon.jpg?w=681&h=383&crop=1){kind=link}
| RELEASE DATE | RUNTIME | IMDB | ROTTENTOMATOES | METACRITIC |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Oct 20, 2023 | 3hr 26m | 8.5 | 94% | 90 |
Premise:
Members of the Osage tribe in the United States are murdered under mysterious circumstances in the 1920s, sparking a major F.B.I. investigation involving J. Edgar Hoover.
Director(s):
Martin Scorsese
Writer(s):
Eric Roth, Martin Scorsese, David Grann
| CAST | ||
|---|---|---|
| Leonardo DiCaprio | … | Ernest Burkhart |
| Robert De Niro | … | William Hale |
| Lily Gladstone | … | Mollie Burkhart |
| Jesse Plemons | … | Tom White |
| Tantoo Cardinal | … | Lizzie Q |
| John Lithgow | … | Prosecutor Peter Leaward |
| Brendan Fraser | … | W.S. Hamilton |
For all the talk of Scorsese honoring the Osage in the production, I felt like Molly and the rest of the tribe were pushed into the background for a good 2/3rds of the movie in order to tell the story of the emotionally tortured white guy who keeps helping murder his in-laws. It felt like Molly’s only real moment of agency was when she went to DC to beg for an investigation.
Also, I for one (and my girlfriend and our friend for two and three) felt that this 3.5 hour movie felt like a 3.5 hour movie. It would have been better served as a miniseries à la Chernobyl, not least because I understand a lot of content from the book didn’t make it to screen. I feel like Scorsese is too much of a purist to have entertained that route though. There are enough big plot beats that you could break on big plot beats and it wouldn’t feel like… well, a 3.5 hour movie.
Having read the book, that was kind of the point. They didn’t have agency, because it was literally robbed from them at every moment. And during the part of the story where Ernest is under scrutiny and forced to own up to his sins, his wife is as passive as it can get, because she’s on death’s door and bed-ridden. It would be artificial to give her a big presence there, because in reality she was in the process of literally disappearing from the world. Molly actually gets more of an emotional presence onscreen, in part because the book is a more journalistic account and first hand sources of who she was are limited. I would like to have seen some scenes of her moving on with her life afterwards at the end in place of that weird epilogue.