WHAT TO WATCH

There’s a really incredible movie buried somewhere in “Killers of the Flower Moon.” 

In fairness, the movie we did get is pretty good. Based on David Grann’s 2017 nonfiction book of the same name, “Killers” tells the story of a series of shameless murders that occurred in Osage County, Oklahoma in the 1920s. The Osage Native Americans had become wealthy through oil discoveries, but a white businessman and his nephews swooped in and started conning and killing people to get the money. It’s a microcosm of how white people have long approached Native Americans and their possessions, and director Martin Scorsese rightly treats it as searing commentary on the entire concept of the western. 

The cast is also excellent. Robert De Niro and Leonardo DiCaprio deliver the kind of performances we’ve come to expect out of a Scorsese film, but the real star here is Lily Gladstone. As an Osage woman who lets herself be seduced by the wrong man and loses her family one by one, she’s an incredibly compelling portrait of love and grief. Some of the most gripping moments of the movie simply involve watching an entire array of emotions play across her face. Cara Jade Myers is also fantastic as her much more fiery, tempestuous sister. 

And yes, the movie does clock in at a whopping three and a half hours. Still, that’s actually three minutes shorter than his last movie, 2019’s “The Irishman,” and Scorsese does fill the movie with all the rich period detail we’ve come to expect from the man. If you’re already a fan, nothing about this movie will be intimidating. 

The problem is, the women are by far the most compelling part of the movie. They’re the real story here, people who finally catch a break only to have it snatched away from them again. Hollywood has never bothered to tell those stories, especially not with the nuance and grace that Gladstone tells it, and it’s a revelation to see it here. They’re undoubtedly the victims here, but Gladstone and Scorsese also help show their incredible strength. 

A movie that truly focused on Gladstone and her family would be a masterpiece. But Scorsese can’t quite shake his instinct to focus on the bad guys, especially when they’re played by De Niro and DiCaprio. These are hardly the wise guys of Scorsese’s earlier films – DiCaprio’s character is dumb, pretty, and weak-willed – but the two take up far too much of the movie’s screen time. They do their roles exceptionally well, DiCaprio in particular, but their story is just so much less interesting. The banality of evil is already a familiar, well-trodden tale. 

“Killers of the Flower Moon” is still worth seeing, and tells an important story that more people need to hear. I can’t help but wish, though, that Scorsese had really understood whose story he should be telling in the first place. 

Grade: Three stars

Jenniffer Wardell is an award-winning movie critic and member of the Utah Film Critics Association. Find her on Twitter at @wardellwriter or drop her a line at [email protected].