Killers of the Flower Moon (film).

David Grann’s Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI is one of the best nonfiction books I’ve ever read, a true story that works as a thriller, an important part of American history, and a document of racism and injustice that continues to echo today. Like most fans of the book and/or Grann’s work, I was thrilled to hear Martin Scorsese was adapting it for the screen…

…and then I saw the movie was three and a half hours long.

It is a very good movie, but it just didn’t need to be this long, and it works in more detail than the core narrative actually needed. It’s become a trend with Scorsese to create these overlong films that bog down in minor details that sap the energy of the main plot, which in this case detracts from what might otherwise have been the best movie of the year if anyone had said to him that he needed to edit this down to a reasonable length. (It’s streaming on Apple TV+.)

The Osage Nation were once the dominant civilization in the central plains of North America, but in the 1870s, the U.S. government exiled them to a desolate part of what is now northern Oklahoma, a move that backfired on the white colonizers when it turned out that the new Osage lands sat on a large oil field. This made the Osage people quite rich on paper, giving them headrights to a share of the proceeds from the nation’s oil revenues, although a 1921 federal law said that the Osage couldn’t access the cash directly without approval of white guardians until they were ruled “competent.” A series of murders of Osage tribe members in the 1920s, ignored by local authorities, led the tribe to beg the nascent Bureau of Investigations to look into the cases, which uncovered a conspiracy to kill the Osage for their headrights and indeed birthed the modern FBI.

The Osage woman at the center of the case that brought the Bureau into Oklahoma was Mollie Kyle (Lily Gladstone), who married a white carpetbagger named Ernest Burkhardt (Leonardo DiCaprio). Mollie’s two sisters, brother-in-law, and cousin were all murdered at the behest of Ernest’s uncle, William King Hale (Robert Deniro), while Ernest and King nearly killed Mollie by poisoning the insulin injections she needed for her diabetes before the Bureau arrived, led by Thomas White (Jesse Plemons), and solved the case, saving Mollie and sending her husband and uncle-in-law to prison.

The story here is so rich and compelling, especially in Grann’s rendition, that it would be hard to make a bad movie out of it; even when the film drags a little in pace, it’s still interesting because of the wide cast of characters and the sense of creeping doom that dominates the first two hours. All three leads are superb, with Gladstone especially strong, and Deniro looking the most invested in a part he’s been in forever. There’s no mystery as to who’s behind the killings, so any tension is from wondering how long they’ll get away with it, and, if you’re unfamiliar with the story, how many people will die before anyone takes the Osage – who are well aware these deaths are not accidental, as ruled by the coroner – seriously.

That makes the film’s bloat far harder to understand, because it just bogs things down and introduces a broad array of characters, nearly all drawn from real life and many played quite well by famous musicians, that the film doesn’t need. Keeping everyone straight in this movie requires a cheat sheet, and there’s a real imbalance to who’s getting that extra screen time – it’s the villains, all white men, while the Osage get far less screen time and have far fewer named characters on their side; the story unfurls from a neutral perspective, rather than from Mollie’s or that of the Osage in general. The real conspiracy was indeed this broad, involving cousins and criminals alike, yet for the sake of telling the story in a reasonable amount of time, Scorsese should have trimmed some of the names or at least kept a few more of them off screen.

The crimes themselves take up about two-thirds of the film, which does allow for the complex (to put it mildly) relationship between Mollie and Ernest, who had two kids together, to develop on screen, although the script may go too far in casting Ernest as a feckless pawn of his uncle rather than someone aware he was committing murder and poisoning his own wife. By the time the Bureau shows up, it is a welcome shot of energy in a film that had gotten stuck in its own mire, and Plemons livens things up even in an understated performance. The last hour, where the killers are brought to justice, zips by compared to the slow build that came before, with the main tension around whether Ernest will choose to stand by his uncle or confess to his crimes and, on some level, side with his wife. Even so, we get some overblown scenes like Brendan Fraser’s defense attorney bloviating in the courthouse with Ernest on the stand, a perfectly fine scene in its own right but not one that pushes the story forward. There are just so many bits here that could have been cut to make this movie two and a half hours, and in that case, it might have challenged for Best Picture, but instead we get an Apple TV+ movie that feels like it was trying to be a limited series instead.

Killers of the Flower Moon earned ten nominations, including the obligatory Best Director and Best Picture nods for Scorsese; this is the seventh film of his last nine to get him a Director nomination, although it seems far more of a recognition of his name than his work here. Gladstone is the overwhelming favorite to win Best Actress, which may be the only major award it wins; if it wins another, I’d guess Robbie Robertson might win for Best Original Score, as the score is strong, adding to many scenes without ever overwhelming the action or dialogue, and the fact that he died before the film was released will likely win him some additional votes. DiCaprio did not get a Best Actor nomination, even though he at least was better than one nominee in Bradley Cooper.