Martin Scorsese may be no fan of comic book movies, but to a certain sect of cinephiles, his films are events on par with the latest Marvel entry. The master filmmaker’s latest, Killers of the Flower Moon, premiered at the Cannes Film Festival Saturday, with its first reviews dropping shortly thereafter. From the sound of it, the legend behind such giants as Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, Goodfellas, and The Wolf of Wall Street has made a masterful, if possibly flawed (or maybe simply ambitious in a way that’s daunting on first viewing), epic.
Let’s get what will likely be the most common complaint among moviegoers out of the way first: its length. Scorsese has been making colossal works ones since 1977’s New York, New York, and Killers — about the “Reign of Terror,” aka the massacre of an oil-rich Osage community in the 1920s — is his second longest (after his previous fiction film, The Irishman, of course).
Variety’s Peter Debruge worries that will hurt its theatrical chances — though funded by Apple, it will hit theaters before their streamer, in October — he also thinks it hurts the film in general:
This is why someone needs to stand up and tell Marty to rein it in. They should’ve done it before he started shooting, since the pace is built in, and Scorsese’s projects don’t compress well after the fact. In its present form, “Killers” is still a compelling true story, one that Scorsese and co-writer Rick Yorn shifted from being a standard white-savior detective yarn to a more morally thorny look at how the white culprits plotted and carried out the murders. Stylistically, this feels like a young man’s movie. It’s engrossing from the get-go, the palpable tension methodically echoed by Robbie Robertson’s steady-heartbeat score. But it keeps going and going until everyone we care about is dead, dying or behind bars, with nearly an hour still in store.
Deadline’s Pete Hammond, on the other hand, had no beef with the length:
There are many ways to spoil the sheer pleasure of watching a master filmmaker handle a vast tale like this, working at the top of a very impressive game at a time when many have retired. I won’t do that except to say with a length of 3 1/2 hours the filmmaker and his longtime editor, Thelma Schoonmaker, don’t seem to be wasting any time. Yes, it feels truly epic in many ways, but all in service to the story. I never looked at my watch.
Ditto The Hollywood Reporter’s David Rooney:
But the three-and-a-half-hour running time is fully justified in an escalating tragedy that never loosens its grip — a sordid illustration of historical erasure with echoes in today’s bitterly divisive political gamesmanship.
Indiewire’s David Ehrlich, who gave it a B+, praises the film but also points to what he sees as its shortcomings:
And yet, the “Reign of Terror” — which came in the wake of an oil discovery that made the members of the Osage Nation in Oklahoma the richest people per capita on planet Earth — proves to be an uncomfortably vast backdrop for Scorsese’s more intimate brand of crime saga. The book from which “Killers of the Flower Moon” has been adapted is a sweeping tale about the end of the Wild West and the birth of the 20th century, as the author David Grann devotes roughly equal time to the modern sociopath who orchestrated the Osage slayings and the old-fashioned cowboy who J. Edgar Hoover dispatched to stop him. Scorsese’s more narrowly focused version takes stock of those tectonic shifts in our nation’s history, but only in passing. Its primary interest is limited to the sinister mastermind and his favorite lapdog, two beady-eyed fucks whose understanding of the new American landscape was limited to the belief that it still belonged to them.
Rolling Stone’s David Fear calls it an M-word:
Structured as the sort of throwback, big-picture epic that characterized ambitious moviemaking in the 1970s and early ’80s, Killers of the Flower Moon is, at its core, a love story. But it’’s also a mystery, albeit not one with simplistic whodunnit solutions; a highly gothic take on the white-hat horse operas of yesteryear; a star vehicle, featuring a career-best performance from an actor whose talent too often gets eclipsed by his celebrity; a continuation of a sui generis 50-year collaboration between two artists/coupla guys from Little Italy; and an indictment of white supremacy, then and now. Above all, it’s a Martin Scorsese picture, brimming with reverence for a culture that survived a horrible trauma as it is filled with exhilarating flourishes, film history references, and explorations of the faultline between the sacred and profane. And yes: It’s a masterpiece.
The Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw connects to Scorsese’s past work, which is often about the sociopathy of the moneyed and powerful:
With co-writer Eric Roth, Scorsese crafts an epic of creeping, existential horror about the birth of the American century, a macabre tale of quasi-genocidal serial killings which mimic the larger erasure of Native Americans from the US. It places in the drama’s foreground a gaslit marriage of lies and poisoned love. It echoes Scorsese’s earlier work about mob violence, mob loyalty and the final, inevitable sellout to the federal authorities, whose own bad faith gradually emerges. But in the end, this film is about what all westerns are about, and perhaps all history: the brutal grab for land, resources and power.
So does The Los Angeles Times’ Justin Chang, who also states that he can’t wait to watch it again so he can better wrestle with its ambitions.
In the background of all the dense, teeming action you may hear reverberant echoes of “Goodfellas” and “The Irishman,” “Gangs of New York” and “The Wolf of Wall Street,” among other indelible American epics of organized crime and tribalist violence. But you will also hear — in the agonized cries and silences of an Osage woman named Mollie Burkhart (a superb Lily Gladstone), Ernest’s wife — a story of this nation’s original sin, here compounded to a degree of monstrosity and horror that can give even a chronicler of human evil as seasoned as Scorsese pause.
For the rest of you, you’ll have to wait till October 6 to make your mind up.