Is Killers of the Flower Moon a tour de force worthy of the highest cinematic praise or is it a film that broke everyone working on it?
Genre: Drama/Period/Historical
Premise: A dimwitted soldier returns from the war to a different town than the one he left, one that has been reshaped by the fortunes of the Osage tribe, which discovered a gigantic oil reserve on their land, which has made them the richest people per capita in the world.
About: This is the looooooooong in development movie from Apple/Paramount, the only film left this year that people believe can compete with Oppenheimer and Barbie for Oscars. It’ll be in theaters for a month before hitting the streaming service. Its 9 hour running time seems to be hurting its box office take, as the movie has clocked in only 24 million dollars this weekend. Although Oppenheimer was the same length and took in 82 million. Maybe the film needed a toy movie counterpart to beef up its marketing footprint. “Bratz” maybe? Not sure how that title combo would work. Bratzenflower? Eric Roth (Forrest Gump, Dune, A Star is Born) wrote the movie, along with Scorsese, who reportedly took a crack at a couple of drafts.
Writer: Eric Roth and Martin Scorsese (based on the non-fiction book by David Grann)
Details: 210 minutes!!!
I can’t tell you how excited I was about this movie when it was first announced. I’d read the book and it just sounded like such an interesting story. You had this Native American tribe, who I’d never heard of, that were at one point, some of the richest people in the world. When you combined that with the birth of the FBI, it’s that rare storytelling gold nugget that all us writers are searching for.
But every update to the project since then has been wrapped in tension and consternation.
They originally wrote a script that adhered to the structure of the book (You can read my review of the book here) but DiCaprio started questioning how interesting his character (an FBI agent investigating a series of murders) was and decided he instead wanted to play the villain.
The script was then rewritten to flesh out the villain role for Leo but, again, DiCaprio balked, feeling like something was missing. He also wondered if he had jumped shipped too quickly, and re-entertained the idea of playing the protagonist.
Meanwhile, the town was going through a socio-political revolution, pushing for diversity on a level never before seen. Questions such as, ‘Who has the right to tell which story?’, rattled industry mainstays like Scorsese, and he began wondering if the Native American tribe depicted in his film was being overshadowed. Maybe the Osage should hold the dominant point of view in the story, not yet another Caucasian male lead.
But that might lead to another problem. If the Osage became the protagonists, could Scorsese, a Caucasian male director, still direct the film? Shouldn’t someone who better understood the life experience of the Osage be directing the picture?
But how would audiences feel if they went to see a movie where an unknown director replaced one of the greatest directors in history and where Leonardo DiCaprio played a secondary character as opposed to the lead? And would the studio risk 200 million dollars on such a movie?
DiCaprio would make Scorsese’s life even worse, coming back to him with a demand to scrap the current script they had slaved over. “Where is the heart of this story?” Dicaprio would ask. Back to the drawing board they went, this time with so many roadblocks that it was unclear if there was any path forward that would be both creatively entertaining and non-offensive.
After a stellar showing at the Cannes film festival and a wonderful first trailer, the mega-production finally seemed to find its footing. There is plenty of evidence that the best art comes out of conflict and struggle. Maybe all that tension was worth it.
But then the press tour started and the lead female actress, Lily Gladstone, started taking shots at other productions. Although her comments weren’t exactly out-of-pocket, it seemed like a strange move to announce your breakout lead actress with such negativity. Then things seemed to reach a boiling point this weekend when Scorsese acknowledged that both he and Robert De Niro would ‘roll their eyes’ at DiCaprio’s many adlibs during filming. It was starting to look like Killers of the Flower Moon broke everyone who worked on it.
With all that said, it’s still Scorsese. It’s still DiCaprio. It’s still De Niro. In a world where movies like, “Transformers: Rise of the Beasts” terrorize our collective intelligence, there is no doubt that these three men care deeply about creating great cinema. Let’s see if they’ve created something great here.
Killers of the Flower Moon follows Ernest Burkhart, a dimwitted World War 1 soldier who spent most of his time in the war as a cook, as he returns to his hometown to work for his uncle, and town patriarch, William Hale (who refers to himself as “King”). Hale seems determined to set Ernest off on the right path, and encourages him to marry the Osage woman, Mollie, he drives around.
Ernest does and the two set about having a family. As the years pass, people in, as well as connected to, the Osage tribe, start dying. Some of illness. Others get murdered. A couple of those people are Mollie’s sisters. Strangely, nobody ever looks into these deaths. People shrug their shoulders and move on.
After a while (what feels like hours to be honest), we reveal little slivers of evidence that Ernest and Hale are involved in these murders. Like a lot of things that happen in Killers of the Flower Moon, clarity is absent. If someone is going to be killed, it usually works like this: Hale tells Ernest who tells a second middle man who then tells a final guy, who then goes and kills the target.
Meanwhile, Ernest, who takes care of his ill wife, who’s having a hard time with diabetes, starts injecting her with insulin laced with poison, as he’s looking to eventually off his wife, presumably for her money, even though he already has access to her money seeing as he’s married to her.
Finally, two hours and forty-five minutes into the movie, the FBI shows up, determined to figure out who’s killing the Osage. It doesn’t take Agent White long to sniff out who’s responsible for the carnage. But can he get Ernest to turn on his Uncle? And will Ernest even be able to last until the court case, as his Uncle appears to have unlimited access to killers?
I have to be careful what I say here because my initial reaction when the movie ended was not positive. I was borderline furious, mainly because 4 hours (with AMC’s previews) is a big time commitment and you want to feel like that was time well spent. I didn’t think this was time well spent at all.
With that said, I have to acknowledge the filmmaking side of the equation. It’s a beautiful movie. The production value was insane. I never once felt like I was on a set. I never once got pulled out of the movie because of something I saw onscreen. And then you have these titan actors working together who can make you forget everything just through their interactions.
It’s funny because one the things I tell you guys is to never just sit two characters down in front of each other and write a scene. It’s the least interesting way you can possibly write a scene. So what’s the first scene we get when Ernest comes back from the war and visits his Uncle? The two sit down across from each other in two chairs and talk for seven minutes.
I quickly leaned that that rule doesn’t apply when you have Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro. That was actually one of my favorite scenes in the film and it was mostly backstory.
But the movie quickly fell out of favor with me due to several screenwriting issues. They were…
No active protagonist
Weak protagonist
Major motivation issues
Inconsistent story engines
Let’s go through that list one by one. Your main character in this movie – Ernest – is not proactive. He’s reactive. He waits for orders. He waits to be told what to do. While this type of character can work in unique situations, it almost never does. Stories work better when your hero is pushing the narrative forward themselves. Cause then they’re taking us on the journey.
They may have been able to get around this had we liked the character of Ernest. But we don’t. He’s weak. He’s dumb. He’s a weasel. He’s cowardly. Just read those adjectives back for a second and then ask yourself, has there even been a non-comedy movie where a main character with those traits has worked? No. Of course not. Nobody likes a weasel.
There’s this saying that arrived in the late 90s that rebuffed the studio executives’ constant demand for “likable characters.” The screenwriters pushed back with: “No, my main character doesn’t have to be likable. He just has to be interesting.” This movie proves that that is wrong. Cause Ernest is an interesting character. But we don’t want to have anything to do with him. And he’s the one taking us on this journey. How are we going to enjoy a movie with a weasel leading us?
But the real problem with Killers of the Flower Moon is motivation. I have never seen a movie with murkier motivation throughout. Everywhere you look, you’re not sure why people are doing things.
Take Hale. Hale is desperately coveting every single cent he can get a hold of. He opens a new insurance scam every month to claim an extra 25 grand (800,000 dollars in today’s money). And he’s killing all these Osage people so that he will eventually inherit their money though his nephews. The dude is 75 YEARS OLD!!! He’s already sickeningly wealthy. He has a super successful ranching business. And he’s making a million bucks an insurance scam multiple times a year.
WHY DOES HE NEED MORE MONEY?????
What’s the end game here? He’s already suuuuuuper rich. You may say, “Because even if he dies, then Ernest gets the money. So the money stays in his family.” Except that Hale is ready to sell his nephew out to the feds! To save himself, he’s going to send Ernest to prison for the rest of his life.
In movies, money needs to have a point. It’s never about stealing a million bucks from the bank. It’s that obtaining that million bucks allows the character to retire for the rest of their life. What was Hale’s motivation for trying to upgrade from “really rich” to “really rich plus more rich?”
But the motivation that infuriated me the most was the insulin poison story. First of all, what does Ernest achieve by killing his wife? He already controls all of his wife’s money. And the script does a terrible job explaining how the poisoning is working. Cause Mollie starts off as having serious health issues from diabetes. Then she starts taking insulin. The insulin makes her worse. Then, many scenes later, the poison is introduced. Ernest starts putting a little bit of poison in her insulin. So Mollie continues to get sick. But she was already getting sick before the poison so we’re not even clear on if he’s poisoning her or not. It’s so unnecessarily confusing that it made me officially give up on the script. The plot of this movie must have flown through the Bermuda Triangle. Cause it was lost and never found again.
I understand why Leo resisted the FBI agent version of this story. There’s something too obvious about it. If you find a less obvious character to lead the story, you’re more likely to write an original movie. Which they did. This is definitely more original than had they gone the FBI agent route.
But you know what a plot becomes when it’s led by an FBI agent looking into a murder? It becomes a FOCUSED PLOT. It becomes a plot with an actual story engine. We feel like there’s a purpose to every scene and to the movie in general. Without that, this narrative was blowing in the wind the entire time. It was desperately trying to find anything to make the story matter.
The pinnacle of this was in the final 20 minutes when one of Ernest’s kids dies of a sickness. I threw up my hands at that point. You had already made us suffer for 3 hours straight with depressing story beat after depressing story beat and now you’re going to randomly kill off a kid who we hadn’t even met????
It’s desperation. This is what you do when you don’t have a plot. You reach for melodramatic story beats that artificially jolt the film.
The supposed reason for the death was so that Ernest, who was in prison, could decide that now he needed to raise his family. Which meant that he had to testify against Hale so he (Ernest) would stay out of prison. But wait a minute. Are you saying that when he had three full kids he didn’t need to raise them then?? Now that he only has two, he does??? It’s so nonsensical, I don’t even know how to react. I’m so frustrated by this screenplay.
It seems to me that Leo was putting pressure on Scorsese and Eric Roth to figure it all out. He kept telling them to change things and, at a certain point, Scorsese and Roth had to concede logic to make their star happy. Not that Leo was doing this maliciously. I think he honestly wants to make great movies. But sometimes he’s so obsessed with the complexity of his character – and this dates all the way back to his frustration with the Jack character in Titanic – that he doesn’t realize how it affects the rest of the script.
If I were judging this on just the script, it might be a “what the hell did I just read?” Since I’m looking at the whole movie, though, I do think there’s some good stuff in here, De Niro’s performance being the most notable. This script, though. This script was not good.
[ ] What the hell did I just watch?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the price of admission
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Identify the character in your concept who has the strongest goal. That should probably be your main character. In this movie, the person with the strongest goal is the FBI Agent White. He’s the one who’s trying to solve these murders. Leo should have just played him. I know White was boring in real life. Okay, so then rewrite him and make him interesting! It would’ve been a far better move than to play a passive weasel. There is no screenplay in history led by a passive weasel that has been good.
