“I ain't foolish because I've done everything right.”

It takes Martin Scorsese years to attain financing for his films in the digital age, due in no small part to his insistence on doing things the analog way. Therefore, the release of one of his films is a cause for celebration in movie geek circles, to finally see what subject he’s devoted the last few years of his life to exploring. For his twenty sixth narrative feature film, Scorsese turns his eye toward the story of atrocities perpetrated on Native Americans by white men in the early 20th century.

Killers of the Flower Moon is based on a book of the same name by David Grann, which carries the subtitle “The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI.” Even in mostly ignoring the white guy heavy half of the book’s subtitle “The Birth of the FBI”—more or less regulating it to the film’s third act—Scorsese still foolishly foregrounds more white people in “The Osage Murders” part that occupies most of the film’s three and a half hour running time.

And I know that Scorsese makes long movies. You have to go all the way back to 1986’s The Color of Money to find a Scorsese movie under two hours, but the combined running time of his last four narrative feature films is nearly 13 hours. Say whatever you want about attention spans in the age of binge-watching, but it can’t be an excuse for increasingly expanding running times, especially when the editing in many of these films is not exactly judicious. An epic running time is not an automatic indication that the work you’re about to see is a masterpiece.

The main villain of both the book and the film adaptation is William “King” Hale, played by Robert De Niro, who has duped the Osage people into thinking he is on their side in representing their interests to the many white people who come to region in search of their own fortune in the wake of the native people striking oil. Naturally he’s the Iago-esque architect of their own destruction, pulling cons like the one he orchestrates between his dim-witted nephew Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio) and local woman Mollie Kyle (Lily Gladstone).

People lived harder lives in that time, which accounts for the nearly 50 year old DiCaprio playing a man closer to half that age. His scenes with Gladstone truly shine, however, though she’s doing the lion’s share of the work by simply holding the screen through stillness. Lily Gladstone is a movie star, it’s a shame she wasn’t the star of this movie.

By the time the film reaches its conclusion, you’ll wonder why Scorsese and co-screenwriter Eric Roth decided to make Ernest the film’s protagonist. With all the possible angles there are to attack this story from, why try to garner sympathy for this doltish lout who was being manipulated by people smarter than he? Why attempt to make this a 360 degree tragedy, especially when the real Ernest Burkhart is deserving of precisely zero sympathy?

There is a feeling throughout that this is the story being told because Scorsese and Roth think that, as white men, this is the story they can comfortably tell without stepping on any toes. Scorsese’s cameo at the film’s conclusion is almost a tacit admission of that, part of a finale that rivals Burn After Reading for almost confrontationally abrupt endings. The sudden and wholly unexpected cameos by several famous people in this scene only compound the surreality of the film’s closing moments.

As with all the violence in his last four or so films, Scorsese’s camera is passive to the evil deeds of the white men like Ernest and King, and other jamokes with funny names like Kelsie Morrison (Louis Cancelmi), Blackie Thompson (Tommy Schultz), and Ernest’s brother Byron (Scott Shepherd) is often just locked down and observing horrible things being done and swept under the rug. The matter of factness of the violence makes it all the more haunting, helping it linger long after the film is over.

With Flower Moon, Scorsese swerves hard away from the frantic, kinetic energy of his best mob movies, despite this bearing an awful lot of resemblance to those tales. As a result, the film often becomes inert. Scorsese feels like he’s pulling back to pay proper reverence to this story, but it often takes him time to then get the gears of the plot in motion once again, leading to a bumpy ride. Suffice it to say I felt every single one of the film’s 206 minutes.

Thankfully the expansive running time allows Scorsese to really give the Osage characters a voice, allowing us access to their ceremonies, meetings, and eventually their desperate bribing of public officials to get their plight taken seriously in the nation’s capital. By the time Jesse Plemons’ Tom White rides into town with his white cowboy hat and aw shucks demeanor hoping to solve this case and help birth the FBI, you’ll wish he’d been there an hour earlier when he could’ve made a difference.

This isn’t my attempt to do a “hot take” as the kids say, I’m just offering up my opinion after a first viewing of a very long movie with very dense subject matter based on a book that I have read and to which this film—at least for the first ninety minutes or so—bears little resemblance. The film is quite novel-like in its approach to storytelling, always coming back to Ernest and Mollie after branching out into the periphery. However, it’s strangely nothing like the novel it’s adapting.

Even great filmmakers make mediocre movies every once in a while, it’s okay. Not every movie the man makes is a masterpiece, and that’s okay too. Scorsese followed up Taxi Driver, one of his leanest and meanest movies with the bloated and bloviated New York, New York. A career is full of peaks and valleys, but the next masterpiece is always right around the corner when you’re dealing with a great filmmaker. Scorsese’s next narrative feature after New York, New York was Raging Bull, one of the best films that he—or anyone else, for that matter—ever made.

I find it difficult to believe that, even with the tight deadlines put on film critics, anyone can make up their mind about a long, dense, and intense film immediately after seeing it. It took me weeks and additional viewings to realize Once Upon a Time in Hollywood was one of my favorite films, and that’s how a lot of these things go. I’m not saying Killers of the Flower Moon will need my reevaluation a decade from now, but maybe I’ll feel completely different about the film in 2033. Maybe I’ll be able to better articulate my reasons for why it works—or definitely doesn’t work. One should always have goals to work toward.

The beauty of this blog should be this ability to wrestle with movies for a few days and process my thoughts about them. If you’re a frequent visitor constantly looking for new content, you deserve new content, and I will try to deliver more of it. Thank you for dropping by to hear my thoughts about a movie I wouldn’t discourage anyone from watching, I would only suggest you adjust your expectations accordingly.