Road to the Oscars Review: ‘Killers of the Flower Moon’ Should Have Been a Mini-Series

Every year, in the time between when the Oscar nominations are announced and the actual Oscars ceremony is held, OFM movie reviewer and associate editor Julie River tries to watch all the movies nominated for best picture that year. In the years since the pandemic, this has become easier, as a lot of the movies are now on streaming.

So far, she hasn’t made it through all of the nominees since the category expanded from five nominees to as many as 10, but this year, she intends to pull it off and write reviews of each movie as she goes through them. She already saw and reviewed American Fiction as part of the Denver Film Festival, and she already saw Barbie, and it was reviewed by fellow OFM writer Ivy Owens. OFM writer Owen Swallow also already reviewed Poor Things. That leaves seven movies for her to watch and review. Can she make it through all 10? Find out on OFM’s Road to the Oscars!

Rating: 77/100

*Warning: Minor spoilers ahead, but to be honest, it’s a true story that happened 100 years ago, and there were lots of chances to spoil it for you in the past century, so maybe get over it?*

With Killers of the Flower Moon, it’s time for some Scorsese drama, which is bound to be the highlight of every awards season, right? Well, it depends on the year you’re talking about. Movies like Taxi Driver and Raging Bull are thought of as classics, and with good reason. For my money, The Aviator is one of his best, and one that doesn’t get talked about much anymore. And Hugo is an absolute masterpiece!

But then there’s the movie he won his first Oscar for, The Departed, which I would argue is one of Scorsese’s worst. I often joke that The Departed only had three problems, but, unfortunately, those three problems were the beginning, the ending, and the Boston accents. (Honestly, I know this is beside the point, but I went to college in Boston; there are not that many people in Boston with thick Boston accents as most people in Boston moved there in adulthood.) Then there was Wolf of Wallstreet, which I admit that I skipped because everything about it just looked like white bro porn, and that did not appeal to me.

So now we get to Killers of the Flower Moon, which is the true story of what are known as the Osage Indian Murders that occurred in the 1910s-1930s, with the most notable killings happening between 1921 and 1926. Following the discovery of oil on the Osage Indian Reservation in Oklahoma, many members of the tribe suddenly became rich, leading to plots from greedy whites to inherit what were known as their “headrights,” or rights to the oil money.

The movie follows the real-life characters of William King Hale (Robert De Niro) and his nephew Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio). Ernest, after returning from World War I, goes to live with his uncle, William Hale. Hale encourages his nephew to meet and eventually marry an Osage woman named Mollie Kyle (Lily Gladstone) and, together, Burkhart and Hale hire a series of contract killers to murder Mollie’s family members in order to redirect all of the headrights towards Burkhart.

It’s been going around on the internet lately that Killers of the Flower Moon, at its absurd length of three and a half hours, would have been better off as a mini-series. Allow me to add my voice to that chorus: This should have been a mini-series! It’s actually not like Scorsese has never worked in television before. He directed the pilot for Boardwalk Empire, which he was executive producer on, he created and directed the short-lived HBO series Vinyl, and he made a documentary mini-series called Pretend It’s a City.

So what kept Scorsese from turning this into a mini-series? No clue. My best guess is that he sees more glamour in film, or he just wants another Oscar. But this would have worked better with more time because, even at its already absurd length, Killers of the Flower Moon has to pack in a lot of story into that time. Especially if you want to dive into the trial as it unfolded later on, as the last hour of the movie does, this would work better in six or seven hour-long episodes.

The other major flaw with this movie is the performances by De Niro and DiCaprio, who don’t really sell me on the idea that they were such brilliant criminal masterminds that they could get away with marrying into a rich Osage family and killing off everyone in the family until they inherited all of the headrights. I’m sure the real Hale and Burkhart did an excellent job of pulling the wool over everyone’s eyes, but the two leading men’s unconvincing performances made everyone else in the movie seem, frankly, a little dumb for not figuring it out.

Even though the movie reveals Burkhart and Hale to be the killers by around the one-hour mark—which would be pretty late for any other movie, but is pretty early for this one—it’s blatantly obvious by the time that reveal comes. And really, this is a movie that telegraphs all of its punches because, even without knowing much about the murders, I admit that I could easily predict where the movie was going at all times. There’s not really a huge sense of suspense in this film.

Killers of the Flower Moon is up for a whopping 10 Academy Awards, starting with the obvious like Best Picture, Best Director for Martin Scorsese, Best Actress for Lily Gladstone, Best Supporting Actor for Robert De Niro for some reason, Best Cinematography, Best Editing, Best Original Score, and Best Original Song. All of those nominations and the only category where it really has a chance is Best Actress, and even then, it’s almost a coin flip. Vegas odds keep going back and forth between Lily Gladstone and Emma Stone for Poor Things. That’s one of the few categories in this entire year’s ceremony that’s that close.

But I feel like Gladstone’s performance is hurt by De Niro and DiCaprio’s lack of believability, because that makes it hard to buy that Mollie was so blinded by love for her husband that she missed the obvious. I haven’t seen Poor Things, but I’ll comment on which actress I think deserves the win once I have. Then over in the Best Director category, Scorsese is the second favorite for Best Director behind Christopher Nolan, but Nolan is considered such a lock for this that being a second favorite doesn’t mean much.

Apparently the Osage people were heavily involved in the making of this movie, which is good. But I can also see the criticism that some have levied against the film that it should have focused more on the Osage people than on the villains of the story. That’s a fair point, although, according to a Hollywood Reporter article, the original version of the script was much more white savior-oriented, focusing on DiCaprio as the heroic white investigator who uncovers the murder. Thankfully, Scorsese thought better of that.

So, we’ll see how the film fares for Best Actress, but it seems unlikely that this is going to win more than that. And honestly, I don’t think it should win more than that, if that. It’s an unevenly paced movie that would have benefitted from a longer format with some pretty hard-to-swallow performances by its two leading men. Overall, it’s one of the weaker nominees in the Best Picture race.

Killers of the Flower Moon is streaming now on Apple TV+.

Photo courtesy of Apple TV+.