Is Killers of the Flower Moon too long?

Despite clocking in at three hours and 26 minutes, Martin Scorsese's 27th feature film earns its runtime

There’s a scene near the beginning of Killers of the Flower Moon that serves as an exercise in patience. Lily Gladstone’s character, Mollie, invites Leonardo DiCaprio’s Ernest, who is trying to win her heart and oil rights, inside for dinner. After she offers Ernest whiskey (the good kind), a storm erupts outside. Ernest gets up to close the window, but Mollie tells him to stop.

“We need to be quiet for a while,” she tells him.

Together, they sit. Ernest reaches for the whiskey, but Mollie motions for him to stop. Ernest looks confused.

“The storm, it’s powerful,” she explains. “So we need to be quiet for a while.”

Ernest nods in understanding, but he doesn’t understand. Not really. He’s not absorbing the storm the way Mollie is. Moments later, he tries to make small talk, something about the rain being good for the crops.

“Just be still,” Mollie scolds with closed eyes and a sly smile.

The scene — from which the image above is taken and what is maybe my favorite in Flower Moon — may serve more important purposes, but when I sat down to write this newsletter, it entered and stayed in my mind for a different reason. Martin Scorsese may not have intended for the scene to be a commentary on the length of the film, but for me, that’s part of what it’s become, a critique of our inability to be quiet, sit still, and absorb something powerful.

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Killers of the Flower Moon, Scorsese’s 27th feature film, arrived in theaters last month exactly one month before Scorsese’s 81st birthday and roughly a hundred years after the events depicted occurred. The movie tells the true story that author David Grann chronicled with his book by the same name. The story is tragic yet simple: In the 1920s, white Americans systematically murdered members of the Osage Nation in an attempt to take control of their oil rights, which at the time had made the Osage the wealthiest people per capita in the world. In other words, this is a story about American sin.

For obvious reasons, it’s an important film. Not to be bleak, but it’s one of the final films from arguably the greatest living filmmaker. More importantly, the film gives the Osage a perspective that is so often nonexistent in our manifestations of history, forcing us to watch the tragedy through their eyes, as victims, rather than our own.

Yet to this point, the discourse around Flower Moon has been limited to a far more stupid consideration: Whether the movie is too long.

In that quick synopsis of Flower Moon, I omitted one relevant characteristic: The movie carries a runtime of three hours and 26 minutes, and people are not happy.

It quickly turned into a thing, the kind of thing that people who haven’t even seen the movie are talking about. Recently, it came to light that a few theaters went rogue by adding an intermission to their showings of Flower Moon, without permission from the filmmaker, which Paramount and Apple quickly shut down.

And this, in turn, led to even more discourse on the thing.

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In September, GQ published a profile of the man himself, titled: Martin Scorsese: “I Have To Find Out Who The Hell I Am.” Like the movie that the interview serves to promote, the article is long. Also like Flower Moon, the article makes the length worthwhile. In it, Scorsese does more than opine on Flower Moon or reflect on the films of his past; Scorsese also reckons with what’s left for him. He of all people understands his time here is limited. And for a man who has dedicated his life to movie making, he’s reckoning with the fact that he doesn’t have enough time to tell all the stories he wants to tell or to come to terms with the human existence — his existence.

“I’m involved with projects as a producer that I would love to direct but no longer have the time. Ten years ago, it would’ve been different.”

“I have no more time. I have no more time.”

“Once you know that you gotta let go and you’re going to die, everything changes.”

It feels, to me at least, both special and significant that Scorsese chose Flower Moon as one of his final stories to tell.

It’s special, because Scorsese knows he doesn’t have much time left to make every movie he wants to make, and yet he chose to spend six years making this one. In that sense, I don’t care what the movie is even about. If Scorsese is spending six of his final years on this planet making a movie, the movie is inherently special.

It’s significant, because of what the movie is about. Somewhere during the making of the movie, Scorsese ripped up the script and started anew in order to center the story on the Osage rather than the FBI — unlike the movie, the book focuses more on the FBI’s (belated) investigation into the murders and less on Mollie, the Osage woman at the center of the story. Although it may have made sense for Grann to focus more on the FBI given the voluminous records that the investigation produced, Scorsese recognized the importance of telling the movie’s story through the eyes of the Osage rather than the FBI. This is their tragedy, not the FBI’s fortune. And at the end of the film itself, Scorsese tacitly acknowledges that in a better world it wouldn’t be him telling this story, but since we don’t live in a world where the Osage can tell their own story at this scale, he’ll tell their story on their behalf and hope that he does it justice.

In Scorsese’s younger years, I don’t know if he would’ve torn up the earlier version of the script and replaced it with something far less thrilling. Maybe he would’ve focused on “the Birth of the FBI,” which is actually part of the book’s title, glamorizing the agents who eventually solved the mystery of the murders. There’s certainly a movie in there — a good one too, evidenced by the fact that both Scorsese and DiCaprio initially signed on for that version of the story (DiCaprio was set to play the lead FBI agent rather than one of the perpetrators). But that’s not really why the story is important. One way or another, the FBI always would’ve grown into what it is today. Rather, what makes this story important is what happened to the Osage, the lack of a response to the happening, and how we live with the uncomfortable truth of that past.

The former version of the story is a movie that could’ve been told in under three hours. That movie wouldn’t need to live with the Osage or give them a point of view. It wouldn’t need to inhabit the Osage Nation. But the version that appeared onscreen —  the three-hour-and-26-minute version — is one that demands more time, thought, and care.

This is a story that deserves to be told delicately, and you can feel the care Scorsese put into telling it. The movie is long for a reason. This is not necessarily a story designed to entertain. It’s a story designed to teach and to reflect. Scorsese doesn’t take any shortcuts, because he knows it would be an injustice to the story, which the Osage trusted Scorsese to tell. He doesn’t ignore certain aspects of the story in an attempt to shave a few minutes off the runtime and make it more palatable for audiences. Because otherwise he wouldn’t be doing the story justice. Otherwise, he wouldn’t be the right person to tell it. There’s no way to make a story this tragic palatable.

Those who have seen Flower Moon might discover that the movie is, in fact, slow. But the movie’s length and pace is not a defect; it’s a strength. And it’s intentional. An atmosphere of dread hangs over the film as the Osage are methodically murdered, and it’s by making the viewer inhabit the world of the Osage during the Reign of Terror that Scorsese is able to give them their point of view. The movie lacks excitement because what actually happened lacked excitement: a group of people trying to live their lives their own way found themselves getting picked off, one by one, by a source of great evil. Scorsese deliberately places us in Osage Nation, makes us live there for 3.5 hours, and in the process, forces us to reckon with the tragedy. It’s a masterpiece in immersion. Sure, it’s grueling, tiring, and difficult to watch. But that’s entirely the point. To make a movie like this exciting would be an injustice to the story. If the movie had been about the birth of the FBI, a director like Taylor Sheridan could’ve provided a two-hour film in the same tone as Sicario or Wind River (two movies I love, by the way). But the movie is not about the FBI. The movie is not supposed to be exciting. As Scorsese himself said, he didn’t “inten[d] to make a blockbuster.” It’s a tragedy. Scorsese seeks to immerse the audience in that tragedy.

Which parts do you think Scorsese should have omitted? The parts that show the Osage being methodically murdered, one by one, day by day, year after year? The parts that show the criminals orchestrating their plan in broad daylight? The parts that show the intimate relationships between husbands and wives, all the while the husbands are plotting to murder their wives? The parts that show the grief and terror that the Osage experienced? The parts that show the white community coming together to protect the murderers? The parts that show an Osage woman and a white man falling in love? The parts that show that same woman slowing growing ill — dying — because her husband is poisoning her?

Cut the murders, and you fail to capture the scope of the terror and tragedy. Cut the murderer’s orchestration of their plan, and you lose just how empowered by the community that these criminals were by meeting in broad daylight and how infuriating it is that the government for so long never bothered to investigate the murders because if they had, they would’ve solved the mystery as quickly as the FBI does at the end of the movie; all they needed to do was look. Cut the relationship between murderers and victims — husbands and wives — and you lose the scale of the evil. Cut the grief, and you deprive the Osage of their perspective. Cut the community’s efforts to protect the murderers, and you can’t capture how systemic this evil was, down to the very roots of our society. Cut Mollie’s illness, Ernest’s complicity in that illness, and their relationship, and you deprive the movie of its emotional core — in other words, you simply don’t have a movie.

So, which part would you like Scorsese to cut?

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To reduce a movie to its runtime is to reduce a movie to a commodity — something that exists to serve you rather than the story it depicts. I’m not naive enough to presume that Apple gave Scorsese $200 million dollars to make Flower Moon out of the goodness of its corporate heart, but movies exist for reasons other than to make rich people richer. Flower Moon doesn’t exist only to make money, but to teach and to reflect. A movie like Flower Moon is why I started this newsletter in the first place. It’s a movie that doesn’t just entertain, but also teaches us something about ourselves. Whether it be Arrival or Midsommar, it’s those kinds of movies that I love. The ones that make us look inward at ourselves. And here’s where I give Apple credit for giving Flower Moon the wide theatrical release it deserves unlike, say, how Netflix is rolling out David Fincher’s The Killer.

That’s not to say a movie can’t exist for pure entertainment alone. My favorite Scorsese movie is The Departed. My favorite movie is Rogue One. But Flower Moon aims to be something more. And in turn, it should be treated as such.

This a story that is almost never told by Hollywood, at least not in this way. So, to say, well they should’ve made a little less of this story so that I don’t have to pee during the movie or waste 3.5 hours of my day, well, isn’t that part of the problem? Audiences will give Avengers: Endgame three hours of their time, but they can’t give 30 more minutes to Flower Moon?

This is a movie that Martin Scorsese spent seven years meticulously crafting. So, to say, fine, no big deal, just let theaters add an intermission, is to deprive Scorsese of his vision. Movies, and storytelling more broadly, are about rhythm, flow, momentum. The best storytellers know when to slow down, when to accelerate, and when to reach a crescendo. Scorsese crafted Flower Moon so that before the FBI arrives in Fairfax two hours into the movie, you’re furious, wondering when the “good guys” are going to finally show up to give the Osage some semblance of justice. When they finally do arrive, you’re wondering what took them so damn long. To interrupt a movie with an intermission that the director did not include himself is to interrupt an orchestra mid-performance. It’s to lose the rhythm, flow, and momentum that the filmmaker worked tirelessly to establish.

I’m not naive to the fact that you may need to pee during Flower Moon. To which I say, get up. Go to the bathroom. Leo won’t leap through the screen to stop you. And if you can’t stomach missing a few minutes of the movie, then wait for it to come out on Apple’s streaming platform. Don’t want to see a 3.5-hour movie in theaters? Then don’t. The solution is not to ask the filmmaker to shave an hour off the runtime or to interrupt the movie so that a few people can alleviate themselves and a theater can make more money on concessions. If that’s the road we want to go down, don’t be surprised when intermissions become an opportunity to jam even more advertisements in front of our eyes and ears.

This is a movie that Scorsese, so clearly, spent so long crafting to ensure that he didn’t misrepresent the Osage’s story — a story about their systematic murder, ignored by those capable of bringing the guilty to justice, furthered by every fiber of our society, and a movie that purposely forces the audience to reckon with those ugly truths. So, to reduce Flower Moon to a debate about when you can take a leak, well, it feels disappointing, if not insulting.

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I wrestled with the decision to both write and publish this newsletter for a number of reasons. For one, I suspect some, if not many, readers may disagree. Flower Moon is a long movie. It’s a time commitment. Weekends are short. Weeknights even shorter. I get it.

Further, I never intended for this newsletter to become a blog. I started this newsletter so that I had a space to write about why I love the movies that I love enough to rewatch over and over again. Given how long I’ve been absent from this newsletter for a number of reasons (weekends are short, weeknights even shorter), I don’t really enjoy making a brief return only to vent about what people are talking about on Twitter.

But I decided to write this because I think the movie is worth the time, and I think it deserves a better conversation than the one it’s getting. Hopefully, in the future, I can add to that conversation with something more akin to the newsletters that I used to write, but for now, this will have to suffice.

All of which is to say, I hope you can find 3.5 hours to watch Killers of the Flower Moon — to listen and to sit still before something powerful.