Despite its length and despite my mind coming up with alternative takes or judicious edits to the existing content, I was never bored by Martin Scorsese’s inexplicably long Killers of the Flower Moon. But don’t get me wrong, this is an irresponsibly long movie that doesn’t justify its runtime. And yet I enjoyed it despite itself. But if you get lost or it loses you, woe to you, your butt, and your bladder.

The film is set in the 1920s and tells the true story of Osage Native Americans and the ne’er-do-well white men who love them… or at least wed them. Leonardo DiCaprio is one such bad egg, Robert De Niro is another. The Osage are filthy rich from hitting oil on the land they were relocated to… and while nobody cares about dead Indians, they do care about their money.

I’m imaging a time when this flick hits digital where an industrious editor puts together a fan edit called The Responsible Cut. A version of the film that chops out a good hour of runtime to tell the exact same story without missing a beat. It’s baffling that Scorsese – an icon of cinema – had enough juice to push a 3.5 hour non-crowd pleaser into theaters. He’s great but he’s not a billion dollar filmmaker.

<RANDOM ASIDE>I’m now imagining an alternate Earth where he plays “one for me, one for thee” and makes a superhero film next.</RANDOM ASIDE>

And yet I was engaged by this film throughout. Not on the edge of my seat and often not a little baffled. And the crazy thing is, the movie could have been longer… and perhaps a more complete version would be an eight hour season of tv that included content and characters not fleshed out in this theatrical release.

The thing is, this film has an almost comically small number of lead actors to fill all that time. The movie could have been more interesting with more focus on the Osage tribe or even the FBI investigators (led by Jesse Plemons).

And yet I still give the movie a positive review because, despite itself, it’s an interesting film that simply didn’t bore me. At it’s very telling that I have to pause the review to assure you I enjoyed it…

I think Leonard DiCaprio is woefully miscast as a guy just home from World War I. I don’t know the actual person he’s based (I never read the book), so maybe he’s the right age… but he seems too old to be playing a returning soldier. Also, he puts on a distracting downturned mouth that comes across as a put-upon affect more than a performance.

On the other hand, I enjoyed him playing a guy a little too dumb for the circumstances he’s in. The twists and turns and turn-abouts he goes through were entertaining. He’s surprisingly good at being a rotten stinker.

Lily Gladstone plays DiCaprio’s wife – a Native woman who’s wise to the reasons why the guys are sniffing around. She’s great… at least in the first hour where she’s mildly amused at DiCaprio’s attempts at romance. I really dug her character and wanted more from her… but there are reasons she’s sidelined in the story so I guess I understand her ill-use.

Robert De Niro is fine but he’s not doing anything new. Given the body count in the movie and the way his character navigates the system, I kept seeing versions of his past mobster roles (note: he does not play a literal gangster in this movie). There’s even a scene that reminded me of him taking a baseball bat to someone in The Untouchable… only now he’s using a different tool to the other end of the human body. It’s comically weird rather than shocking.

Speaking of comically weird, the film is pretty serious but there’s a vein of dark humor running through it. My relatively small audience would break into laughter at the right moments… so we were all fairly engaged.

Since I was so engaged, I was constantly wondering how it would turn out. Given it’s based on a historical non-fiction accounting, I was expecting the kind of rage inducer that history is awash with. It made me wonder if anything was left out from the page… which suggests a reading of the book is in order.

The end of the film though? I’ve never seen a more brilliant way of telling the “what happened next ” end title cards of a movie. Because it doesn’t use title cards… I’ll let you be delighted by the alternative take Scorsese came up with… plus the most pitch perfect cameo in his filmography.

I liked Killers of the Flower Moon despite feeling like it needed a severe edit or a complete rewrite. It’s baffling I can write that sentence and still give the flick such a strong review. It IS an interesting, entertaining, and important a story. It’s a good review with caveats… but it’s not worth reviewing what could have been when we can only review what is… and what is is pretty solid.

Score: 85