A different kind of Mean Streets — How Scorsese's Killers of the Flower Moon earns its epic runtime

One of director Martin Scorsese's earliest movie memories are of his family crowding around a 16-inch television. It was 1949 and on Fridays they would watch Italian films broadcast on the local station. The young boy noticed how movies such as Bicycle Thieves reached across oceans and generations, speaking to both him and his grandparents with universal truths. 

Nourished by his love of cinema, the boy grew to become one of the most successful American directors of the 20th century. He started with what he knew. Stories ripped from the alleyways of New York City and the characters he grew up with. 

But with Killers of the Flower Moon set in Oklahoma, the altar boy turned auteur is stepping far outside his comfort zone. As Scorsese quipped at an interview on stage at Cinemacon last spring "It wasn't an easy film to make. I'm a New Yorker. There were prairies out there and wild horses." 

Welcome to Osage Country

The year is 1920. The oil in the ground has made the Indigenous families of Osage Nation some of the wealthiest in America.

The streets of Fairfax, Okla., are the inverse of the norm, with wealthy Osage couples flashing their furs and driving gleaming Pierce-Arrow autos down the main street while white butlers stand at the ready.

Into this topsy-turvy world comes Leonardo DiCaprio as Ernest Burkhart, a simple man with an easy smile who loves money, whisky and women.

Injured in the war (nothing so dramatic, he was a cook), Ernest is taken in by his uncle, William Hale (Robert De Niro). King Hale, which he would no doubt remind you he prefers, is a cattle rancher and a self-proclaimed friend to every Osage. 

Coyote on the prowl

While Killers takes its time exploring the unique topography of the town, the film quickly centres on the union of Ernest and Mollie Kyle.

With a cocksure grin, Ernest offers the well-to-do Osage woman a ride. He talks about as fast as he drives, but Mollie sees him for what he is. Show-me-kah-see. Coyote.

But there are other wolves circling and a rising Osage body count. Based on the non-fiction book by David Grann, Scorsese punctuates the wealth and riches with brutal vignettes. An Osage mother shot beside her baby's pram. A poisoned man jerking his last breath on the ground. 

Between the bloodshed and the bedlam, Ernest and Mollie continue courting. King Hale has his own reasons to encourage them. The "headrights" of the Osage families — the rights to receive funds from the oil under their land — are worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Soon Mollie softens toward her doting driver and he's welcomed into the family, though Mollie's mother, played by legendary Canadian actor Tantoo Cardinal, fixes Ernest with a withering stare.

While Killers has plenty of stars, Lily Gladstone as Mollie is a revelation. Holding her own with DiCaprio and De Niro, she anchors moments with a ferocious stillness.

DiCaprio, no stranger to playing wily characters, embodies this gormless gadfly with no moral centre. Add to that Robert De Niro playing a role with such gravity it's difficult to imagine anyone else in it. Behind King's cheerful smiles are eyes of cold calculation, cataloguing the debts he's owed.

Fargo-worthy fools

One of the surprises of Killers is that wedged in between this tale of exploitation and avarice are moments of full out comedy. The cast of ne'er do wells King Hale employs, like gap-toothed rejects of a Norman Rockwell painting, could give the simpletons from Fargo a run for their money. 

While the 206 minute runtime may seem intimidating, from the opening frame to the final shot I was fully engaged. (That said, if filmmakers continue to make three-hour plus features, it's time to bring back the cinematic tradition of the intermission.) 

The film works in phases, first the rambling, raucous introduction to Osage Nation, then the complications as the extent of King Hale's schemes are revealed, which culminates in a visit from the newly formed Federal Bureau of Investigations, led by Jesse Plemons as the lead investigator. 

Interestingly, the film Scorsese originally set out to make was firmly focused on the FBI case, with DiCaprio cast as the straight-laced Texas Ranger turned investigator.

But after a table read of an early version of the screenplay both DiCaprio and the director agreed it wasn't working. In fact, it was DiCaprio's idea to put the focus on Ernest and Mollie.

This love story that beggars belief is the contradiction at the heart of Killers of the Flower Moon. Why would she stay? With everything happening around her. With her acute powers of perception. Whether this is a story of love or deception is something only audiences can answer for themselves. 

Spoiler alert for the end of Killers of the Flower Moon

Framing the story around Mollie and Earnest also offered the director a way to centre the film on the Indigenous experience.

Throughout the entire project Scorsese has spoken with reverence for the Osage Nation and the surviving community members he and DiCaprio met with. 

Speaking at Cinemacon, Scorsese said, "We were on the edge all the time, to make sure we did right by them." 

There are limits. At the Hollywood premiere, the film's Osage language consultant Christopher Cote expressed his disappointment that the movie didn't tell the story more from Mollie's point of view. But, he told Hollywood Reporter, "it would take an Osage to do that." 

But Scorsese has been acutely aware of whose story he is telling, and in a remarkable sequence near the end, he confronts this head on. 

The setting is an old-fashioned radio play, where actors on stage recreate famous events from the news. 

The story they are retelling is the Osage murders, perhaps an acknowledgement of how tragedies from the past become today's entertainment. When it comes to finishing Mollie's tale, Martin Scorsese himself takes the stage. As he told Zoomer, he couldn't think of who else would read the lines. 

So the boy from Flushing, Queens, describes the final arc of Mollie's life as Osage drums carry the camera into the sky.