How to watch Killers of the Flower Moon in two (or more) parts
12.01.2024 - 15:07
/ polygon.com
/ Quentin Tarantino
/ Martin Scorsese
/ Robert De-Niro
/ Lily Gladstone
Martin Scorsese’s compelling, righteously furious crime epic Killers of the Flower Moon is now available to stream at home on Apple TV Plus, and it’s well worth watching if you didn’t catch it in theaters. Starring Robert De Niro in diabolical uncle mode, Leonardo DiCaprio in tortured idiot mode, and a luminous, movie-stealing, award-winning Lily Gladstone, the film tells the incredible, appalling true story of the wholesale murder of members of the wealthy Osage tribe in 1920s Oklahoma. Based on David Grann’s nonfiction bestseller, Scorsese’s movie focuses on the marriage of Ernest Burkhart (DiCaprio) and Osage heiress Mollie (Gladstone), and the machinations of De Niro’s cattle baron Bill Hale as he attempts to secure Mollie’s family’s oil rights. It’s a damning portrait of American complicity, greed, and erasure.
But Killers of the Flower Moon is a monster of a movie, clocking in at almost three and a half hours. Many will understandably be thinking of breaking the movie up into parts to watch at home. If you’re wondering how to fit this intimidating, Oppenheimer-dwarfing running time into your busy life, we’re here to help, with suggestions for the best places to break the movie into two, three, or even four parts. But first, a word of warning — or perhaps of encouragement.
Unquestionably, the optimum viewing experience for Scorsese’s magnum opus is in a single sitting. We strongly recommend setting aside the time and settling in for the duration, if at all possible.
Despite its length, Killers of the Flower Moon has clearly been conceived, written, and edited as a single piece, and breaking it up doesn’t do it too many favors. It doesn’t have an episodic structure — unlike, say, Quentin Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight, a long movie broken into chapters marked by title cards, which the director actually allowed Netflix to release in an approved serialized version. Nor does it have an obvious break point for an intermission, like S.S. Rajamouli’s RRR, which neatly divides in two with a dramatically well-timed fade to black at the halfway point.
Instead, Killers of the Flower Moon is structured like a long crescendo. It builds steadily and inexorably, gathering dramatic momentum and an impressive amount of detail, which it then invests in a series of devastating scenes in the final half-hour. When you break it up, some of that accumulated power is lost.
While it isn’t Scorsese’s most high-energy film by any stretch of the imagination, it doesn’t drag, either. Scorsese and his longtime editor Thelma Schoonmaker have a fluid editing style that eschews establishing shots and downtime in favor of short interlocking scenes, overlapping audio, and sudden, unpredictable cuts. Their storytelling has an