I watched so many movies over the holidays and one of my biggest disappointments was Killers of the Flower Moon. While I respect the fact that Martin Scorsese made the film he wanted to make and Marty is still a master, I was really disappointed with the script and the framing of this tragic story. Marty cowrote the script with Eric Roth, and those two men clearly believed that Robert DeNiro’s William “King” Hale and Leo DiCaprio’s Ernest Burkhart were the most fascinating and watchable characters in the whole history of these crimes against the Osage. While I understand why the (newly formed) FBI investigation was not the main focus, it felt like Lily Gladstone’s Mollie was underserved with the script, all so Marty could tell the story he wanted to tell: The Real Goodfellas of Osage County. Paul Schrader sort of agrees with me.

Paul Schrader wrote Martin Scorsese‘s “Taxi Driver” and “Raging Bull,” and it appears he would’ve handled things differently had he been the one to pen “Killers of the Flower Moon.” In a recent interview with France’s Le Monde, Schrader called “Flower Moon” a “good movie” but one that could’ve been better had DiCaprio been playing the FBI agent investigating the Osage murders.

“Marty compares me to a Flemish miniaturist. He would be more the type who paints Renaissance frescoes,” Schrader said. “Give him $200 million, a good film will inevitably come out of it. That said, I would have preferred Leonardo DiCaprio to play the role of the cop in ‘Killers of the Flower Moon’ rather than the role of the idiot. Spending three-and-a-half hours in the company of an idiot is a long time.”

Scorsese originally intended for DiCaprio to play FBI agent Tom White in “Killers of the Flower Moon.” The director spent two years working on a “Flower Moon” script from the perspective of White, who took the lead on investigating a string of murders among the Osage Nation in the 1920s. The filmmaker told The Irish Times earlier this year that it was DiCaprio who personally called him requesting a script change. The actor wanted to play Ernest Burkhart instead.

“Myself and [my co-screenwriter] Eric Roth talked about telling the story from the point of view of the bureau agents coming in to investigate,” Scorsese said. “After two years of working on the script, Leo came to me and asked, ‘Where is the heart of this story?’ I had had meetings and dinners with the Osage, and I thought, ‘Well, there’s the story.’ The real story, we felt, was not necessarily coming from the outside, with the bureau, but rather from the inside, from Oklahoma.”

Changing the “Flower Moon” script paid off for Scorsese, who has received acclaim and awards attention for the film. The New York Film Critics Circle and the National Board of Review named “Flower Moon” the best movie of the year, although Schrader would appear to prefer Christopher Nolan’s “Oppenheimer” instead. He called it “the best, most important film of this century.”

“If you see one film in cinemas this year it should be ‘Oppenheimer,’” Schrader said over the summer. “I’m not a Nolan groupie but this one blows the door off the hinges.”

[From Variety]

I mean, I agree that Oppenheimer is a better film at every level – cleaner storytelling, a master director at full flight, great performances across the board, and it’s simply more interesting to watch a film about a tortured genius. I think Schrader’s criticism is dead-on: “Spending three-and-a-half hours in the company of an idiot is a long time.” It’s true. I’ll cite a specific example with a minor spoiler: when Mollie and Ernest’s daughter dies of whooping cough, the focus was on King Hale and Ernest’s reactions and not Mollie’s. Instead of actually putting more focus on the Osage, Scorsese made a film detailing the CRIMES against the Osage. Instead of seeing it through the FBI investigation (as Scorsese’s original script seemed to do), we see the crimes unfold through the perspective of King Hale and Ernest Burkhart for the most part.

Photos courtesy of Avalon Red.