I pledged to go to the theater Saturday to see the three-and-a-half hour The Brutalist. I begged off at the last minute, but then, the guilt of it made me do penance.

I watched Killers of the Flower Moon, another glaring omission, especially on the part of an unpaid film reviewer. Killers was adapted from David Grann’s best-selling book about a series of murders of Osage Indians in the 1920s, crimes borne of their oil wealth and societal vulnerability.

The good.

Martin Scorsese is no slouch behind the camera, and he ably presents the grandeur and sweep of Osage life and the peculiar opulence that sprouted about it. The film looks and feels like a $200 million picture. The detail is impeccable and the feel authentic (not the garish, silly design of Gangs of New York).

Lily Gladstone. Her job as the stoic sufferer of any number of depredations could have been capably performed with simple solemnity. But she infuses it with charm, passion, and subtle resignation. In a film during which I often found myself stifling a yawn, she was captivating.     

To the bad.

Scorsese seems to be having a late-in-life problem with repetitive scenes. Here, we are treated to at least a half dozen scenes of Robert De Niro (the bad guy) telling Leonardo DiCaprio (his nephew and henchman) what to do, DiCaprio getting more and more upset, and De Niro just yelling at him again and again. Much like The Irishman, the movie is 3.5 hours. In that film, it was “1.5 hours … trying to get Jimmy Hoffa (Al Pacino) either to his senses or a meeting.” Here, it is De Niro and DiCaprio bickering.

Worse, their interminable mugging is to the detriment of more interesting characters and subplots, from the resistance of one white man (played quite ably by Jason Isbell), to the genesis of the federal investigation, to the intervention of an Indian investigator, to the actual murders themselves.  Simply put, no one gives a flying fig about these two one-dimensional, barking characters, but there they are, hogging all the scenery at the trough.

The film is also painfully confused. Is this a testament to a historical wrong? A little. But that factor seems mailed in, with scenes of Osage registering objection, but no real agency. Which is fine.  Most people in history have little to no agency. They are subject to the cruelties of their surroundings. It leaves us the machinations of the criminals. But they are so simple (Osage sheep, whites sheep shearers), they don’t lend themselves to captivating drama. Also, Scorsese’s tie to the Tulsa race massacre seems cheap and manipulative.

Is it a procedural or whodunit? Nope.  We know the villain from moment one, he only lacks a mustache to twirl, and when the case is cracked in the last third, it is by far the best part of the picture. But the way it is solved is mundane. They try to break a guy, he gives a bit of guff but soon talks. The book was very much a whodunit and a procedural, grippingly so.

Is it a love story? Scorsese tries, but there is no real chemistry between DiCaprio and Gladstone, certainly, not enough to sustain his serial abuses, i.e., his central part in the murder of her family and friends. The lovable scamp!

Is it a psychological portrait? Perhaps. DiCaprio is the guilty henchman, no doubt, but he is so glaringly stupid (Scorsese even give him pointless unwieldy teeth, this side of Simple Jack), you wonder if the character’s psychology is worth the inquiry.

The writing is not so much weak as it is misdirected. If you’re going to pay $5 million for adaptation rights to a book, why jettison the most interesting parts? The book really digs into the strange origins and dichotomy of the Osage and their oil wealth, which was borne of their savvy as much as their geographic fortune. Here, they hit oil, and the rest is a surface coverage of their spendthrift ways and the fact that to access the wealth, they need white guardians. Scorsese presents this in a sort of mashed up montage. Similarly, the book covers the birth of the FBI and the investigation of the corrupt locals from a federal agent, a first. Here, the Feds just show up (led by a criminally underutilized Jesse Plemons) and start to brace some dudes.          

Like The Irishman, I felt this would never end, and like The Irishman, the universal plaudits feel like they are being artificially elevated on the vapor of Scorsese’s status and the ennobling of the cause.