Do all masterpieces look the same, in the way that Tolstoy once posited all happy families do? After seeing The Eras Tour and Killers of the Flower Moon back-to-back, I can definitively say that no, they do not.
The film version of Taylor Swift’s mega-hit, record-breaking concert tour and Martin Scorsese’s opus on the murder of members of the Osage people in the 1920s are as inextricably linked as Barbie and Oppenheimer were this summer. Both are long, clocking in at three hours and 26 minutes for Killers and two hours and 49 minutes for Eras. Both were released in mid-October, and are currently the top two movies at the box office, raking in millions of dollars each. The words used in both of their overwhelmingly positive reviews are largely interchangeable: Try figuring out which was called “astonishing” versus “a juggernaut,” “epic,” or “a phenomenon.” Killers of the Flower Moon and The Eras Tour are testaments to their talented orchestrators, each working at the top of their game.
They are also polar opposites, in a very Barbenheimer way: One is a sparkly, cotton-candy pop bonanza, and the other is a sure-to-be-Oscar-winning retelling of a particularly dark, racist moment in US history. When it was clear that they would be in theaters at the same time, how could you not think of the double-feature potential?
So, I watched both in one day: Six-plus hours in a movie theater seat on what was supposed to be a rainy Saturday in New York. I began with Killers of the Flower Moon, with the mentality that it would be easier to pump myself up for Eras after watching such a serious movie, rather than try to get serious after dancing to T-Swift. With my husband in tow and a giant bowl of popcorn in my hands, I settled in for three and a half hours.
What can I say? You already know it was excellent. While the runtime didn’t fly by, exactly, it was engrossing. Not a single minute was wasted. Lily Gladstone was spectacular, Leonardo DiCaprio (and his fake, historically accurate teeth) acted his heart out. I kept thinking about the rich, culturally specific costume design, especially the Pendleton blankets that the Osage women wear throughout the movie. (Costume designer Jacqueline West had over 1,000 of them made; more on that here.) I left the theater in a daze. As you may have guessed, this is a film that you should sit with a bit—one that lends itself to long conversations parsing out every single detail. Especially that ending. That ending!