Does Martin Scorcese hate his audience? Or does he want cinema to fail?
Bring back the intermission.
A preface: I saw “Killers of the Flower Moon” on opening weekend. I liked it. I didn’t think it was perfect. But I’m glad I saw it. And I’m glad I saw it on the big screen even though the experience — with commercials and trailers at the beginning — meant that I was stuck in my seat for four solid hours.
Many of my fellow moviegoers weren’t quite so resilient.
A lot of folks got up during the movie to go take a bathroom break or — who knows? — to stretch their legs. They missed part of the movie because their bodies simply couldn’t endure the full, unbroken journey. (I prepped by not buying a single snack, not even water.)
It would’ve been helpful to have an intermission.
Some movie theaters agree. A few have been sneaking unplanned intermissions into the movie to give their paying customers a break. And, well, the moviemaking team isn’t happy.
As of Friday morning, two European cinema chains and one independent theater in Amsterdam sold tickets to screenings of “Killers of the Flower Moon” with a built-in break. A spokesperson for UCI Cinemas, an exhibition chain with venues in Germany, Italy, Portugal and Brazil, confirmed that all of its nearly 80 theaters — with the exception of Imax screens in Porta di Roma, Orio, and Campi Bisenzio — had included a “six-minute interval towards the middle of the film.”
To be clear, only a smattering of venues out of the roughly 10,000 globally that are screening “Killers of the Flower Moon” have included an intermission, but it hasn’t gone unnoticed. Thelma Schoonmaker, the editor of the film and longtime collaborator with Scorsese, told The Standard, “I understand that somebody’s running it with an intermission which is not right. That’s a violation so I have to find out about it.”
Long story short: The movie production companies are cracking down on theaters that give the intermissions.
Which seems dumb and incredibly short-sighted to me.
Understand: I liked the movie. I don’t need it to be shorter. There was something profound about sitting with the journey over the time it needed to unfold. I’m down!
But if you want to drive people away from the movie theater experience to streaming, this is a good way to do it — to tell your audience that they have to test their physical boundaries to see your movie the way you want it to be seen, or to just wait to see it on the home screen and all its attendant distractions.
Scorcese has positioned himself as a Defender of Cinema in the Age of Cinema’s Slow Death. So it’s weird that he seems indifferent to the problem here:
While Scorsese has not directly addressed the intermission (or lack thereof), he defended the long runtime of “Killers of the Flower Moon” in an interview with the Hindustan Times, saying, “People say it’s three hours, but come on, you can sit in front of the TV and watch something for five hours.”
I mean: C’mon man. Very few people watch TV for five hours without getting up, going to pee, making dinner or a snack, checking screens or having conversations. Watching TV for five hours is not an endurance test. Watching a three-and-a-half-hour movie in theater can be a challenge.
There’s a lot of talk about “respecting the artist’s intent” with how a movie is seen. “If Scorsese didn’t intend for there to be an intermission, I think that should be at least the primary way people can see it,” said one expert. But because he didn’t plan for an intermission, the director has all but forced a good chunk of his audience to watch his movie on streaming services, where they’ll watch it however they like.
It’s not a great way to save cinema.
The intermission is what makes Kubrick’s movies, for instance, often great: it’s at that carefully chosen perfect spot, not at an arbitrary halfway mark. For what it’s worth, I think it would have made total sense to put the intermission at the arrival of Jesse Plemons, since this is where the narrative shifts towards really solving the murders (this is not a spoiler, it’s in the trailer).
Despite that, I think it’s Scorsese’s best since Goodfellas.
I saw KOTFM too. Sometimes, I believe, people can forget there is an audience on the other end of their art that are living, breathing people and not demographics. I know I did that when I was at my last gig.