Feel free to brand me a cultural philistine if you wish, but the minute I saw the run-time for Martin Scorsese’s new film Killers of the Flower Moon I emitted a weary groan. Clocking in at a mighty 3 hours and 26 minutes, I could very easily hit play, set off from London up the motorway to Sheffield, and arrive there bang on the end credits.
Scorsese has long been a fan of hefty timestamps â The Irishman was even longer, by three extra minutes â but he’s far from the only one at it. If you unravel the film spool for Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, released earlier this year, it would reach from Trafalgar Square to Croydon IKEA with another half a mile to spare. Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning - Part 1 featured Tom Cruise performing all manner of ridiculous and death-defying back-flips for just shy of three hours, and that’s somehow only the first instalment of the saga.
As much as I loved the psychological suspense that fizzled throughout last year’s classical corruption epic Tár (2 hours 38 minutes) I’ll admit it could have done with a trim. In general, the average length of films is creeping up. According to number-crunching analysis by The Economist, they have become 24 per cent longer since Hollywood's Golden Age in the 1930s.
None of this is going to put me off watching Killers of the Flower Moon (I guess I’ll just take a packed lunch) but I’ll have to try and leave my scepticism at the cinema doors â because honestly, there are few films crossing the three-hour threshold that truly need to be that long. Some of the zippiest, most entertaining films going – from kids classics like Toy Story and Paddington, to cult horrors like Blair Witch Project and The Wicker Man – cram entire worlds into roughly the duration of a football match.
Maybe it speaks to my lack of an attention span, but I don’t think it’s mere coincidence that many of my favourite films clock in at under 100 minutes: Jean Luc-Godard’s Bande à part, Pedro Almodóvar’s Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, Jamie Babbit’s But I’m A Cheerleader and Mark Waters’ Mean Girls all tick this short and sweet box across varied genres. Sure, it takes immense skill to keep a cinema gripped for hours on end, but it’s equally impressive to spawn truly iconic, enduring characters and beloved stories out of more limited windows.
Shorter films often have tighter storytelling as a matter of necessity, but they’re also great for the box office; rather than hogging screen three for half of the day, snappier showings are a better earner. Obviously art shouldn’t be dictated purely by potential turnover, but if it happens to work with the film in question, isn’t that just another giant plus?
It goes without saying that there are obvious exceptions to my irrational dislike for lengthy pieces of art. It would be sheer stupidity for me to try and rubbish a stone cold classic like Gone With The Wind, or The Godfather, on the shaky basis that ‘it goes on a bit’. Plays â and I’ll get onto why in a second â also seem to be more easily immune from dragging on.
Complicité’s wildly inventive take on the 2009 Polish novel Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead flew by at the Barbican in a blissful blur, and needed every second of its three hour run-time to do justice to Olga Tokarczuk's bleak and hilarious murder mystery. It was a similar story for the equally lengthy Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, at the Gielgud Theatre – and I didn’t even smuggle any secret snacks into that one.
The mammoth Angels in America at the National Theatre also had the right idea, splitting its eight hours of stage time across two separate days. A decent night’s sleep, in the middle of proceedings? Heavenly!
You’ll notice that these are all plays, and the thing about plays is that they usually have some kind of interval – the perfect opportunity to gulp down pre-ordered glasses of prosecco while standing in other people’s way. The especially decadent among us might even use it to secure a tiny little pot of icecream to gobble during the second half. Sometimes, if you’re lucky, you might even spot somebody famous in the loos! Football matches, which also come with a half-time interlude, also have the right idea.
Which has got me thinking: imagine how much better a marathon film would be with an interval?
Back in the 1960s, television began emerging as a competitor to film, and 75 per cent of UK households owned one. And so film directors went wild with their runtimes in a bid to lure punters into the cinema. Because lengthy epics like Laurence of Arabia (3 hours 30 minutes) required multiple reels, the films had theatre-style intermissions to give the projectionist a chance to get everything set up.
Forget about trying to pay attention to a 6.30pm showing with nothing but sweet and salty popcorn for dinner, and dare to dream of tumbling out of the doors of Peckhamplex midway through for a quick mid-film debrief, a leg stretch, and maybe even some hastily-acquired nuggets from the McDonalds opposite.
Wouldn’t it make for a more utopian world, where everyone is contented and happy? The likes of Scorsese, Nolan, et al, able to carry on making ridiculously long films without a care in the world; and the impatient film-goers among us, with a snack break in the middle of it.
