Killers of the Flower Moon

#18 in my ranking of Martin Scorsese’s filmography.

You know that feeling when a filmmaker has been banging out classics for decades, hitting a real high stride over the past decade, and then his next movie is pretty good? Yeah…it’s kind of deflating. Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon, based on the book by David Grann, is an earnest look at a hundred year old series of crimes that thematically feels right at home in his body of work, and yet it makes a miscalculation around its point of view character that really seems to hamper the whole thing, taking the extremely precise skill and execution of late-stage Scorsese and muddling things just enough to take it from what could have been great to something merely good. Remind you, it’s still quite good (it ends really well), but, well, its central character is a moron.

The Osage Nation, which has been forcibly moved from Missouri to Arkansas to Kansas and finally to a reservation in Oklahoma have discovered that the land the federal government has given them is rich with oil, making them the richest people per capita on the planet. This has brought the wolves to their doorstep as they enjoy their riches but also begin dying in mysterious ways. Into this world comes Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio), a WWI vet to live with his uncle William Hale (Robert De Niro), a cattle rancher and friend of the Osage who immediately starts scheming on how to use his nephew to get as much of the Osage money as he can. First is to get Ernest and Mollie Kyle (Lily Gladstone) together. They quickly develop an affinity for each other and marry, giving Hale his in into the Osage property through her family, but she’s one of four daughters to a living mother.

Now, my central issue with this film is really Ernest and his innate dumbness. He’s a dumb character, and it undermines what seems to be the intended purpose of him actually being in an internal conflict about the terrible things he’s helping along at the behest of his uncle and his genuine love for Mollie. Despite DiCaprio’s committed performance and Scorsese’s precise direction, the writing and editing are so stacked against his intelligence that when he looks up at the terrible things he’s doing into his wife’s eyes, all I see is a complete lack of connection, like he has literally no idea that he’s hurting her.

And hurt her he does. It’s all behind her back and behind closed doors (reminding me of William Wyler‘s final film, The Liberation of L.B. Jones), but Ernest has a direct hand in the bombing of her sister Rita (JaNae Collins) and husband Bill (Jason Isbell) by arranging it with Acie Kirby (Pete Yorn). He is always around Hale while he works with Ernest’s older brother Byron (Scott Shepherd) who executes Anna (Cara Jade Myers), Mollie’s older sister. And that points to another reason I feel like Ernest shouldn’t have been the main character: he’s only part of the larger conspiracy and violence. A lot of it happens away from him, and yet he’s carrying the guilt for all of it, reminding me slightly of the amorphous judgment in The Wolf of Wall Street. He’s a small cog, but he does have what might be the most potent connection to the Osage out of all of them, so it still makes sense that he would be the focus.

The point where Ernest’s idiocy kind of reaches the worst point is when Mollie, sickly because she suffers from diabetes but given insulin through the intercession of Hale, becomes deeply suspicious of everyone around her except Ernest to the point where she demands that Ernest be the only one who administer her daily shot, cutting out the doctors. The doctors, though, tell Ernest to add a small vial to every bottle of insulin, all while Mollie only gets worse with the administration of the supposed miracle cure to her affliction. It’s obvious that he makes some kind of connection, being torn between orders indirectly from his uncle and the suffering of his wife, but I see it performed and written more like he simply doesn’t understand. He thinks that maybe there’s something wrong with the instructions but he simply can’t make the connection because it isn’t explain to him directly.

The latter half of the film is centered around the arrival of the federal investigator Tom White (Jesse Plemons), out to investigate the murders and quickly discovering the insular world he’s stepped into while using a set of undercover agents to help him gather intelligence. The noose around Ernest quickly tightens because, again, he’s not terribly bright and the crimes are so heinously blatant, and the conflict within Ernest really seems to finally be understood by him. It’s being confronted with consequences that makes him finally realize what’s going on, finally getting him to question the vial he’s putting into his wife’s medicine.

Now, I should mention Brendan Fraser. He’s got a very small part near the end, and the sudden explosion of noise around his performance online that came up when the film was released wide made me expect something quite different from what I got. I was expecting a show-stopping performance so out of line with everything around it that it just ended good feeling for the film, but he’s honestly barely in it. He has one concentrated dose of dialogue where he explains to Ernest to not testify against his uncle, and it’s overbearing but far from some kind of Southern caricature on the lines of Foghorn Leghorn.

Anyway, Mollie really is the heart of the film, and it’s unfortunate because she’s really passive in the face of everything that happens (most likely in alignment with the real Mollie) and gets sidelined for long stretches because of her illness. It’s not Ernest’s moral quandary of killing his wife or following his uncle’s orders that’s the emotional core, it’s Mollie realizing that her husband is a monster. The moment she realizes the depths of his evil is a quiet one at the very end. It’s far from histrionic, just giving Mollie this still moment to observe her husband and ask him a single question.

I do also like how Scorsese ends the film with the recap of everything that happens afterwards with a recreation of a radio production rather than just scrawling text. It gives him a nice little cameo at the end, too (I think he had a voice cameo as a photographer earlier, as well).

So, it’s a wildly impressive physical production, impeccably made by Scorsese with serious Apple money. It’s performed really well. DiCaprio gives this dumb character his all, almost making him feel more multidimensional than he probably deserves, while De Niro so easily balances on this evil line between charismatic and scheming. It’s Gladstone’s performance that has the most effect, though, and she’s very good.

I just feel like the focus on Ernest, a stupid character who really just doesn’t seem to understand what he’s doing, was a mistake that hobbles the film more than it deserves. This is a serious film with strong entertainment in its crime genre, doing everything it can to elevate the genre in the process, but the moral quandary at the center is just not something I’m terribly convinced by.

It’s good, though. That’s for sure.

Rating: 3/4