Thoughts on Killers of the Flower Moon · 4:46pm Oct 28th, 2023

Not an easy watch by any means but one that I am glad to have seen all the way through.

It's funny in some ways. I'm "aware" of the popular perception of Leonardo DiCaprio as a romantic or dreamboat actor, and yet between this movie - where he plays a guy who is an idiot, and while he is party to some truly despicable actions, proves more pathetic than hateworthy - and my knowledge of other roles (Jordan Belfort in "The Wolf of Wall Street," Calvin Candie in "Django Unchained") I have far more associations of Leo as an unsavory character than anything else. (His character from "Catch Me If You Can" skews more sympathetic from what I remember of that movie, but he's still playing a master con artist.)

Dicaprio, as Ernest Burkhardt, is an idiot, who largely does whatever he is told and is constantly left confused or befuddled, but he ultimately proves to have a small but crucial piece of humanity left deep inside. His uncle, William King Hale, played to perfection by Robert de Niro, has none of that. De Niro's character is, in a word, devilish. He engineers so much of the movie's misery, in planning the exploitation of the Osage people for their oil headrights, and sets up so many murders and deaths, all while putting on a friendly and pious front, that one could easily be swept up in his lies, even after directly seeing how he has already orchestrated the murders of several Osage women.

(The movie doesn't skimp on the brutality of the era, though the thing that makes these deaths so horrifying isn't the gore to do with any of the gunshots, or even some postmortem dismemberment. Rather it's the sheer premeditation that goes into so many of them. This is a movie that GETS how people dehumanize each other. The racism shown in this movie is eerily cold-blooded, and there is far more horror in the casual execution and dumping of an Osage woman than any shootout.)

Lily Gladstone is a solid anchor for the movie, as Mollie, the Osage woman who Ernest marries (at his uncle's behest). Ernest is pathetic and yet you do question where he stands in regard to his wife: he does seem to love her, yet is still spineless to his uncle's evil plans and goes along with the scheme to break her and her family. Mollie's anguish is beautifully, painfully realized, and her determination to find some way of unraveling the mystery of her sisters' murders is quite powerful throughout.

This is, even for a three hour-plus feature, a very long movie. You have to really wait and see how all the pieces fit together and how everything plays out. But the conclusion of the movie is terrific, as finally, the feds start to unravel the mystery, as Ernest finally begins to grow a conscience (even if not in time to really save himself), and we see the movie come to a powerful end.

Two points regarding the very end of the movie: one is that Scorsese chooses to sum up the final fates of the characters, in the most unique way of an in-universe radio drama narrating things. This offers a surprising spin on exposition, one that manages to be entertaining, and then somber as the final narrator in the segment (Scorsese himself) reads off the final words regarding Mollie Burkhardt and her fate. Very sad...

And yet, in the movie ending on a final sequence of an Osage ritual dance, there may be something like hope as well. Food for thought at any rate.

Very glad I was able to see this on the big screen.

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