Framing the Flower Moon

I was very excited to see Killers of the Flower Moon. It's the first Martin Scorsese movie I will have watched in theaters. It's aided by his most trusted collaborators - his editor Thelma Schoonmaker and his composer Robbie Robertson. It features 2 veteran actors in Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro, and a rising star in Lily Gladstone. I "knew" the acting would be great. I "knew" the cinematography would be great. I "knew" the editing would be great. And they were! Every aspect I "knew" Killers would excel in, it did. However, beyond the technical mastery, its story is fundamentally flawed, told from the wrong character's perspective with a puzzling relationship at its core.

Killers of the Flower Moon centers around the blossoming relationship between Ernest Burkhart, a white veteran returning from war, and Mollie Kyle, a wealthy Osage woman. Ernest is torn between his love for Mollie and the influence of his Uncle William King Hale, who hatches a plan to slowly kill the Osage people and steal their headrights. Or at least I THINK he's torn. Ernest doesn't follow the expected arc of slowly realizing Hale's plan and having to confront his own involvement in it. Ernest knows Hale's plan from the near-beginning, and by the end of the film, he still refuses to acknowledge his own actions.

That is to say, Ernest isn't a typical protagonist. He certainly isn't a hero, but he doesn't neatly fall into any anti-hero archetype. He isn't cunning, he isn't driven, and he isn't especially conflicted. He's passive and obedient. Ernest never actively pursues evil actions, he just allows himself to get swept away in them. If he had any moral scruples at the story's beginning, they're gone by the hour mark. Ernest is a genuine coward in a gut-wrenchingly real way, showing that most evil comes not from passionate hatred, but from a mix of stupidity, indifference, and straightforward opportunism. Most men aren't like William Hale, planning the deaths of hundreds. Most men are like Ernest, passively accepting the Hales of the world, out of comfort and convenience.

That point is effectively horrifying, and central to the story, but Ernest's character is simply difficult to sit with for over three hours. It's a tall order to expect an audience to tolerate, let alone empathize with, a character like Ernest. We spend so much time with him, and yet time and time again, the revelation is that there is no deeper level to Ernest. He isn't complex in the typical movie way. He doesn't have a deep inner-conflict, or ambitions, or a deep history that informs his actions.

Instead, Ernest is complex in that frustrating, elusive, and honest way. His wants are simple, but his actions are unpredictable. He amorphously glides from action to action, doing whatever feels "right" in the moment. That feeling of "what's right," however, doesn't appear tied to any moral guidepost. Ernest is hard to get a read on, not because there's a lot to understand below the surface, but because he doesn't seem to be capable of understanding himself. Ernest is an impressively realized, if cynical, portrait of a truly average, unremarkable person. DiCaprio plays him with a distinct lack of revelation. He is as he is as he is - for the entire runtime.

This profound lack of deeper humanity extends to Ernest's relationship with Mollie. Their connection appears to be the core of the film, but there's little indication of what forms their bond, or if that bond even truly exists. Their relationship is a black hole, sucking the rest of the film into a profound disconnection and emptiness that can't sustain itself across three and a half hours.

Much of the criticism leveled at Killers of the Flower Moon has centered around its runtime. It has spurred half-serious debates about time allotments for bathroom breaks, which in true internet fashion, spurred a backlash-to-the-backlash, about attention spans deteriorating and checking phones in the theater. To address all that: No, I didn't need a bathroom break during the movie. No, I didn't check my phone during the movie. While watching, I barely felt the runtime, largely due to Thelma Schoonmaker's expertly-paced editing. Time flew by, but upon reflection, the story is too thin and too static to justify 226 minutes of film. The oscillating nature of Ernest's arc means large swathes of the film play out the same way. The sheer quality of craftsmanship is astounding, but there's no use in sharpening a broken sword.

Just because Killers is epic in scale and in subject, doesn't mean it needs to match that ambition in length. In The Wolf of Wall Street, Scorsese had reason to tell that story across three hours. It had a clear, carefully-plotted arc, with a momentous rise and a devastating fall. In Killers, the characters undergo very little change. Ernest isn't slowly brought into the criminal organization; he agrees to take part in the scheme from the start. Then, he flips back and forth between uncertainty and complacency. There's an ostensible escalation, in the sense that the killings become more and more blatant, but Ernest's moral conflict never changes, and he never enters a new phase as a character. Scorsese and co-writer Eric Roth's choice to frame the story from Ernest's perspective fractures the film irreparably.

Many of the characters that surround Ernest, however, are much more tangibly developed. Lily Gladstone as Mollie Kyle steals every scene she's in, with a quiet dignity and discerning gaze that holds strong as her community, then her family, then finally her life, are threatened. Gladstone sublty shows Mollie's conflicted emotions through quick glances and hard stares and looks of disbelief. Her eyes are a window to the soul with the blinds half-drawn, concealing her emotions but allowing slight cracks in that veneer which expand as the film progresses. Mollie knows from the start that her relationship with Ernest is doomed, and yet she desperately holds onto him for support. Mollie is the true heart of the film, and Gladstone deserved more screen time.

Robert de Niro plays William King Hale - a real, recognizable monster. He's hateable but spellbinding, so blatant in intention yet daunting in influence that despite his obvious ill-will, he sets the social norms in Osage land. The white characters immediately treat his actions as permissible, always willing to go as low as he suggests. By the time Ernest feels the plan is going too far, it's already over. Bill Hale opens the floodgates, enabling the collective to sink to his level through greed and opportunism.

Killers of the Flower Moon doesn't shy away from depicting their acts head-on, using violence selectively and impactfully. Scorsese depicts the killings in what feels like real-time, without style, fanfare, or artistic flair. It's visceral, and blunt, and then it's over. The placement of these scenes throughout the film are especially purposeful, sneaking up on the audience after calm dialogue scenes. They aren't telegraphed, which gives the film a pervading sense of impending violence constantly bubbling below the surface.

The killings are crushing, but personally, the scenes I found most emotionally resonant were Killer's occasional left-turns into surreal, spiritual imagery. Early in the film, soon after Mollie starts her relationship with Ernest, Mollie's mother sees an owl, a premonition of death in Osage culture. Later in the film, while feverish, Mollie sees an owl fly into her room just moments before Ernest re-enters to provide her "medicine." It's a quiet exhumation of a dying relationship. There's a mesmerizing scene in which Mollie's mother is escorted into the afterlife by a man covered in red paint. In complete contrast to the blunt killings, this scene is serene, comfortable with death. It then smash cuts to the desperate cries of her family back in our world.

This is all to say that Killers of the Flower Moon does a lot right, and it contains some of the most gripping individual scenes in any film I've watched. Beyond the empty relationship at its core, and repetitive story structure, Killers is an excellent film, it just didn't offer much more than I expected walking into the theater - that is, until the last 20 minutes.

Around the three-hour mark, the inevitable happens, and Mollie finally leaves Ernest. The story reaches its natural conclusion, and then the film switches gears. We cut to a true crime radio show detailing the aftermath of the killings. It's filmed live with an audience. There's an energetic band dramatically scoring the events, and crew on stage impersonating the REAL PEOPLE we just witnessed live and die and struggle for three hours. The radio show flattens them into stereotypes for the audience's entertainment, the exact thing that lesser portrayals of Native American culture have done for decades, and that Killers was wary to avoid. This epilogue is a screed against the exploitation of tragedies for entertainment value, against selling the suffering of a culture you don't understand as a spectacle with the same greed and opportunism that enabled these killings in the first place. Then, the radio show ends on a different note. A man, played by Martin Scorsese, tells us the end of Mollie's story. After leaving Ernest, she remarried, and died at age 50 of diabetes. Mollie was buried next to her family, and, in the final line of the movie, we learn that her tombstone bore no reference to the Osage murders.

This final line is the central thesis of the entire film, reframing the entire film as a mere chapter of Mollie's life. It asserts that her FAMILY, and her COMMUNITY defined her, not the things that were done TO her family and community. The final shot of the film, a soaring, beautiful overhead shot of the Osage people celebrating, tells us what truly defines them: their culture, their beliefs, their relationships with each other. By changing the framing in this epilogue, Killers of the Flower Moon celebrates the Osage as people, rather than victims in someone else's story.