A movies central character neednt be someone we admire, but he should probably be someone were drawn to, someone we vibe with in sympathetic fascination, who we feel we know and understand even as he crosses over to the dark side. Few movies have lived out that dynamic more cathartically than the underworld dramas of Martin Scorsese.
Mean Streets, the tale of low-rung Little Italy mobsters that Scorsese made 50 years ago (I think its still his greatest film), is about Harvey Keitels ladder-climbing numbers runner, but the most explosive character is Robert De Niros Johnny Boy, a self-destructive firecracker who doesnt give two shits about you, or nobody else, a quality that would make him repellent if he werent so hypnotic. In Taxi Driver, De Niros Travis Bickle is a loner who cant connect, but he connects with the audience in every frame. GoodFellas inserts us into the hungry soul of Ray Liottas Henry Hill, who craves being a gangster so much that he, along with the audience, spends the entire movie discovering how brutal the stakes are. De Niros Ace Rothstein in Casino is a Vegas power player whose broken marriage to Sharon Stones Ginger leaves us desolate, gutted, on the rocks. And in The Irishman, De Niros Frank Sheeran is a Mob soldier who is given the staggering order to execute Jimmy Hoffa, the man to whom hes been a loyal bodyguard for years.
But then theres Ernest Burkhart, the lunkish hick Leonardo DiCaprio plays in Scorseses Killers of the Flower Moon. Ernest, a veteran of World War I, shows up at the door of his uncle, William King Hale (Robert De Niro), saying that he loves money. Hes soon involved in all sorts of dirty business: stealing, arranging the murders of innocents, keeping his downcast grimace of a mouth shut in order to cover up a vast criminal conspiracy. Ernests actions, in their way, are Mob-like, yet Ernest isnt presented as a violent man. Hes closer to a moral-idiot manchild who will do whatever his boss uncle tells him to do, because thats the limits of his thinking.
Beneath his terrible actions, though, who is Ernest Burkhart? As we watch Killers of the Flower Moon, what is it in him were being asked to identify with? Whats his desire, his journey, his relationship to the darkness?
Ive seen the film twice, and Im still trying to suss that one out.
DiCaprio, an actor of skillful precision, makes Ernest, on the surface, a genial yokel who lacks the imagination to think for himself. Early on, De Niros King Hale asks Ernest if he likes red (i.e., Native American women), and Ernest says sure, he likes all women. King wants to set Ernest up with Mollie Kyle (Lily Gladstone), one of several sisters in the Osage Nation who are sitting on the headrights of powerful oil-rich land. Ernest is a step ahead of him; hes been chauffeuring Lily around and flirting with her. So when the two get married, is it part of an unconscionable scheme? Or do they really love each other? The movie says both, but thats a tricky one to wrap your head around, especially when Ernest starts participating, with the nonchalance of a handyman, in the brutal murder of Mollies sisters.
The rationale or, rather, the explanation for all the homicide, apart from the naked greed that motivates it, is that the men committing the murders are racists. They dont regard the Osage as full human beings; thus they can kill them as if they were swatting flies. Organized racial murder has often conformed to this pattern (think of the Holocaust), but Ernest, the hayseed whos just following orders, has a shifting, eccentric relationship to the crimes chronicled in Killers of the Flower Moon. The film presents him as rock-stupidexcept for the moments when hes wily and street-smart. (It takes the Bureau of Investigation agent Tom White, played by Jesse Plemons, quite a while to crack Ernest open.) The film presents him as a money-grubbing varmintexcept that hes also a devoted husband who cherishes his family.
Great movie characters, of course, can be rippled with contradiction; thats what makes their stories rich and ambiguous. Just think of Scorseses Mob dramas, the Godfather films or The Sopranos, where ruthless killers are devoted to their families.
But in Killers of the Flower Moon, Ernest feels less like a character of dark or even tragic impulses than like a man who, in any given scene, is what the film needs him to be. When hes asked to do the ultimate dark deed to add poison to the insulin shots his wife is taking he carries out the task with such methodical thoughtlessness that instead of the heart of darkness opening up before us, we may feel like were seeing the heart of darkness closed off. Our connection to Ernest as a character should be deepening, but instead were on the outside looking in. Can a man slow-kill the wife he loves, without a shrug, all because hes a dunce yokel following orders?
Killers of the Flower Moon has been hailed by many critics as a masterpiece, but I would say its a divisive movie. I wouldnt call it love-it-or-hate-it. More like love-it vs. its-too-long-and-is-somehow-missing-something. Killers isnt the first Scorsese movie adapted from a work of nonfiction (GoodFellas was too, and Raging Bull was a brutal biopic). But its the first one to feel less like a drama than like an extended act of journalism. This happened, then this happened, and then this happened.
Yet for a film rooted in the density of history, theres a disorienting lack of background to much of what takes place in Killers of the Flower Moon. As presented, the rural Oklahoma community its set in is a vicious snakepit, up to its neck in the murder and exploitation of the Osage; its as if were watching a toxic local industry. Thats all real, but how did it get that way? In GoodFellas and Casino, Scorsese anatomized how the Mob worked. Here, we watch the movie with essential questions nagging at us like how the guardian system operates (the Osage dont control their money, except that some of them kind of do) or how William Hale brought this scheme of organized murder into being. How Hale himself, a public friend and benefactor of the Osage, evolved into a genocidal terrorist is never even addressed his terse heartlessness is presented as a fait accompli. (Thats why De Niros very good performance of jaunty evil never spooks you; it lacks a layer.) And Ernest Burkharts compliance in the scheme is presented with the same quality of rote objectivity. Its as if theyve all been doing this their whole lives.
Everything Killers of the Flower Moon shows us really happened, of course. The film is scrupulously true to the terrible facts of the Osage murders. Yet the answer to the Why? of how the Reign of Terror happened that these men were heartless racists is an accurate answer that still doesnt always feel like a dramatically full answer. As we watch Mollie waste away, Lily Gladstone acts with a sorrowful bewilderment that haunts us, but the fact is that Killers of the Flower Moon is a movie that asks us to spend three-and-a-half hours in the shoes of her affectless deceptive scoundrel of a husband, who by the end we may feel we understand less than we did at the beginning. If the movie seems too long to you, maybe thats because its like sharing space with a ghost.