YMMV / Killers of the Flower Moon

• Alternative Character Interpretation:
  • Did Ernest really love Mollie? If he did love her, at what point did it start—when he first met her, as he claims, or after his uncle instructed him to marry her? And was it that love for his wife and children (and the guilt he held for betraying them) that motivated him to testify against Hale, or merely the realization that his uncle would kill him for his wealth as easily and swiftly as he had killed so many others?
  • Alternatively: Did Mollie really love Ernest? Or was their marriage always one of convenience for her? As the original book points out more directly than the film, Osage women were more likely to marry white men because U.S. law required that they have white guardians in order to access their finances. The fact that Mollie's first meeting with Ernest comes directly after a difficult and humiliating meeting on this exact subject suggests that she may have agreed to his advances just to make the best out of a bad situation. For what it’s worth, Ernest and Mollie’s descendants told Scorsese that they did genuinely love each other.
  • Did John Ramsey half-ass the assassination of Henry Roan because he subconsciously hoped it would lead to his arrest and punishment because he felt guilty about killing him? His lack of resistance to the DOI agents would certainly be coherent with this interpretation.
• Award Snub: 10 Academy Award nominations, 0 wins, marking the third time a Martin Scorsese film has pulled off that feat (Gangs of New York and The Irishman are the others).
  • Lily Gladstone went into the Oscars having won the Screen Actors Guild and Golden Globe (Drama) awards for Best Actress, but lost to Emma Stone (for Poor Things). Most observers ranked the race as a tossup between the two, but Gladstone's loss was viewed by some as a mild upset—to the point that even Stone herself was visibly surprised. Some observers suggested that Gladstone may have been better served by being submitted for Best Supporting Actress instead (she only appeared in 27% of the film, very low for a Best Actress nominee).
  • A couple of surprising non-nominations were Leonardo DiCaprio (passed over for Best Actor despite heavy acclaim) and Best Adapted Screenplay, a nomination that practically everyone assumed was a given with how it condensed a sprawling nonfiction book into a cinematic narrative.^note  An oddball rumor that circulated after the nominations were announced claimed that Paul Thomas Anderson did an uncredited rewrite of the shooting script and that the Academy was made aware of it, explaining the snub, but most people dismissed this as poorly-sourced gossip. There's also the point that, because of the Writer's Guild's often convoluted and arbitrary appeals system, there have been many cases of writers getting nominations and even wins for screenplays that went through uncredited rewrites.
• Awesome Music:
  • "Dark was the Night, Cold was the Ground" by Blind Willie Johnson playing over a haunting scene of Hale's men setting fire to his own fields.
  • "Wahzhazhe (A Song for My People)", the huge Osage group chant at the end, performed by actual, modern day members of the nation. It's an incredibly powerful capstone to a film primarily about the atrocities committed against these people to show them and their culture still thriving in the modern day.
• Catharsis Factor: Considering all the heinous acts Hale and company pull throughout the film, it's incredibly satisfying to see all their plans come crumbling down throughout the third act as the BOI quickly zeroes in on them for their crimes. The fact that one of the agents responsible for taking them down, John Wren, is himself a Native American (played by Russell Means' son Tatanka Means) makes it even better.
• Complete Monster:
  • William King Hale is a well-dressed, affable man whose seeming friendliness to the Osage Nation masks a heart of pure, greed-driven evil. Motivated by a desire to claim as many "headrights" from the Osage as he can, Hale devises a devious, years-spanning plot to first establish familial or monetary connections to various Osage, then coldly murder them so their inheritance will trickle back to Hale. Dozens of innocent Osage are killed during this "reign of terror", all while Hale continues to act as an ally to the Osage. In his most despicable scheme, Hale targets his own in-laws, the Kyle family, for total annihilation, poisoning several of them with a "wasting illness" that slowly kills them while forcing the weak-willed Ernest to do the same to his wife, Mollie. Hale has anyone trying to investigate the mysterious deaths either beaten within an inch of their life or killed, and emotionally abuses those around him into compliance. When the BOI begins closing in on the murder and mayhem, Hale arranges the deaths of several of his minions to tie up loose ends, and tries to do the same to Ernest himself. Even when finally exposed, Hale has the audacity to continue acting like a "friend" to the Osage, truthfully valuing nothing but money and uncaring of how many corpses he leaves behind to get more of it.
  • Byron Burkhart is the most wicked of Hale's co-conspirators, a dim and brutal man who carries out and organizes most of the Osage killings. Brutally beating an investigator who arrives to inspect the killings, Byron is responsible for shootings and worse that kill numerous innocent Osage. Byron even carries out the death of his own girlfriend Anna with no remorse, despite her being pregnant.
• Crosses the Line Twice: Kelsie Morrison suggesting if he can adopt his deceased Osage wife's children and then kill them to get their headrights is horrifying, but the sheer audacity of such a suggestion and the casual way he delivers it makes it very darkly humorous.
• He Really Can Act: Alt-country musician Jason Isbell had no prior film acting credits and only a handful of cameos and voice work on TV before playing Bill Smith in this movie. He blends in nearly perfectly with the rest of the film's expansive cast of experienced character actors and memorably goes toe-to-toe with DiCaprio in his penultimate scene.
• Jerkass Woobie: Ernest is a dumb thug who is an accomplice in a monstrous conspiracy, and ends up poisoning his own wife, but it's easy to feel pity for him given he is ultimately just an easily manipulated pawn of his uncle, and it's shown he's not at all proud of what he's doing, even when he tries to escape the consequences. His emotional breakdown after one of his children dies is one of the film's biggest gut punches.
• Moral Event Horizon:
  • You can argue Ernest crossed it at the beginning at the film when he begins to rob the Osage people, but by the time he is poisoning his own wife he is essentially irredeemable. Mollie's utter contempt for him in their last scene together shows she knows this.
  • Hale's introduction places him as a greedy Gold Digger already, but his plan to kill Mollie's family one by one, ending with her, all to get their oil money is what truly makes him beyond redemption. Especially as he does such outrageous acts like grieving at the funerals of the people whose deaths he arranged.
• Padding: Many of the scenes in this very long film feel like they could be cut in half and still make the same point. But a standout is Kelsie Morrison testifying at trial to how he murdered Anna under Hale's orders, followed by a scene showing the murder that had just been explained in testimony. Considering how much was cut from the book, that screen time could probably have been put to better use.
• Paranoia Fuel: Osage citizens are killed everywhere (in their homes, on the streets of town, etc.) and don't know who to trust throughout the killing spree, as Mollie is married to the nephew of the Big Bad (who seems to hold sway over the local elites and authorities), their doctors are poisoning some of them, and one killer shoots an Osage man right after sharing a friendly drink with him by a roadside. The corruption is so pervasive that even Hale's jury includes some of his co-conspirators.
• Strangled by the Red String: Mollie and Ernest really don't show much chemistry in the brief segment of the film before their marriage, so them getting together, though a necessary part of the plot/history, feels rather out of nowhere. While their interactions having little chemistry late in the movie is almost certainly intentional and a show of Mollie's distrust of her husband as her family dies around her, their initial interactions raise the question of why she decided to marry him in the first place, especially considering the scene directly prior to their engagement is her pointing out to her sisters that he's an obvious Gold Digger. Some have wondered if it might have made more sense for the film to make more of a point of why Mollie (and other Osage women) historically would have been compelled to marry white men.
• Tear Jerker:
  • Mollie's overall situation is this, with her sisters and mother dying, and eventually knowing that Ernest had a role in the murders of the Osage people.
  • Ernest's reaction when White informs him the news of the death of one of his children from a whooping cough.
  • The final scene between Mollie and Ernest, whereby Ernest struggles to, and eventually refuses to admit to poisoning the insulin meant for Mollie, resulting in Mollie leaving Ernest.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot:
  • In spite of the lengthy runtime of the film, little is directly said about why the BOI investigated the case in the first place. While the film suggests that it was the result of Mollie traveling to D.C. with a delegation and personally pleading with President Calvin Coolidge, in reality the Osage had to basically bribe J. Edgar Hoover to do his job and investigate the case. After this, Hoover stole the credit for solving the case from White and his team and ended the investigation before they could make arrests of many other people implicated in killing Osage because he was afraid a prolonged investigation would expose mistakes he made earlier in the case. These incidents could have added some color to the movie, avoided giving some rather controversial figures a Historical Hero Upgrade by implication, and played into the central themes of white people in power exploiting the Osage.
  • There's a subset of viewers who would've preferred the original idea of the movie focusing on the investigation into the murders, either from the perspective of the BOI (as in the original book) or solely from the Osage themselves, as opposed to viewing things mostly from the Villain Protagonists' point of view. The fact a decent chunk of Mollie and Ernest's scenes, especially after the investigation does start, can come across as Padding in an three and a half hour long movie doesn't help.
  • The Osage Nation providing for the widow and ten children of one of their few white allies after the killers murdered him and stole evidence he had collected about their plot (along with his family's life savings) was an interesting real-life element of the case that didn't make it into the film.
• Unexpected Character: Almost nobody expected Martin Scorsese himself to pop out and deliver the "Where Are They Now?" Epilogue in the final scene.
• The Woobie: The number of tragedies and indignities heaped upon Mollie throughout the film stagger the imagination, made all the worse by the fact that this is a true story. She is a woman who rapidly loses her entire immediate family to a murderous conspiracy that includes her own husband, who, unbeknownst to her, is slowly poisoning her using her own insulin shots on his uncle's behalf. As the film goes on she just grows more despondent and frail to the point where by the third act she's practically an Empty Shell just barely clinging on to life. Even after her life is saved and the conspiracy is exposed, Mollie outlives her young daughter and is soon after faced with the shattering revelation of her husband's betrayal. The epilogue reveals that she only lived to be 50, and was buried next to her murdered family, with her obituary making no mention of the atrocities committed against them.

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