![]() ![]() ![]() His performance leaves audiences wondering how Ernest could possibly claim to love Mollie while committing such despicable deeds. DiCaprio masterfully portrays this character as cowardly, gullible, and greedy. Starting off as her taxi driver and eventually marrying her, Ernest seems to care, to some extent, about his wife but simultaneously assists his uncle and brother in killing her relatives. ![]() Mollie’s doomed marriage to Ernest is what elevates “Killers of the Flower Moon” to the next level. Whereas the story of the Osage murders could have turned into a typical Western, Scorsese experiments with genre norms by framing the entire narrative around the romance and marriage of Ernest and Mollie and interspersing scenes of familial life with depictions of Ernest and Hale’s heinous acts. While most of these murders went uninvestigated, the deaths of Mollie’s sisters, mother, and other relatives prompted an investigation from the FBI. Hale, covered in a 2017 David Grann book of the same name, Scorsese paints a damning image of the historical treatment of the Osage people by their white “guardians,” who controlled their finances and orchestrated the Reign of Terror from 1910 to 1930, killing an estimated 60 Osage people for their headrights. In “Killers of the Flower Moon,” Scorsese’s latest film, the audience follows Ernest and his uncle William “King” Hale (Robert De Niro), who plots to have Ernest marry a wealthy Osage woman, Mollie Kyle (Lily Gladstone) and murder her relatives to inherit her headrights to the oil reserves located in Osage territory. As the film cuts to a scene of Ernest and his brother robbing and looting the Osage people, it is clear who these wolves are. “Do you see the wolves in this picture?” asks Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio), reading aloud from a children’s picture book on the Osage people. As filmmaker Martin Scorsese foreshadows, this black gold, which according to the film made the Osage the richest people per capita in the world, also brought the attention of those who sought to exploit them by whatever means possible. Shortly afterward, the Osage are seen celebrating as oil gushes from the ground. In a solemn gathering, the Osage people bury a ceremonial pipe and declare that their children will now speak the white man’s language and be raised in the white man’s culture. ![]()
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