Martin Scorsese's Killers Of The Flower Moon Cameo Was A Perfect Accident
Warning: this post contains spoilers for the end of "Killers of the Flower Moon."
Martin Scorsese's latest film "Killers of the Flower Moon" was based on the 2017 nonfiction book by David Grann, and tells a fictionalized version of the notorious Osage murders committed by William King Hale through the mid-1920s. Hale, motivated by greed and a terrifyingly innate sense of white supremacy, swept into the Osage nation specifically to direct Osage wealth into the pockets of white men. Hale arranged himself as a community hero, and the Osage people trusted him, but he was secretly arranging their deaths and stealing their wealth. Inheritance schemes and outright murders kept Hale on top of the community's business interests.
This, Scorsese argues, is the real foundation of American exceptionalism.
In Scorsese's film, Hale is played by Robert De Niro and the film's main character is a soulless little turd named Ernest (Leonard DiCaprio) who goes along with Hale's plans, motivated only by greed and his own lack of wherewithal. "Killers" delves deeply into the two men's crimes and their bloody-minded insistence on theft and exploitation, two things that come naturally to evil men. The face of the Osage community is Mollie Kyle, played by Lily Gladstone.
The film ends with an epilogue set about 20 years after the events of the bulk of the film. The action cuts abruptly to a stage in a distant theater wherein actors and newsreaders are enacting a true-crime dramatization of the Osage murders, informing a modern audience of how everything played out and how all the characters died. The final word in the epilogue is given by Scorsese himself in what is an ingenious cameo.
It seems his cameo, while thematically notable, was a last-minute decision. Scorsese talked about it in a recent interview with EW.
That's Entertainment
The final on-stage, radio broadcast sequence confronts a tragic meta-truth about any and all biographies, especially those that ended badly for the subjects: by turning a story into a movie, an artist is pathetically reducing the truth into a crass, commercial entertainment. The 1940s radio drama within "Killers of the Flower Moon" points out that the tragedy of the Osage people was, a scant 20 years after the fact, already being turned into unremarkable fodder for mid-evening entertainment for white people. Scorsese, in stepping in front of the camera to remind listeners of what happened to Mollie, is implicating himself in that process.
"Killers of the Flower Moon," however noble its intentions or effective its tragedy, is just the 2023 version of that radio drama. Mollie's life is now just entertainment. It's a wise, sad ending that reminds audiences that real-life tragedy, however informed we may be on them through pop entertainment, can't ever be undone. The scars remain. All we have left is amusement. Scorsese was aware of this and said to EW:
"One of the things we were discussing was the fact that, for God's sake, after everything, it becomes entertainment. [...] And you can say, well, this film becomes entertainment too, in which case then we have to take the responsibility. We hope that it's entertainment with some depth and enrichment that maybe can approach some kind of truth."
It's a careful line to walk, the balance between truth and entertainment. Scorsese implicates the audience and he implicates himself.
Scorsese wrote the screenplay for "Flower Moon" with Eric Roth, who is regularly nominated for Oscars (and who won for writing "Forrest Gump"). Roth wrote the final monologue as a tribute to the real Mollie Kyle. Scorsese admitted he didn't know how to direct that speech.
How do I direct this?
The final speech that Scorsese delivered didn't yet have an assigned actor, even when it came to the day it needed to be shot. Scorsese admits that he wouldn't know how to direct an actor for that scene, so he delayed shooting it, hoping inspiration would come. It never did. In a last-ditch effort, just to get something on film, Scorsese stepped in himself. Scorsese had, of course, appeared in several of his own films in the past ("Taxi Driver," "Hugo," etc.), but he didn't intend to appear in "Flower Moon."
Luckily, when he stepped in as a stop-gap actor, everything fell into place. Scorsese recalled:
"I didn't know how to direct it. [...] I couldn't ask an actor to do it, so I said, 'Let me try. It's one shot, and if it doesn't work, I think I know what I could tell an actor to do.' [...] As I was repeating it, I'm thinking about the lineup of the graves of the mother, the sisters, the father, and the little girl. I said it. I did it. And finally, everybody froze and said, 'That may be it. Maybe it's okay. Just go with that, rather than ending it in a conventional way.'"
Scorsese described how Mollie Kyle was buried next to her forebears and her descendents, all of them long gone. Not only did the film end satisfyingly, but Scorsese's presence changed one of the themes of the film. This wasn't merely a hard-hitting drama about the tragic exploitation of the Osage people at the hands of greedy white "captains of industry." This was also another example of how the fate of the Osage people is still being distantly exploited, even by skilled filmmakers.