The Key to Lily Gladstone’s Incredible Performance Isn’t Her Suffering. It’s Her Spark.

In Slate’s annual Movie Club, film critic Dana Stevens emails with fellow critics—for 2023, Bilge Ebiri, Esther Zuckerman, and Mark Harris—about the year in cinema. Read the first entry here.

Hello Waterloo vampires,

I’ve just finished writing a piece that digs into some of this year’s Great Men movies. Call them biopics or whatever you want, but in Maestro, Ferrari, Oppenheimer, and Napoleon, great directors tackle men whom history has chosen to revere. While I think Oppenheimer is the only true masterpiece of the four, I have to say I was probably most delighted by Joaquin Phoenix’s performance as Napoleon Bonaparte. I’m not saying he’s better than Bradley Cooper, Adam Driver, and Cillian Murphy, but I am saying I had the most fun watching him. I loved how committed he was to inaccuracy. Ridley Scott does not give a shit about whether something is quote-unquote correct, and neither does Phoenix in this role.

Phoenix is an actor known for his physical transformation, but, perhaps on the instruction of Scott himself, he chose to do very little to change himself when playing the pompous French ruler. He even uses his own American accent. Blind item: I was having a conversation with a wonderful filmmaker at a party earlier this year who said Phoenix in Napoleon reminded him of the late Ryan O’Neal in Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon. Somehow he feels completely wrong for the role, but that wrongness is right. His out-of-time quality makes Napoleon seem hilariously like the kind of emotionally stunted man we encounter all the time in the 21^st century: Napoleon as a bratty internet shitposter.

This is all to Bilge’s point—or maybe a bastardization of Bilge’s point—that accuracy isn’t always the thing, even when playing real-life people. In Maestro, Cooper goes to great lengths to look like Leonard Bernstein, but in some ways, I believe the accuracy of the makeup is a detriment to the movie. (And not because of the nose. I think Mark had the best take on that here.) The moments I adored in Maestro were the ones that broke free from the fetters of reality: for instance, when the camera follows Lenny from the bed he’s sharing with a male partner to the stage at Carnegie Hall. I was completely swept away by the dream ballet in which Lenny and his to-be wife Felicia (Carey Mulligan) are basically absorbed by his compositions for “Fancy Free” and “On the Town.” (I wrote about that here.) But I could sometimes feel a tug-of-war between actor and auteur. The auteur in Cooper could be expressionistic, while the actor felt he had to be “correct.” It’s a dynamic keeps Maestro a shade away from being a great film, in my book.

I thought a lot about actors and auteurs when pondering what to write about Lily Gladstone’s astounding work in Killers of the Flower Moon. Of course, Martin Scorsese is the auteur of the film, and it’s maybe one of his best of all time, which is a wild thing to say about a director who has had his career. (How does he keep getting better in his 80s? May we all be so blessed.) Yet I think there is an auteurist quality to Gladstone’s performance. As Mollie Burkhart, Gladstone shapes the film in her image, which is why I take issue with anyone arguing that she isn’t a “lead” or that her character is underdeveloped. Counting how much dialogue someone has is a terrible way to measure their impact on a film.

Earlier this year I attended the IndieWire Honors, one of the many awards celebrations at which Gladstone has been already feted. (Thanks to pal Kate Erbland for inviting me!) During Gladstone’s savvy speech she made two points I would like to highlight. In the first, she thanked IndieWire for seeing her performance in the Kelly Reichardt film Certain Women “when a lot of people didn’t, when a lot of people just assumed I was some ranch hand that they plucked from Montana. You saw the work.”

It’s easy to assume, of actors from marginalized backgrounds who didn’t go to Juilliard or the Yale School of Drama, that their talent is a fluke—something they just have rather than something they have cultivated. Gladstone wants to combat this prejudice, in the same way she wants to use her newfound status to elevate the filmmakers she is collaborating with who are not Martin Scorsese, like Erica Tremblay, whose indie Fancy Dance premiered at Sundance in January and still does not have U.S. distribution. It’s clear that Gladstone sees the attention she’s getting as an opportunity, or even a responsibility—to the Osage woman she’s playing on screen, and to other Indigenous actors and filmmakers for whom her celebrity can open doors.

It’s this boldness that I think also comes through onscreen in Killers of the Flower Moon. Yes, Gladstone possesses a naturalism that is hard to learn, which is maybe why people wrongly assumed she was a non-actor in Certain Women. She brings a similar quality to Morrisa Maltz’s The Unknown Country—her other film this year, for which she won a Gotham Award. That delicate road-trip drama about a woman driving through America to grieve her grandmother does pair her with nonprofessionals. With her open face, ready to listen, Gladstone is able to meld into the fabric of the land that Maltz is portraying.

What she accomplishes in Killers of the Flower Moon is different. I feel like people keep ignoring her early scenes of flirtation with Leonardo DiCaprio’s Ernest to make their points about how the movie doesn’t serve her. But those beats—when he first picks her up in his car and she tells him to get a move on; when she invites him inside her home and teases him for his greed—are just as crucial as the ones where she is bedridden.

The first time we see Mollie she’s asking her guardian for her own money, and you can see her weariness at that racist protocol. But then she sparkles when she meets Ernest. He’s a white man over whom she has power, and she relishes that—you can hear it in her laugh. There’s been a lot made about whether or not it’s right to say that there was love between Ernest and Mollie. But Gladstone deftly portrays that love can mean different things to different people. Mollie is hot for Ernest, which leads her to misguidedly trust him, and that can’t be underestimated. And then, in their final scene together, you see the same look in her eyes that she had when she was confronting her guardian at the film’s start. You thought you could own me, just like everyone thinks they can own me. Now you can’t.

Mollie, too, is a real person, and yet unlike Leonard Bernstein or Enzo Ferrari, we have little idea of what she was actually like. Gladstone recognizes the responsibility of bringing her to life and shaping her in a way that feels true for generations to come. It’s not an imitation. It’s something more. It’s a revival.

It’s been a true honor discussing (but mostly celebrating) movies with you all,

Esther

Read the next entry in Movie Club: Leonardo DiCaprio Never Should Have Been Cast as Ernest Burkhart. That’s Why He’s So Great.