In Killers of the Flower Moon , Leonardo DiCaprio Gives a Master Class in Directing Our Attention to What’s Really Important

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 survivors,

Way back at the beginning of this round, before the Great Ferrari Wars, I started thinking about Dana’s question—a single performance that I wanted to highlight—and I found myself paralyzed; there seemed to be both too many from which to choose and too few that the club hadn’t already lauded. Then I remembered: This is the end of this year’s Slate Movie Club, so I don’t have to follow the rules! There are no consequences! So I’m going to talk about not one performance, but two. (It would have been three, but all I have to say about Milo Machado Graner, the 11-year-old son in Anatomy of a Fall, is “Holy shit!”)

Esther, your comment about strict accuracy—or, in the case of Napoleon, even half-assed accuracy—not always being a priority makes me feel justified in selecting, as one of my favorites of the year, Leonardo DiCaprio in Killers of the Flower Moon. If you’d asked me right after I saw the movie whose performance would stay with me, I wouldn’t have said his. What he does shouldn’t work, and in some technical ways, it doesn’t work, but months after seeing the film I have come to realize that DiCaprio is the glue that holds a great ensemble together. I know it’s unreasonable to bemoan that a gigantic movie star who’s currently hoping to secure his seventh Oscar nomination for acting is insufficiently appreciated, but you know what? It’s true: We still might not be giving DiCaprio enough credit.

Pauline Kael once cruelly (and inaccurately) wrote of Meryl Streep that she “makes a career out of seeming to overcome being miscast.” I think of that when I think about Killers of the Flower Moon, because Leonardo DiCaprio simply should not be playing Ernest Burkhart. (Early on, when the screenplay was very different, he had the role of Tom White, eventually played by Jesse Plemons.) First of all, DiCaprio is just too old. Burkhart was 26 when he returned home from World War I, as he does at the start of the movie; DiCaprio is 49. That’s a meaningful and problematic gap; in 1919, it was the difference between a relative innocent with good things still ahead and a man with maybe a dozen years left to live. And second, DiCaprio is a movie star, and Ernest is not a star part or a center of gravity. He’s a dull, ordinary, not especially bright guy, touchingly devoted to his wife, malleable enough to participate in evil against her people, and not given to much introspection about that or about anything else.

Offered a role like Ernest, most movie stars would turn it down. If they took it, they’d use it as an opportunity to self-consciously “transform.” DiCaprio doesn’t. He just lets himself look like what he is—a man in his late 40s, heavier and more creased than he was when he became a worldwide sensation. He doesn’t play “ordinary” with the patronizing distance that some stars do; he just dims his light. He doesn’t sparkle; he doesn’t seethe; he doesn’t do things that allow us to see a lively, vibrant mind at work.

And yet, because DiCaprio is not just a movie star but an honest, deeply committed actor, every choice he makes is in the service of the role and the film. Lily Gladstone’s performance is every bit the triumph that you say it is, Esther, but I want to give DiCaprio some credit for the ways in which his performance not only makes space for hers but intentionally highlights hers. In their scenes together, he hangs back; he’s quiet and attentive; he can’t stop looking at her. In movies, we often take our cues about who to look at from stars, and DiCaprio, using his physicality, his demeanor, even his silences, finds ways, especially early on, to tell us: Watch her. Follow her. This is her story. And in the second half of the movie, he declines histrionic opportunities to turn Ernest’s culpability into a series of crisis-of-conscience arias. There is no “Oscar clip”; he is just a bland, average man, devoted to his wife and family, and apparently content, until it’s far too late, to sell his soul. He is, in some ways, defeated from the start in a way a younger actor wouldn’t be, and that defeat prevents Killers of the Flower Moon from sliding into a comfortable “fall of a good man” arc. Instead, it becomes more challenging study of the nature of evil.

Alongside poor unsung Leo is an actor who truly is underappreciated, and who, with luck, will soon be nominated for an Oscar for (absurdly) the first time. It seems almost random to discuss Jeffrey Wright’s role in American Fiction because there are alternate universes in which we could be talking about Jeffrey Wright playing Paul Giamatti’s role in The Holdovers, or Robert Downey Jr.’s role in Oppenheimer; or Robert De Niro’s role in Killers of the Flower Moon, or, honestly, Joaquin Phoenix’s role in Napoleon. Because if you have seen Wright on stage or followed his screen work in supporting roles closely, you know that he can do just about anything. He is often used when a movie requires precision greatness in a minimum of screen time; in Rustin, he parachutes in as Adam Clayton Powell Jr., basically writes a brilliant three-minute essay on ruthless political ambition, and departs. If he were on screen one minute longer you’d follow him off into his own biopic.

But thankfully, in American Fiction, Cord Jefferson gives him a fat, rich leading role, not a Wes Anderson cameo or a franchise-elevating turn in a superhero movie. And lord, what a pleasure it is to see him go to work on a full three-course meal. His performance as Thelonious “Monk” Ellison, a mid-career serious novelist who, almost by accident, stumbles onto an opportunity to make it big (but at a cost) is a master class in belligerent bemusement and impacted bitterness. Monk is, in a way, a cousin to the Coen brothers’ Llewyn Davis; he’s someone who thinks his most special quality is his discernment, and he’s talked himself into believing that he’s a disappointment because he’s too principled to be a success. But in some unacknowledged way, he’s also a disappointment to himself. There’s something in him that longs to cut loose, to go low, to prove that if he were willing to play the whore, he’d be the best whore in the business. (One of the delights of Wright’s performance is that he’s playing a very subdued middle-aged man who suddenly discovers that he kind of enjoys acting.)

Wright is given a multitude of sins to embody in American Fiction—pride, envy, greed, self-delusion, arrogance—but his Monk is also a basically decent man trying to be a good son and brother. Even when the movie is at its most self-consciously provocative, he keeps its center human, and therefore keeps its stakes high. The cast is full of sharp performances; I especially loved John Ortiz as Monk’s loyal, pragmatic agent (his scene coaching Monk through a phone call with a publisher is the year’s funniest bit of silent acting) and Sterling K. Brown, disarmingly loose, relaxed, and droll as his gay brother. But I have to believe they’re both at their best because if you’re on screen with Wright, you have to come ready to play. He’s the kind of great actor who raises everyone’s game, and I would happily go on about what role I’d like to see him take on next (Willy Loman! Troy Maxson! Roy Cohn!), but I think I just heard the bartender at Slate Movie Club (Dan) announce that it’s closing time. It’s been a pleasure poring over this movie year with all of you! Dana, I’m eager to read the words with which you send us off into the night.

I don’t have to go home but I can’t stay here,

Mark

Read the next entry in Movie Club: In Defense of Past Lives