The Ending Of Killers Of The Flower Moon Explained

murders that will live on in infamy a twisted love story that actually happened and an entire alternate screenplay here's what the ending of killers of the flower moon really means killers of the flower Moon opens with the oage people in Oklahoma striking oil by the 1920s the discovery had turned them into the wealthiest group of people in the world except that racist laws require white Guardians to handle their wealth many oage are being murdered and the police are doing nothing to solve the cases William King there one white man using this situation for his own benefit and ropes his War veteran nephew Ernest buckheart into an elaborate criminal scheme marry into an oage family then kill the members off one by one until the oil money is all theirs Ernest actually falls in love with his new wife Molly but still partakes in the violence against her family due to a combination of greed and his uncle's manipulation I do love that money sir Molly is diabetic and gets prescribed the new rare and extreme extremely expensive synthetic insulin distrusting the doctors she has her husband perform the shots for her unbeknownst to her Ernest is following the doctor's orders to mix the insulin with the poison to slow her down gradually sickening her afraid she's going to die Molly uses what little strength she has left to travel to Washington DC to plead to President Calvin cage for an investigation into the unsolved murders it works Agents from the Bureau of Investigation led by Tom white come in and arrest Ernest hey casually turns himself in confident he'll be ruled innocent in the Final Act of killers of the flower Moon Ernest waivers back and forth on whether to testify against hail Ernest makes confessions only to take them back and claim he was forced to by the Boi he shows up in court without realizing he and his uncle have the same lawyer WS Hamilton who works further to scare him off from testifying in jail Ernest learns his youngest daughter has died of whooping cough but surprisingly Molly is still alive and has gotten help recovering from the poisoning Ernest has an emotional reunion with his wife the trials continue to unearth evidence of the conspiracy despite Tail's best efforts to suppress it and Ernest ultimately testifies and pleads guilty to killing rer and Bill Smith by blowing up their house but he won't confess to everything in his last scene he lies to Molly still saying the shots he gave her were just regular insulin the film continues into an epilogue of sorts where the story of the oage murders is presented via a live performance of a True Crime radio play the energetic fast-paced deliveries and wacky sound effects make it easy to miss all the details but this epilog describes what happened in the aftermath of the story we hear how Ernest and hail both ended up free on parole despite their life sentences and in a cameo from director Martin scorsi himself how Molly's obituary made no mention of the murders the final shot of the film shows a massive oage drum and dancing circle from overhead like SC say's past crime film killers of the flower moon is about the all consuming power of greed in the American capitalist system here this theme also plays into the Reckoning with the mass genocide of indigenous people Ernest makes for a particularly complicated protagonist because on the one hand he seems to genuinely love his wife but on the other he's both so greedy and so easily manipulated that this love ultimately means nothing more than anything nnest is a weak man and the way he's pulled back and forth over the course of the trial in the film's final AC serves to emphasize that weakness I just love money I love it as much as I love my wife the scene in which Hamilton brings Ernest to a meeting with the oil company execs to put the fear of God into him evokes no BT scene in network another film about the forces of the market doing everything to suppress descent you might watch the Final Act of killers of the flower Moon hoping for Earnest to finer strength to stand up to hail and acknowledge his crimes but his confession offers little cathar ernest's final interactions with Molly only served to emphasize his dishonesty and cowardice Molly never really trusted him identifying him as a coyote from the beginning but nonetheless chose to spend her life with him by the end of the film she fully sees through his Charming facade wanting nothing more to do with him on the most basic level presenting the final facts of the story in the form of a live radio show offers a more entertaining alternative to the standard practice of closing historical films with information or title card the choice to present this information so entertainingly however comes with its own layers of commentary on the nature of the True Crime genre as a whole and uncore says he own responsibilities with killers of the flower moon in particular for one thing there's the question of entertainment as a distraction after over 3 hours of methodically paced storytelling suddenly getting bombarded with a presentation so fast and so silly makes it harder to take in the sadness of the story being told this radio show is specifically stated to be associate iated with FBI director Jay Edgar Hoover which raises questions about the propagandistic use of such Stories the images of the theater audience recall how scorsi ended the Wolf of Wall Street forcing the viewer to reflect on their own attraction to such stories in the first place not letting himself off the hook either Score says he appears on stage as part of the radio show but when he's talking about Molly's divorce remarriage and death the bells and whistles fade away he wants us to take this in that's what killers of the flower moon is trying to accomplish to offer serious reflection on tragedy within the apparatus of mass entertainment whereas Ernest is a sort of villain who lacks any serious sense of right or wrong hail is the kindest convinced himself he's in the right which is what makes him so scary he's convinced the oage nation he's their Ally and he can talk at length about the virtues of their culture yet he still wants to take everything from them because he views their fall as a historic inevitability oh Sage they're going to go their time is over it's an even more extreme parallel to Ernest professing love for the same woman he's slowly poisoning speaking to Ernest in jail hail delivers a chilling monologue affirming his confidence that history will vindicate him because all the anger people hold towards him now will end up forgotten to some degree this confidence was scarily well founded he and the other convicted killers were eventually let free while other Killers weren't caught or convicted at all and the broader culture genuinely forgot about the story for a long time yet even if White America forgot the oage nation did not forget when hail was let out of prison his release was met with protest and though it's taken far too long the existence of killers of the flower Moon as both a book and a movie it's also a rejoinder to hail's view of History what might have once been forgotten is now being remembered on a large scale as with the radio epilog the closing shot of killers of the flower moon seems to serve two primary purposes one stylistic and one thematic the stylistic purpose of the final shot is to sheer visual Splendor of it at all with a reported budget of $200 million this production had plenty of resources for stunning scenes with massive crowds and fancy camera work but Score says he restrains those more grandiose instincts from much of the film in favor of a more intimate focus on character drama the ending offers a place where such a spectacle fits comfortably thematically the final shot returns a central focus of the film to the oage people trying to navigate the issue of perspective was one of the challenges of making the film most of the iant Native American characters are killed Midway through the film and Molly the main exception to this Rule and one of the most important characters still has to spend a large chunk of the film bedridden while the white male exploiters take center stage in the drama presenting the oage perspective on this tragedy however was one of scor's priorities in telling this story the movie opens from their perspective and after the radio drama segment entirely about white America's Viewpoint the closing shot Returns the movie to them the start to the credit solidifies this with the film's title displayed in the oage language before it is shown in English scor's thoughtful Direction continues even beyond the end of The Narrative into the credits themselves pay attention to the Sounds in the background they're the sounds of nature that mody teachers Earnest to listen to at the start of their courtship when Sight and Sound pointed this out in an interview with scori he responded the music comes from there it always did that's how music originated from imitating animals and the sounds of insects and so you get the goat singers you get the ancient world the tragedy again from that and that's for us to go back to and to find comfort in I think well before the release of killers of the flower Moon oage Nation principal Chief Joffrey Standing Bear who had Score says he on the film's cultural depictions discussed the filming of the film's closing shot he revealed that it was a relatively late edition telling Tulsa well that I heard that Mr scori and the producers are going to come back and try to get a better ending by showing everyone who was an extra in a social dance where everyone's having a good time speaking to Vogue during the movie's premiere at the can film festival Gladstone made sure to inform people of one of her favorite details in the true story that wasn't included in the film it's not in this film but it's important to me that people know that Molly when she divorced Ernest she didn't just cut and run she went back and got the money from him that had embezzled from her in an interview magazine talk with director Kelly reichart bladstone described using quotes from those a court cases to base a performance of the film's ending scenes on saying I don't want harm to perform my husband but I want the truth to come out for what it is closer to release SC said he had talked more about aspects of the film's final acts in interviews he told the New Yorker that the film's ending was harder to right than the beginning explaining the first two hours we were moving along the second two hours boy is is getting a little long in the tooth as they say the killers of the flower Moon movie captures much of the book's content but it's completely different in in terms of structure the book is divided into three major sections or Chronicles the first Chronicle The Marked woman is centered around Molly and her account of the crimes against her family the second the evidence man follows Tom White and the Boi as they uncover hail's big conspiracy finally the reporter shifts the focus of the book's author David Grant as he personally investigates the case further and uncovers the extent to which the Boi overall failed to bring about Justice when this money started coming we should have known it came with something else because it's a white man's money even if Score says his film adaptation has stuck closer to the structure of the book there was almost no way the book sending could be directly adapted to even attempt that the film would either have to shift to a documentary format or there would need to be a big meta framing device involved scull says he gets a bit mess up with the radio show epilog but that's different from making the whole third act about a writer living nearly a century later as far as we know killers of the flower Moon didn't have an alternate ending filmed there is however an entire alternate screenplay Eric Ross's original draft was closer to the mystery structure of the book as well as to more traditional Western with Tom white as a primary Viewpoint character as Roth and scor sayi worked on developing the script they realized they had to completely start over for multiple reasons putting the focus on the Boi made it too much of a white savior story and with hail so obviously a villain with Robert dairo in the role the Boi Centric version f as a compelling mystery DiCaprio who was originally going to play White reportedly questioned scori where's the heart in this movie scor said he determined that the heart was in the Twisted romance between Ernest and Molly a topic which only became more interesting to him while doing research and speaking with members of the O age who claimed the love between the couple was real despite how badly Ernest was hurting Molly the CIO switched roles from white to Earnest and the movie that exists today came into being [Music] he

Channel: Looper

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Keywords: looper, killers of the flower moon, ending, explained, leonardo dicaprio

Id: Dpcs5sAqueM

Length: 12min 3sec (723 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 20 2023