By 
Killers of the Flower Moon spoilers below
Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon is exactly the kind of movie that everyone wants to take very seriously. The boys – Bobby De Niro and Marty – are back in town, with a very long film about an under-explored time and place in American history. It’s blessed with a Lily Gladstone performance full of quiet grace and fury as Mollie. It’s a film that lets its story take its time.
And we absolutely should take Killers of the Flower Moon seriously for all those reasons. It’s really good. There is one thing which is going to be overlooked though. Killers of the Flower Moon is a platform for one of the finest sights in all of modern cinema: Leonardo DiCaprio pretending to be incredibly stupid.
I have an ongoing theory that DiCaprio is in the stage of his career where he alternates between very, very clever characters and very, very stupid ones. There was, of course, Floppy Haired Heartthrob Leo. It’s your Romeo + Juliets, your Titanics, your Man in the Iron Masks of this world. Then between Blood Diamond and The Wolf of Wall Street, he specialised in morally ambiguous types: thieves and swindlers who dared you not to admire them a little bit, or lawmen who knew they were doing the wrong thing in the name of getting the right result. He evolved from teen idol to middlebrow thriller guy in the time-honoured fashion, but with the extra sprinkling of stardust which his collabs with Scorsese brought.
Then a couple of things happened. DiCaprio stopped making as many movies, and he started alternating between geniuses and idiots. In The Revenant, Hugh Glass was smart enough to Ray Mears his way to survival. Once Upon a Time in Hollywood gave us the bewildered and sinking Rick Dalton. Don’t Look Up’s Dr Randall Mindy was an astrophysicist. In Killers of the Flower Moon he plays Ernest, who has the critical faculties of the average clump of moss.
And, let’s be honest, Leo’s idiots are a whole lot more fun than his smart alecs. Nobody does stupidity like Leo DiCaprio. His idiot characters are always intensely watchable. Brad Pitt’s torso and the flamethrower stick in the memory, but the finest moments in Once Upon a Time… came when a hungover Rick Dalton berates himself in his trailer after drying up on set. “Eight goddamn whiskey sours,” he spits. “Fuckin’ bullshit!”
His thick characters aren’t your common or garden morons. They’re operatically, heroically dumb. Every misapprehension is an enormous effort. You can see the physical exertion it takes to mobilise the few grey cells he has at his disposal, and to heave himself onto a course which will, ultimately, fuck him over.
You see it in Killers of the Flower Moon every time his Ernest Burkhart talks things over with Robert De Niro’s William King Hale. Hale sighs, clucks his tongue and sadly shakes his head, intoning with solemn sorrow that events have forced him into a terrible position which only he can remedy.
Truly, Ernest is his own particular flavour of dim. OUATIH's Rick is aware that he has intellectual limits, and gets frustrated by them; Ernest can catch a drift and read between the lines, but he doesn't realise until it’s too late that he can’t reason beyond what other people set out for him. You might see Ernest as a stand-in for the willing self-deception of white Americans who thought their treatment of Native Americans was only what was right and fair, and gave up responsibility for thinking about it to men like Hale who snatched things for themselves.
Ernest lives up to his name: he sincerely commits to whatever it is the last person he spoke to told him, even if it’s fairly obviously going to end in tears. Hale’s suggestion that Mollie should be treated with a medicine personally administered by his doctors is very obviously a bad idea. Even when she’s near-comatose, Ernest is none the wiser. By the time he caught on I was wondering if Jesse Plemons was going to have to explain the whole thing to him with finger-puppets.
DiCaprio isn’t the only megastar to have had some fun playing idiots. That’s how the Coen Brothers like to deploy George Clooney and Brad Pitt in Hail Caesar and Burn After Reading respectively, and Chris Hemsworth’s himbo secretary in the 2016 Ghostbusters was a lot of fun. It seems like it might be a generational thing, though. The Gen Z heartthrob equivalent might be playing a pretentious dickhead, as Timothee Chalamet did in Lady Bird and The French Dispatch.
Playing stupid isn’t something that’s going to win you an Oscar. It’s seen as being more like schtick than proper acting; it’s something comedians do, not serious artists. It looks easy because you have to communicate a lack of thought rather than too much of it. That’s why it’s never been something which has won prizes, and yet portrayals of The Difficult Genius – A Beautiful Mind, The Imitation Game, Darkest Hour, Steve Jobs, etc. etc. etc. – are an Oscars Best Actor shoo-in.
That, though, is where DiCaprio’s work in the lower registers of the IQ scale is quietly revolutionary. What separates his screen idiots from other heavyweights’ dumbbells is that he uses stupidity to disarm you before hitting you with big emotions.
Think of Rick Dalton, telling his reflection: “If you don’t get your lines right, I’m gonna blow your brains out.” It’s funny, and it’s desperate, and it’s sad. Flashes of comprehension in Ernest make his bad decisions that bit more tragic while keeping him sympathetic.
Rick got him an Oscar nomination, the first few-sandwiches-short part I can see on a Best Actor or Actress shortlist since Meryl Streep’s turn in Florence Foster Jenkins. Should he get another, come February playing dumb will look pretty smart.
