Scorsese himself described "Killer of the Flower Moon" this way: I wanted it to be like a piece with a predetermined theme, but as it developed, it became rich and intense, and then one was thrown into a vortex. 」
In fact, the look and feel of this film resembles the performance of a large symphony, intertwined with several themes and parts, and the performance of the orchestra is not perfect, but the direction of the flow is important.
Scorsese, who constructs a polyphonic expression of intimacy and violence, suspense and sin, accusation and confession, said in an interview with Sight and Sound magazine: The story is about Ernest and Molly falling in love with each other, and at its core, he loves her. 」
That's not entirely true.
Ernest's love for Molly is permeated with poison and is often blind and empty.
At its core, Killer of the Flower Moon is indeed love, to be exact, Scorsese's love for the Osage people and the Osage culture, even though he doesn't really know each other, until the very end of the film, when he maintains a cautious distance, looking at them from a distance.
The Flower Moon Killer is a lengthy nonfiction work by New Yorker columnist David Grayne, which begins with the following paragraph describing the Osage Native settlement in 1921:
The Osage people have become the highest per capita income group in the world, and the New York magazine Prospect exclaims that these Indians are making a lot of money, much to the dismay of the bankers. 」
Journalists attract readers' attention with sensational stories, such as Osage tycoon and Red ** Millionaire, red brick mansion and dazzling crystal chandelier, diamond ring, fur coat, chauffeur, and so on.
One writer was surprised to find that the Osage girls were studying at the best private boarding schools, wearing expensive French costumes, and the little girls were like a group of beautiful Parisian girls who strayed into the countryside of Native America.
While parts of history have been buried in unpublished archives for a long time, stereotypical narratives surrounding Native Americans or Native Americans have long been ingrained. So much so that when Scorsese first visited Gray Horse, Oklahoma, he realized that most of the locals were wary of him: Was he going to make our story a cliché full of violence, alcoholism, and madness?Rich towns, speeding luxury cars, red-hot tycoons and noblewomen, the delirium atmosphere catalyzed by alcohol and violence, and, a whole group of people who have been brutally mutilated for their excessive innocence - Scorsese did not shy away from this kind of labeling in the film, but "Killer of the Flower Moon" is worth noting the distance between the camera and the Osage people. 
Molly is important, and Richard Brody asserted in the New Yorker's long review: Molly is the real central character in "The Killer of the Flower Moon", she is the fulcrum of the film's plot, and she gives the story a depth of inward exploration. Lily Gladstone, who plays Molly, deserves to lock in next year's Oscars in advance. And this is not a movie that makes Molly speak and listen to her, the narrative perspective of "Killer of the Flower Moon" comes from the perspective of the white male protagonist Ernest. 
Gray's original work begins with the perspective of Tom White, a white FBI investigator, and then the author himself combs through a vast amount of unpublished sources, piecing together from the wreckage and fragments of history the horrific and scheming history of the Osage people—how the oil-flowing prairie became a graveyard soaked in Indian blood. According to Scorsese's original conception, DiCaprio was to play Tom White, but he immediately realized that the character was a good guy without suspense, so much so that it lacked dramatic tension. After that, both DiCaprio and Scorsese's appeal shifted to the originally insignificant accomplice Ernest. The narrative unfolds from Ernest's point of view, which makes the tone of the film completely different from the original. Ernest goes to Grey Horse to join his uncle Hale, a man with an obscure past, no place to come from, and a man who has nothing, eager to dig for gold and get rich in other people's land. Ernest is both the man who is about to fall into a twisted intimacy with an Indian woman, and he is also the epitome of "American" in the broadest sense of the word. Ernest was innocent at first, he was not bad or incompetent, and soon succumbed to his uncle's will, and was bewitched by him, and entered a meticulously divided and organized criminal network. 
Scorsese's abandonment of Tom White, the innocent narrator, and his approach to the Osage ethnic group from the perspective of Ernest as an accomplice in the work is not only a sense of remorse within the work, but the director's further attempt to anchor the audience, at least the American audience, in the position of accomplice in the history of guilt, and not let go of any of them. The viewer follows Ernest's look, in the process of continuous zooming. The world of uncles and whites is sideways, imminent, in a crude oil town. Once Ernest's eyes are cast on the Osage people, it is another parallel world separated by distance. When Ernest was first attracted to Molly and took her as a chauffeur to an Ossech party, the car drove out of town, and the image was a brief empty mirror, full of spring flowers, as one Osage writer wrote: On the vast grassland, the flowers are dotted, and the cornflowers are interspersed with pansies, and the bright petals are as gorgeous as the stars, like the five colors left behind by the gods. The town Ernest drove away from was the world of advanced capitalism brought about by the oil economy, and on the other side of the prairie flowers, he saw another world that was integrated with the natural terroir, the latter a world that he had not entered or even approached, but which he had participated in destroying. 
When Ernest and Molly go on their first date, there is a sudden rainstorm, and Molly asks him to sit down and listen quietly to the sound of the thunderstorm. In this scene, Scorsese uses an intuitive, two-person frame image to show that Ernest simply cannot understand Molly's spiritual world and the culture she belongs to, and that she is a different dimension at the end of the world. Scorsese uses his skillful skill to control the distance, cruising between the distant and the imminent. All the scenes of Ossech** dripping with vitality, whether they are the celebration of life or the ritual of death, are observed from a distance. And they become things in front of them, and there is only one situation, that is, they become fish on the white man's chopping block. Ernest is a composite of a sinner and a lover. He obediently carried out his uncle's plot, married Molly, killed her sisters one by one, and sought the wealth of these women. But he has love for Molly, and he pursued her out of love and not to kill her. Or rather, his love for Molly is not enough for him to refuse and rebel against his uncle's ** plan, he loves Molly, but in the atmosphere of white people killing Indians step by step, his intelligence and ability are not enough for him not to be an accomplice. 
The deep suspicion of killing his wife is beyond the norm for both Scorsese and DiCaprio. The violence in the second half of the movie is revealed, and Scorsese is the home field. As for DiCaprio, his limitations have created Ernest with his rightly superficial appearance. Throughout, Ernest is a man without psychological depth, he is hollow, shaped like a clay man by his uncle, who is the embodiment of the cruel side of the American dream. At the beginning of the film, Ernest is just a rustic young man, and by the end of the film, his face is close to a copy of Hale, especially the curvature of the corners of their mouths, which is almost identical. With Ernest's superficiality, from his point of view, the audience has no chance to open up Molly's spiritual world. The film doesn't get into the psychology of white men because it's not necessary. The film also didn't get into the Indian, women's psyche, because it couldn't be done. Like Faulkner's Absalom!Absalom!From the bottom of old boxes, boxes and drawers, we dig out a few untitled or signed letters, in which the men and women who once lived and breathed in the world are now only a few abbreviations or nicknames, condensed into feelings that are incomprehensible today. The intention of "Killer of the Flower Moon" is to see through the glass, and the truth of Osage's culture and history cannot be truly reached, all the audience and Ernest can see is the mirror image on the glass, and what they can only touch when they reach out is the glass. 
Richard Brody borrowed from Scorsese's old work "Silence" to describe "The Killer of the Flower Moon": Molly, Osage and the Osage reclaim their subjectivity in the image, but their sense of subjectivity is expressed as a deafening silence. Because it's been a white man's narrative throughout. When Ernest first arrived in Grey Horse, his uncle gave him a general knowledge book of the Koop Osage people, and he turned the pages under the lamp, and his uncle's narrator read out the contents of the book—the history of American Indians was written, constructed, and transmitted by white people. The film ends with a cabaret-esque performance in which reality enters fiction, with Scorsese himself playing the storyteller, a long story short that encapsulates the town of Gray Horse and the entire land of the United States soaked in Indian blood. After the filming of "Killer of the Flower Moon" was completed, Scorsese said: I have lived in the world of "Killer of the Flower Moon" for a long time. He recalls that the origin of the film can be traced back to the fact that he had just finished filming "Bad Streets", because of his experience on the Indian Reservation in South Dakota, he wanted to make a movie about the 1890 American Army ** Native American Knee River **, when he was really able to stare at the story of the Indians, nearly half a century passed. 
In this regard, at the heart of "Killer of the Flower Moon" is unquestionable love, a creator who first falls in love with a culture he doesn't really understand, first out of guilt, and then with an accomplice introspection, expressing repentance that has been too long overdue. It's just that all this narration still can't get rid of the white man's position, the white man's narrative, and he can't actually speak for the object of his repentance. Scorsese speaks sonorously to the camera in his own capacity, and this distancing scene is not reminiscent of Brecht, but closer to Strindberg's "Drama of a Dream" in disguise: the man comes with flowers and calls the name of the woman he can't see, the woman is invisible, the audience can only hear the echo of the man, hear the echo of the echo, and then the man disappears. The play ends here.