Warning: SPOILERS ahead for Killers of the Flower Moon
Killers of the Flower Moon director Martin Scorsese breaks down the film’s ending. Near the closure of the movie, Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio) turns on William King Hale (Robert De Niro) after his daughter Anna passes away. Hale’s attorney, W.S. Hamilton (Brendan Fraser), pressured Burkhart not to testify against him and stated that he was the victim of torture from the BOI agent Tom White (Jesse Plemons). However, he changes his mind and testifies when he sees the suffering Hale brought upon the Osage when one of his children dies.
In an interview with IndieWire, Scorsese breaks down the scene where Burkhart realizes what he has done and decides to testify. Explaining that there are no good guys between the two characters, the filmmaker compared the scene to a divorce with Burkhart afraid to say the whole truth. Check out what he said on the scene below:
And so ultimately, that particular last scene, [we were asking], “When is there going to be the showdown between the bad guy and the good guy?” There is no good guy. What showdown? First, we thought, “Oh, they could be in the jail in the same cell, and they start fighting and beating each other up.” Then I said, “Well, that’s like any formula film,” — I’m not saying formula films are bad — I’m saying that this picture demands something else, I don’t know quite what it is yet. And then we said, “What if Bob’s behind bars, and Leo’s on the outside and they grab each other through the bars?? So that’s a little better. So why are they grabbing each other? It’s beyond hitting. It’s dead. It reminds you of when Joe Pesci looks at Bob De Niro at Howard Johnson’s towards the end of “The Irishman,” and he says about the killing that has to happen, he says, “It’s going to happen. It’s fallen on us.” That’s quiet. It’s about power.
And here we finally worked and worked and worked on the scene: We got the dialogue down. Two or three days before shooting, we waited and waited and waited. We had the jail area built. So we had the patience to do the other scenes first. And we slipped into it. And, it’s finally Leo coming up and saying, “Well, you know, I’m gonna have to testify,” meaning like, “I’m gonna have to leave you.” It’s almost like a breakup, like a divorce: “I’m going to try to be amiable.” What they call an amicable divorce. I don’t know if there’s such a thing, but people do have feelings. But he’s afraid to say, “Bill, I’m gonna go against you.” He has to put it that way. And he uses his family as an excuse. “I got to think of my family now.” And Bill’s last weapon is, “I love you, my son.”
Ernest Burkhart Has No Redemption in Killers of the Flower Moon
While the above scene may be interpreted as a redemption for Ernest Burkhart, it predates his downfall. Burkhart is willing to testify against Hale to save himself and protect his family, but he cannot protect his personal reputation and isn’t willing to reveal to his wife, Mollie (Lily Gladstone), what he was poisoning her with throughout the years. Early in Killers of the Flower Moon, it is revealed that Mollie has diabetes, and her condition is severe enough to warrant experimenting with insulin.
However, Hale and the town’s doctors ask Ernest to mix the insulin with an unknown drug, which makes her constantly ill and is slowly poisoning her. In the film’s final scene, before cutting to a radio broadcast, Mollie asks Ernest what he injected her with. Ernest responds, “It’s just insulin,” which prompts Mollie to leave, divorcing him and living a separate life with her remaining children. Ernest was then given a life sentence but was ultimately paroled for having testified.
Ernest Burkhart may have saved himself from time in jail, but ultimately spent the rest of his life alone, without seeing his wife and children. While the movie gives Burkhart a chance to redeem himself in that jail scene, it never follows through because, as Scorsese mentioned, there are no “good guys” in the story, and they ultimately get what they deserve. The ending of Killers of the Flower Moon has already had many interpretations, and audiences can make up their minds on what Scorsese ultimately meant as the movie is now playing in theaters.
