Extremely dumb, dull, slow-on-the-pickup characters have been non-existent in straight dramas for the most part. 99% of the time such characters appear in comedies, of course. Which is why Leonardo DiCaprio‘s Ernest Burkhart character in Killers of the Flower Moon is a stand-out.
The man is dumb as a fencepost and mired in a slow, drip-drip, rural melodrama that doesn’t really develop or intensify during the first two hours, and so Ernest is unable to offer the slightest intrigue or payoff in such a film. And so KOTFM viewers are stuck with the guy.
What could Leo and director Martin Scorsese have been thinking?
Leo to Marty in 2020, or a year before filming began: “Wait, I’ve got it..let’s do what we can to bore audiences to death as far as Ernest is concerned…no competititve energy between Ernest and Mollie, I mean, which will make her seem more interesting by contrast. If we make Ernest the polar opposite of Jordan Belfort in The Wolf of Wall Street, audiences will be more intrigued by Mollie’s character because at least she has that moral revulsion thing going on…those dirty looks she gives everyone once the murders start happening.”
From Sean T. Collins’ 11.3 N.Y Times essay, “Not the Brightest Killer of the Flower Moon“:
DiCaprio’s Burkhart “is too thick — intellectually, emotionally, morally — to do much of anything but allow his hand to be forced, first by Robert De Niro‘s King Hale, then by the federal agents tasked with taking him down.
“Ernest never really learns, never really comes clean, never really grasps the monstrousness of what’s happening until it’s too late. He’s just not sharp enough to see it, or to allow himself to be shown. The man is a zero — the mental and moral void into which King Hale’s Osage targets and their allies disappear.
“A sharper character would have implied that it takes some canniness, cunning or charisma to plunder a land and its people. Instead, Ernest shows us that the bigotry and greed that fueled the genocidal campaign against the Osage are ultimately stupid, and the resulting tragedy all the sadder for it.”
HE to fans of dullness: Please name some astoundingly stupid characters that weren’t used in comedies or for comic relief — characters who just take up space and little else — characters who do and say almost nothing. One laugh or chuckle and they’re disqualified. They have to be pure intellectual deadweight.