The script, written by Triet and her life partner Arthur Harari, is a tour de force of multiplying perspectives just when we think we’ve figured out who’s misrepresenting themselves to whom and why, a new line of courtroom questioning or rug-pulling flashback arrives to shift our allegiances again. In Justine Triet’s Anatomy of a Fall, Hüller plumbs the psyche of a successful novelist and devoted mother who may or may not have pushed her husband out a third-story window to his death. Her experience of powerlessness and abandonment becomes the audience’s own. Without Mollie in it, the world Scorsese has spent by then two-plus hours building in such fine detail and at so dizzying a scale makes no moral sense-and that scary sensation of chaos, of being cast adrift in a universe taken over by evil forces, is precisely the point of removing her from the screen for a time. When Gladstone’s Mollie is absent from the screen for a stretch late in the movie (for reasons that still make my pulse race with fear and anger three months after seeing it), the viewer misses her with a visceral pang. (I’ve always found the concept of “category fraud” silly in its hyperbolic estimate of the degree of wrong committed: One pictures a gentleman dashing his silk top hat to the ground and crying, “That, sir, is naught but category fraud!”) Once you’ve seen KOTFM there can be no question that, whichever of the two actors highlighted more dialogue in their shooting script, Gladstone and DiCaprio were equal partners in collaborating with the director to make the film what it is-to my mind, not only one of the best of the year but among the most ambitious and powerful of Scorsese’s long and masterpiece-studded career. I robustly dissent from the notion that Gladstone’s relatively modest total screen time when compared to her co-star Leonardo DiCaprio makes her role more of a supporting one. NGL: I would love to see her clutching that trophy and to hear what I expect, based on the thoughtful and passionate person she comes across as in interviews, would be a sensational acceptance speech. Gladstone is in fact the current favorite to win Best Actress, in the opinion of many who make it their business to quantify such tricky things as shifts in early-awards-season favor. One of my rare rooting favorites this year will be Lily Gladstone, the quiet hurricane at the center of Killers of the Flower Moon.
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