While Martin Scorsese is receiving nearly universal acclaim for his adaptation of Killers of the Flower Moon, one aspect of the film has been unexpectedly controversial. That’s Brendan Fraser’s performance as attorney W.S. Hamilton, the man responsible for defending Robert De Niro’s wealthy landowner William Hale in the plot to kill his nephew Ernest Burkhart’s Osage Indian wife (and basically her entire family) in order to inherit their lucrative mineral rights.
Twitter is abuzz with people alternatively bemoaning Fraser’s showy performance and bemoaning those bemoaning Fraser’s showy performance (you’ll just have to trust us that there are LOTS of other tweets exactly like the ones linked). There’s a lot to unpack here, starting with the fact that it’s mere days after the release of what is arguably awards season’s first and biggest release. (I’m writing this on Monday morning, objectively the best possible time for Monday-morning-quarterbacking.)
As for why Brendan Fraser specifically: Even if you enjoyed it, his performance is objectively jarring. And it was almost certainly meant to be. He literally enters the movie almost three hours in, on a hard cut to his character screaming. He goes on to scream the best trailer line that wasn’t actually in the Flowers trailer—“He is saving you, DUMB BOY,” which seems destined to join the repertoire of quote-happy movie fans everywhere, alongside “I already work around the clock!” and “Gimme back my son!”
The previous three fourths or so of the film are a meticulous, slow-building psychological drama focused largely on De Niro’s William Hale, DiCaprio’s Ernest Burkhart, and Lily Gladstone’s Mollie Burkhart. De Niro summons every ounce of the repressed smarm he learned in the Meet The Parents movies and other lesser-remembered comedies and uses it as the mask of a psychopathically covetous killer cosplaying as a “friend to the Indian.” As Hale’s catspaw but also Mollie’s loving husband, DiCaprio’s Burkhart is being torn apart by the twin forces of greed and love, multiplied by his own relative dullness. Gladstone’s Mollie is slowly trying to reconcile what she thinks she knows about her husband with her growing recognition of the full scope of the disinheritance plot.
Fraser, meanwhile, enters this world populated almost entirely by hucksters and charlatans and has to be the biggest huckster charlatan of all. He plays the guy charged with maintaining the pretense that Hale really is a pillar of the community and the best thing to ever happen to the Osage. And he has to try to intimidate Burkhart enough that Burkhart recants his testimony.
Not to mention the context. The 1920s were already a theatrical, grandstanding time (see: The Great Gatsby, or Bill Bryson’s lovingly told portrait of 1927 in One Summer: America 1927) and the white-collar defense attorney is one of our most theatrical, grandstanding archetypes. Who could forget “If the glove don’t fit, you must acquit?”
This is the time and the kind of character Fraser is playing.
Meanwhile, up until that point, Killers of the Flower Moon has been largely a quiet movie about whispered plots, back-room deals, and Ernest Burkhart gaslighting his wife in their dead quiet Oklahoma house–a deliberately-isolated corner of deliberately-isolated “Indian Country.” All of a sudden these characters are thrust onto the national stage, by way of crowded courtrooms packed with federal officials and flashbulbing journalists.
This is meant to be jarring. Historically, it's the moment the larger country caught wind of all (well, some) of the shady shit that had been going down in Fairfax and Pawhuska. The movie shifts from quiet character study to courtroom drama, and Fraser’s character is the face of that shift.
Killers of the Flower Moon is a star-studded movie that—up until that moment—doesn’t feel particularly star-studded. Certainly not in the way that famous faces are always showing up in cameo roles in Wes Anderson or David O. Russell movies. Fraser seems to naturally operate on a different level of reality than the rest of the film (at least one commentator pointed out that he’s playing a Coen Brothers character in a Scorsese movie). Where De Niro and DiCaprio’s characters get slowly grounded and fleshed out over the course of a few hours, Fraser and John Lithgow (who shows up as a prosecutor) are two famous faces suddenly coming to us cold, without benefit of all the foundation-building.
There are also qualities peculiar to Brendan Fraser that add to both the jarring effect of the performance and people’s compulsion to defend it. Fraser, who won an Oscar for his performance in The Whale, is not Daniel Day-Lewis. He doesn’t disappear into roles, which isn’t to say that he doesn’t commit or perform the hell out of them—it’s just that he’s always there, for better or worse. As Killing Them Softly director Andrew Dominik once said of Brad Pitt, “You obviously can’t cast Brad as an everyman because he brings too much baggage to something like that. But if he’s playing a mythological character or somebody exceptional, then that baggage is a good thing.”
It’s tough to argue that Fraser doesn’t have a similar quality. So that when he shows up in Flower Moon a few hours in chewing scenery and looking like he hasn’t lost all of his weight from The Whale, your first thought isn’t Who is this new guy? but rather That’s Brendan Fraser, from The Whale. Fraser arguably has a meta-textual weight (no jokes!) to him that other actors don’t. His persona beyond the film influenced the way The Whale was received (as part of his redemption arc) the same way it influences the way his performance in Killers of the Flower Moon is received. And because of the public’s perception of his poor treatment by Hollywood —the injuries from doing his own stunts, the “fallen hearthrob” label, the alleged sexual assault and the alleged industry blackballing he endured for talking about it– he also inspires more full-throated defenses than maybe any other actor outside of Keanu Reeves.
We feel like we know Brendan Fraser. That’s part of his appeal and it’s part of why it can be jarring to see him show up in a movie unexpectedly. It’s also why we celebrate him and feel protective of him. As ever, Fraser is us, for better or worse.
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