The Eyes of Lily Gladstone

What makes an Oscar-worthy performance.

[Spoilers ahead for Killers of the Flower Moon]

Yesterday morning, I rewatched Killers of the Flower Moon. For most of this awards season, my favorite performance has been Emma Stone in Poor Things since I think that film lives or dies on the comic skills she brings to the role. While I wouldn’t be upset if Stone takes home her second Oscar next Sunday, I have now moved towards Lily Gladstone’s performance as Mollie Burkhart as my favorite among the Best Actress nominees. While Stone certainly has a difficult task showing her character’s development—especially the challenges in owning Bella Baxter’s sexual awakening while not falling into being a sex object for the male gaze—Gladstone is the rock upon which Flower Moon stands. And to play to the reality of the character, she has to do it quietly with most of the acting coming from her glances.

My original hesitation over Gladstone’s performance came from the film’s second act where Mollie is being slowly poisoned to death by her husband, Ernest (Leonardo DiCaprio). This may seem like a bit of a turn after the film’s first act where Mollie is self-assured and sly, so to see her brought low by illness seems to limit her performance. But Gladstone’s characterization of Mollie and what she represents structures the entire film. What Gladstone has to do is show a woman who is always on the defensive. She can never just exist at rest. The three different faces of Mollie across three acts shows the tragedy of her life, not simply being betrayed by her husband and having her family murdered, but that there is no safety for her. She’s constantly fighting, and never once raising her voice in anger during the battle.

It's easy to see the shine in Gladstone’s performance throughout the first act. Mollie essentially has to try and play like she’s in control. She knows Ernest is only after her for her money, but she believes that transactionally, she can make that exchange because he’s handsome, charming, and his affections won’t stray. She thinks (or perhaps she’s convincing herself) that she can keep him in pocket, aware of his shortcomings, but also aware that she might have more control in the relationship due to her wealth. And yet because Mollie is a fairly taciturn character, Gladstone has to convey all of this with her eyes and little facial expressions. When Mollie flirts with Ernest, she can’t be the coquette; she has to volley his attempts back at him to assert her power. Anything less and she believes she’ll lose what little power she has as a woman who has already been declared “incompetent” by the state so that she doesn’t even have unrestricted access to her own money.

Lily Gladstone as Mollie Burkhart in Killers of the Flower Moon | Image via AppleTV+

So how does this performance hold together when Mollie gets sick? Why is it still a good performance if Mollie is now reduced to shivering, sweating, and slowly dying? Because the second act doesn’t work without the first. We can’t get to this point if Gladstone hadn’t conveyed Mollie’s strength for the first hour of the movie. Mollie’s mistake is in thinking she can keep a venomous creature as a pet (Ernest is described more than once as a snake), and now she’s slowly losing the strength she had. If we hadn’t seen that strength, then the tragedy of the second act doesn’t play as well. It’s Gladstone imbuing the pain with pathos and conveying the conflict of a woman who doesn’t want to believe that her husband is slowly killing her let alone orchestrating the deaths of her sisters. The fever is physical because of the poison, but it’s also psychological as Mollie, with all her strength, can’t bear to look at the horror she’s brought into her home.

And then the fever breaks. Mollie gets rescued by the FBI agents, and regains her physical strength, but the look across Gladstone’s eyes shows a changed woman. Go back and watch the movie and see her in the first act and then see her in the third act. There’s no fever this time, so technically she should look the same, but aside from a little makeup to put some darkness under her eyes, the Mollie we see is a changed woman. Her final confrontation with Ernest where she basically asks if he knew he was poisoning her—and he still can’t admit it—is so powerful because she has now had her worst fear confirmed. It wasn’t simply that her husband was trying to kill her; it’s that for all the control she thought she had, it wasn’t enough for the man she married to see her as a full human being.

But does Gladstone rant and rail in the scene? Does she even sneer? No. She simply conveys a quiet sadness and leaves. This is emblematic of her whole work in the picture where she always finds the smaller, more contained way to play the character. Ernest, a white guy, has the freedom to play the buffoon, but how will the world treat Mollie if she so much as raises her voice? Gladstone understands that she has to convey the inner life of this complicated woman and do it without a big speech or soaring emotions. And so she does it with her eyes.

The Academy typically like to award the “most” rather than the “best” when it comes to acting, and perhaps that’s why Stone may still have the edge at the Oscars because of all the weirdness of Bella Baxter. But Gladstone’s win at the SAG Awards gives me hope that people can recognize how a quiet, contained performance can still speak volumes.