Real stars of ‘Killers of the Flower Moon’ are DiCaprio’s bad teeth

I went to a screening of Martin Scorsese’s “Killers of the Flower Moon” a week ago and have thought about it a great deal ever since. I think about the bodies. I think about Scorsese’s camera exploring every square inch of the Osage Nation in the early 20th century: the mucky streets, packed houses, desolate jail cells. I think about Lily Gladstone’s Mollie Burkhart wheezing, “You’re next” to her husband while in a fit of delirium. I think about Robert De Niro’s character’s wire-rimmed glasses that deeply resemble the ones that my own grandfather — an equally patrician, but decidedly less evil man — wore himself. I think about Scorsese’s extended, impressionistic shot of townspeople laboring outside as a fire rages behind them, with only their silhouettes visible in the heat mirage.

But mostly, I think about Leo’s teeth.

“Killers of the Flower Moon,” based on the bestselling book by David Grann, is a masterpiece. That word gets thrown around a lot, especially in the deluge of reviews that arrive the second a highly anticipated film is released. I’m pretty sure someone called “The Batman” a masterpiece, which I dare say was an overstatement.

But “Flower Moon” is one of those films that earns its masterpiece status, and it will be referred to as a masterpiece many years from now: in classrooms, in broader critical essays, in American Film Institute lists, etc. It’s the story of members of the Osage Nation in Oklahoma who were systematically poisoned, shot and blown up by their white neighbors in an attempt by those whites to wrest lucrative oil rights away from them. This is not a fun movie, but it IS an essential one. Like “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford,” it’s so meticulous in its period detail that to watch it is to feel as if you yourself are living inside of history.

One of those details, the one I oddly think about the most, sits inside of Leonardo DiCaprio’s mouth. DiCaprio plays WWI veteran Ernest Burkhart, who’s enlisted by his uncle Bill “King” Hale (played by De Niro, who gives his best performance in decades) to marry into the Kyles, an Osage Nation family. Because the Osage tribe technically owned rights to the vast oil deposits underneath their bequeathed land, the only way that whites could lay any sort of legal claim to that oil was through intermarriage. Hale’s not afraid to exploit that fact on a mass scale. He wants Ernest to infiltrate the Kyles by marrying daughter Mollie (played brilliantly by Gladstone), and then to kill off members of Mollie’s family, Mollie included, so that only its white heirs would remain.

Ernest Burkhart is a simple man: greedy, dumb, easily suggestible. Not unlike De Niro’s Frank Sheeran in Scorsese’s “The Irishman,” he’s a useful idiot for those who are both more powerful and more cunning. He loves his new wife, but still agrees to set into motion Hale’s plan to slowly poison her to death even though he isn’t quite certain why he would. He’s just one of many white folks throughout world history who, almost by instinct, went along for the ride in committing mass atrocity.

You can see this confusion, this ‘Why did I do that?’ angst, right there on DiCaprio’s face. And you can really see it in his teeth, which are crooked and discolored in ways that are period-appropriate. Ernest’s smile is not a fetching one; he looks more sarcastic than happy whenever he busts it out. And when Ernest is miserable — especially under direct questioning from the federal government — he purses his lips tight over his teeth, as if he’s trying to keep the ugliness from bursting out of him.

DiCaprio’s oral prosthetics were handled by legendary makeup artist Vincent Van Dyke (“The Revenant,” “I, Tonya,” “Tropic Thunder”), as part of a grander production design team that gives you, the viewer, plenty to look at through all 200-plus minutes of “Flower Moon.” I looked at brain matter fall out of a victim’s exploded cranium. I looked at the colorful Osage blankets that Gladstone kept tightly wrapped around her as she navigated a town that was conspiring to kill both her and her whole family. I looked at Ernest’s old-time cab and its supple leather backseat. All of it looked so real that I could smell it.

That goes for the teeth, too. DiCaprio still looks like DiCaprio in “Flower Moon,” but Van Dyke’s prosthetics change his face in fantastically subtle ways, enough to make Ernest feel like an entirely different person from the actor playing him. It’s not unlike the effect that false teeth had for Russell Crowe in “A Beautiful Mind,” or even for Mike Myers in “Austin Powers.” For all three of those roles, teeth were a seemingly minor detail that helped each actor inhibit their roles fully.

To give you an example for DiCaprio, there’s a scene at the beginning of “Flower Moon” where Gladstone, upon meeting DiCaprio for the first time, says something in Osage that DiCaprio’s character doesn’t understand. Trying to be flirty, DiCaprio says to Gladstone, “Well, I don’t know what that was, but it must have been Indian for handsome devil.” Scorsese told reporters that DiCaprio thought up that line on the spot:

“That’s an improv. You see her laugh for real. That moment you have the actual relationship, it’s actually between the two actors.”

I’ll bet that moment doesn’t happen on camera unless DiCaprio has those ugly-ass teeth sitting in his mouth. They round out his character so painstakingly that they define him. These are iconic teeth. They will be seared into your mind once you’ve left the theater. So will De Niro’s glasses. So will Gladstone’s incredible poker face. And so will Jesse Plemons, playing a federal agent in a Stetson who’s much savvier than he gives away. You’ll think about this story and you’ll see all of those details bright and clear when you do. You’ll never forget them.

I know I won’t. I think about “Killers of the Flower Moon,” and I think about Leo’s teeth when I do. I bet that Ernest Burkhart had himself some foul breath. I bet he was a lousy kisser. I bet he was a terrible liar. In fact, I know he was a terrible liar, because he got caught. “Killers of the Flower Moon,” like other great Scorsese films, is about people who, in the end, cannot hide who they really are, not even from themselves. All of that is on DiCaprio’s face, and in his mouth. This is one of the great American films. Give those teeth a trophy for Best Actor.