I felt like Molly and the rest of the tribe were pushed into the background

Having read the book, that was kind of the point. They didn’t have agency, because it was literally robbed from them at every moment. And during the part of the story where Ernest is under scrutiny and forced to own up to his sins, his wife is as passive as it can get, because she’s on death’s door and bed-ridden. It would be artificial to give her a big presence there, because in reality she was in the process of literally disappearing from the world. Molly actually gets more of an emotional presence onscreen, in part because the book is a more journalistic account and first hand sources of who she was are limited. I would like to have seen some scenes of her moving on with her life afterwards at the end in place of that weird epilogue.