![]() But Scorsese shows us the politics: the bureau’s belated appearance appears to be, at least partly, a matter of containing the difficult situation involving the white people and the inescapably wealthy Osage peoples, and reinforcing federal control over the new state of Oklahoma.Īs performed by Gladstone and DiCaprio, the relationship between Mollie and Ernest has a kind of spiritual nausea Ernest is sincere about his feelings for his wife, in his way, but they are part of a context of bad faith and violence. ![]() This is Tom White, played by Jesse Plemons. When the situation becomes too bad for the federal authorities to ignore, Washington DC sends an officer of its fledgling Bureau of Investigations (later to be the FBI). Mollie’s diabetes is also a factor it is made strangely worse by the medicine Hale has procured for her, and which Ernest administers while always simpering and blubbing his concern for her declining health. And so Ernest and Mollie’s doomed marriage commences, complicated by the terrible fears of Mollie’s ailing mother, Lizzie Q (Tantoo Cardinal), who has a quietly beautiful death scene. Hale hires Ernest for a position as his vague underling, courtier and dirty-work factotum, and encourages him to date and also marry Mollie, whom Ernest has already met, which would give him (and therefore Hale) a legal claim on Mollie’s “headrights”, as her oil entitlements are known. This cattleman-plutocrat is William Hale, played by Robert De Niro, a man of calcified resentment and self-importance who preens himself on his good relations with the Osage people. Spiritual nausea … Lily Gladstone and Leonardo DiCaprio in Killers of the Flower Moon. Later the bodies of Osage murder-victims are found, including Mollie’s wayward sister Anna (Cara Jade Myers), whose autopsy is bizarrely carried out in the open air, at the crime scene itself. And there is something else: Mollie and her family are deeply disturbed by mysterious illnesses which have been killing off Osage people, one by one. But they are still subject to a racist and infantilising condition of “guardianship”: to claim the income and spend it, Osage individuals need a white co-signatory. Lily Gladstone gives a performance of tragic force as Mollie Burkhart, a Native American woman from the Osage tribe who, like all her people, has become unexpectedly wealthy because the apparently stony and unpromising land in Oklahoma on which the authorities allowed the Osage to settle turned out to have huge reserves of oil. ![]() But in the end, this film is about what all westerns are about, and perhaps all history: the brutal grab for land, resources and power. It echoes Scorsese’s earlier work about mob violence, mob loyalty and the final, inevitable sellout to the federal authorities, whose own bad faith gradually emerges. It places in the drama’s foreground a gaslit marriage of lies and poisoned love. With co-writer Eric Roth, Scorsese crafts an epic of creeping, existential horror about the birth of the American century, a macabre tale of quasi-genocidal serial killings which mimic the larger erasure of Native Americans from the US. M artin Scorsese’s western true-crime thriller is about the US’s Osage murders of the early 1920s, based on the nonfiction bestseller by David Grann.
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