206 min | R | October 20, 2023 | Paramount Pictures
Oil money pours into the Osage Nation, and white men marry in to murder their way to the inheritance. Martin Scorsese tells the story from the side of the killers, not the lawmen. The result is an American crime story about love used as a weapon.
Martin Scorsese turns the Osage murders into a study of how greed wears the face of love. In 1920s Oklahoma, oil money flows to the Osage Nation, and white men descend to marry into it and inherit it through death. Ernest Burkhart courts Mollie Kyle while his uncle William Hale orchestrates a campaign of murder against her family and her people. The film refuses the comfort of a detective story and tells the crime from the side of the perpetrators. This is a film about the slow machinery of dispossession and the men who tell themselves they are not monsters while they pull the levers.
Leonardo DiCaprio plays Ernest as a weak man who loves his wife and poisons her at the same time. He keeps his jaw slack and his eyes dim, and DiCaprio makes the stupidity itself terrifying. Robert De Niro plays William Hale with avuncular warmth that curdles into evil in plain sight. He speaks the Osage language and funds the church and signs the death warrants without raising his voice. Lily Gladstone plays Mollie with a stillness that holds the moral weight of the entire film, watching her sisters die one by one and understanding what her husband cannot admit. Jesse Plemons arrives late as Tom White and brings a federal procedural calm that exposes how long the killing went unanswered.
Scorsese and co-writer Eric Roth structure the film around complicity rather than mystery. Rodrigo Prieto shoots the Oklahoma prairie in deep amber and dust, framing the oil derricks as a blight that follows the wealth. Robbie Robertson’s score throbs with a low electric blues pulse that drives under the dialogue and turns ordinary scenes into dread. Thelma Schoonmaker’s editing lets conversations run long so the audience sits inside the rationalizations as they form. The final sequence breaks the frame entirely and stages the aftermath as a radio drama, implicating the entertainment that turns murder into product.
This is Scorsese reckoning with the American foundation of theft and the men who profit while professing affection for their victims. The film denies the audience a hero who rides in to fix it because no such hero existed in time. Gladstone anchors the whole enterprise in the face of a woman who survives what was meant to erase her. The result is a furious and patient examination of a crime the country buried, told by a director who refuses to look away.