This movie was well-made, though its structure seemed familiar. It is a Scorsese film so perhaps it was the mob-like plot: a wealthy big shot tries to appear as a benign community leader, while he buys local political and law enforcement protection, has others do the dirty work, and throws any of them under the bus if the corruption is exposed. Just substitute the native Osage lands for the inner city neighborhood. In this case, rather than bootlegging, gambling or prostitution, the bad guy (William Hale) traffics mainly in murder. The goal is to have the sale rights of the Osage people’s oil land transferred from the murder victims to a white spouse in bad guy Bill Hale’s pocket, or through other machinations, to him directly.
The screen time is mostly taken up by Hale, his nephew Ernest Burkhart and Burkhart’s Osage wife Mollie. Ernest loves her but he is weak and kowtows to Hale’s wishes, even to the point of endangering his wife. Finally he — but I won’t give anything further away in the plot.
The only criticism I will make is that a lot of people are murdered in this story, especially from Mollie’s own family, and we see very little about the other victims except for a little insight into Mollie’s wild sister Annie. If you are going to use 3 1/2 hours to tell a story, I think a tad more character development on some of the victims would not go amiss. However, the movie is well-made, as I said earlier, but I don’t see that I will feel driven to watch it again down the road.