Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon is as much a companion to Goodfellas as The Departed was – albeit dealing with a type of gangsterism that America has long refused to confront, of an organised effort to steal from and butcher its indigenous people for monetary profit.
In 1894, oil was discovered on land belonging to the Osage Nation. They ensured ownership of the mineral rights, and became the richest people per capita on Earth. Then the wolves came. At the dawn of a new century, and during a period known as the Reign of Terror, dozens of Osage were murdered, their share of the oil rights inherited by the white co-conspirators who had married into their families. Killers of the Flower Moon hones in on one such individual, Leonardo DiCaprio’s Ernest Burkhart, who arrived in Fairfax, Oklahoma, and married Mollie Kyle (Lily Gladstone) at the behest of his uncle, William Hale (Robert De Niro).
