"Coyote wants money," Mollie (Lily Gladstone), a young Osage Nation woman, notes sagely when feckless WW1 returnee Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio) starts courting her in early 1920s Oklahoma, the setting for Martin Scorsese’s period epic. He’s a former infantry cook with no cash or discernible talent; she’s a hugely wealthy owner of headrights (the inherited mineral rights to oil-rich Osage County) who understands the motives of the lascivious white men tumbling off the train in town trying to marry so-called "full-bloods".
Ernest may project vulpine avarice ("I just love money!" he admits repeatedly) but Mollie might as well fall for him as any of them; after all, her sisters are all "blanket" wives to unscrupulous layabouts, and the disfranchisement of First Nation people is operating on an industrial and epidemic scale.
