Ever since he started making films, 60-odd years ago, Martin Scorsese has always wanted to make a western; instead, he may have killed the genre. And that’s no small thing for this most American of forms. Over the past century, westerns have cemented the founding myths of American identity; how white settlers subjugated and massacred the continent’s indigenous population and tamed the wild west, with God and guns (and cinema) on their side. So it takes guts to unpick that mythology with a true story of just how evil and racist white Americans really were – especially in a political climate where such histories are being actively suppressed in the US. We’ve had plenty of “revisionist” westerns in recent years; you could call this a destructionist western. It cuts to the dark heart of colonialist greed and capitalist corruption on which America was really founded. In terms of revolutionary cinema, nothing else in this year’s Oscar crop can compete.
For the uninitiated, the setting is 1920s Oklahoma, where the discovery of oil on their land made the Osage Nation the richest people on the planet. The fact that they were required by law to have white guardians to help them manage their wealth is just the beginning of the injustice heaped upon them here. Robert De Niro’s two-faced patriarch William “King” Hale, hatches a plan for his dim nephew Ernest (Leonardo DiCaprio) to marry Osage heiress Mollie (Lily Gladstone), then systematically bump off her family and seize her oil rights – aided by pretty much the entire white community. Blinded by love, and wealth, Mollie and her people take far too long to figure out what’s really going on.
