Killers of the Flower Moon

Based on the 1920s Osage Nation murders, director Martin Scorsese's epic historical drama, Killers of the Flower Moon, is set to uncover the dark underbelly of America's indigenous assimilation policies and the depths of greed and corruption that reigned on the Osage Nation's land in the 1920s. The film masterfully weaves a web of deceit, violence, and bureaucratic negligence that ultimately exposed the nation's ugly truth. The film unfolds in the midst of the Osage oil bonanza. The discovery of oil on the Osage Nation lands brought tremendous wealth and a new wave of settlers who saw the Osage as an obstacle to their riches. At the center of the drama is Ernest Burkhart, a charming and calculating bootlegger from Denver, played by Jesse Plemons. Ernest marries Mollie Kyle, a young Osage woman, in 1921 and claims 160 acres of her land as marital property. As the marriage turns out to be a means to gain control over Mollie's inherited wealth, Ernest becomes fixated on gaining more lucrative deals. One such deal brings Ernest into the orbit of William Hale, a ruthless and cunning rancher who is obsessed with controlling Osage land and extracting its riches. Hale, played by Robert De Niro, rules over the seemingly idyllic cowtown of Bartlesville in Osage County with an iron fist and sees Ernest as a valuable pawn in his game of accumulation. Within the Osage community, internal power struggles begin to manifest. Two families stand out as key players: the Baldwins and the Unbeaches, while also standing is the Baldwin couple's granddaughter, Mollie, eventually teams up with her relatives to exploit her marriage contract advantage. As each side fights for Osage wealth and estate control through dubious tactics of buying their relatives' lands and forging division among their ranks, tensions escalate, leading to the brutal murder of numerous Osage men. F.B.I. Director J. Edgar Hoover, eager to promote himself by choosing bold and sensitive cases, sends a young and inexperienced F.B.I. agent, Tom White, to Oklahoma to deal with the gruesome matter. White tasks Ernest, in contrast to Mollie's growing family bond, by hiring him as an undercover operative to infiltrate the very fabric of the Osage Nation land transactions, however the White family and many F.B.I. members began questioning and interfering with Ernest for personal motives when being informed properly with suspicions of Burkhart's growing suspicion. However the murders get more frequent and the F.B.I. is more baffled by clues which appear one after another. Mollie's connection to Hale and Ernest leads to tragic insight, and upon escaping her cousin's captivity and married a state judge later, the authorities can now figure out that she was merely an integral portion between a massive deceit along with corrupt Osage government that also connived to leave at least forty-five known Native American murder cases under state government's scrutiny and silences for which made powerful officials from the United States government complicit in their heinous crimes. While awaiting the coming of justice on their due to finally receiving a name and details about involved men through ongoing violent drama, The Baldwins were getting wealth but they start avoiding it upon them becoming known to some F.B.I. officials. It was too late, the system works slow and corruption reached its top and within the film's historical backdrop many were either dead. In the end, White manages to unravel the tangled web of deceit and arrests Hale and Burkhart, bringing much-needed closure and justice to the Osage Nation.