+3
I didn't find it a slog at all, and I saw it theatrically. It is a depressing subject, of course. But that didn't make it a chore to sit through.
I rather like how Scorsese and company shifted the focus of the story to the Osage rather than just which white men were perpetrating the crimes, and thank goodness it wasn't a procedural about how the white authorities uncovered and prosecuted the crimes. Why the whites wanted the land is clear and needs no deep dive. How they achieved it is also clear and much more emotionally resonant seeing its effect on the people they are brutalizing and murdering than to see a series of backroom deals and schemes, of which we get several. To see that side of it mostly from the perspective of DiCaprio's rather dim and conflicted Ernest Burkhart reveals both how it was done in detail and why eventually it all unraveled to authorities. Jesse Plemons Agent Thomas Bruce White doesn't have to do a whole lot of super sleuthing to figure out what happened. The perpetrators had been so brazen and used to literally getting away with murder they barely covered up what they were doing.
In this case the value of the agency that was about to become the F.B.I. was not in their amazing detective skills but showing exactly why a Federal crime agency is needed. Like many such crimes the local authorities were either complicit or at least willing to turn a blind eye, thus justice in the courts was never going to happen without impartial enforcement. Scorsese's Killers of the Flower Moon illustrates the need for such an agency, not the procedures they follow to arrest and prosecute.
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"Film is a disease. When it infects your bloodstream it takes over as the number one hormone. It bosses the enzymes, directs the pineal gland, plays Iago to your psyche. As with heroin, the antidote to Film is more Film." - Frank Capra
Last edited by Holden Pike; 12-12-23 at 01:31 PM.