Oil is discovered under Osage Nation land in late 19th century Oklahoma. It's 1919. The oil companies have moved in and Osage people are some of the richest folks in the world. All that wealth attracts a lot of workers, capitalists, criminals, and general scammers. Everybody is looking to get a piece of the Indian oil pie. War veteran Ernest Burkhart (Leo DiCaprio) returns to join his brother Byron and his uncle William Hale (Robert De Niro). William has become a wealthy leader of the town by having his family and friends worm their way into the native community. He is known as King Hale and has ingratiated himself into the tribe. He directs Ernest to woo and marry Mollie (Lily Gladstone), a shy and sickly native woman.

I put off watching this for as long as possible. I don't want to spend three hours watching evil people stealing from helpless Indian folks. As I started watching this, a phrase pops into my mind. This is "stealing candy from a baby" and it's not a fun time to watch it over and over again. It's a tough watch for two hours. I find myself stopping or just multi-tasking with my iPad. When the FBI shows up, this becomes a tradition howcatchem and that's a little bit more watchable. I don't have to stop anymore. This would be a great two hour mystery movie with the FBI. Martin Scorsese probably wants the native characters to have more time. He is not shy about making these characters evil. Leo is doing something like Brando and I don't like it. It seems much more fitting that he be handsome Leo so that Mollie would be powerless to his charms. As for Mollie, her cluelessness is rather frustrating. There is no denying Scorsese's filmmaking mastery or his sincere intentions. The first two hours are a grind, but it is still a rewarding watch.

Leonardo Di Caprio returns from World War One to Oklahoma, where oil has made the Osage Indians rich. After long, meandering talks with his uncle, Robert De Niro, Di Caprio runs a taxi, and picks up Lily Gladstone, a pure-blood Osage, and begins to drive her regularly. They fall in love, and eventually have three children, while someone is busy killing off Osage Indians.

This being a Scorsese movie with a stellar cast, it is impeccably written, directed, and shot. I don't know what Thelma Schoonmaker, Scorsese's long-time editor, was doing. At more than three hours before he wraps it up with a ten-minute epilogue, presented as an episode of Gangbusters talking about where everyone wound up spending the rest of their lives. It goes on too long for a movie, at least for a movie without a break. This is the upside and downside of companies like Amazon and Netflix having the wherewithal to tempt great film makers with large gobs of money. Because the viewer at home will watch a movie like this at his leisure, taking time to go to the bath room, having a meal, and so forth, it's made for him. There is no need to edit this down. What could have been cut to a reasonable length without DiCaprio's army career and finding out that he lived in a trailer in his final years is left in, with only the audience's bladders telling them it's time to leave this story. What would have made a fine mini-series on television must be watched in one go in the movie theater, trapped between the gorgeous images, and the fact that every minute of screen time cuts two points off the IQ of DiCaprio's character.

It's a movie that really should be seen in the theater for the size and audience, and yet makes it impossible.

Martin Scorsese follows up his sloppy The Irishman with another excursion in indulgence and overnarration. For three and a half hours, he tells the story of the Osage Indian murders in Osage County, Oklahoma at the beginning of the 20th century, but this is not a cinematic work; it's a visual retelling of literature. The narrative is so unfocused, longwinded, and loquacious that watching the movie is like listening to a busker going at it repetitiously for hours on end. And the story, although fascinating enough in a historical context, has an unappealing revisionist whiff about it and is often reduced to a simple us-and-them dichotomy. Scorsese keeps pounding his narrative drum like that aforementioned busker, but The Killers of the Flower Moon never becomes the grandiose, epic drama it purports to be, and it desperately lacks subtlety. The performances could have been good in a tighter and more focused movie, with De Niro being onto something unique as the ageing, self-righteous patriarch William Hale.