Director Martin Scorcese gets together with his favourites Robert De Niro (their 11th outing together) and Leonardo DiCaprio (their 7th together) in this bleak tale about Osage murders. Watching them together I cannot help but remember the Costigan-Costello interplay (DiCaprio-Jack Nicholson) in The Departed, one of my favourite Scorcese-DiCaprio movies, even though these two films are very dissimilar.

KFM is based on an eponymous book by journalist David Grann, which was listed by the Time magazine as one of its top ten non-fiction books of 2017.

Way more stark than most of Hollywood’s long films like Ben Hur, Cleopatra etc, KFM has a run time of 208.10 minutes. The setting is 1920s Oklahoma, after oil is unearthed on tribal land. Members of the tribe retain headrights (one for each member) to the mineral rights on their land. The whites come as prospectors but want much more than what they are entitled to. They want the wealth that belongs to the tribals and will do anything to get it. Thus starts a a series of murders of Osage native Americans, most of them not investigated, many of them pronounced accidents or suicides.

The film sticks pretty close to actual events which form a seriously disturbing, but seldom discussed part of American history. The camera work is breathtaking, whether over sweeping shots of the landscape or in tawdry homes and drinking holes. The murders play out almost casually through the narrative, ending with a wonderful ‘theatrical’ touch where Scorcese takes the stage. My favourite scene is the last one between DiCaprio and Gladstone, intense but underplayed, with no background music to detract from raw emotions.

Performances are always fabulous in Scorcese films and this is no exception. Lily Gladstone makes a pitch perfect Mollie Burkhart. De Niro pulls off William Hale with aplomb. But the screen belongs to Leonardo DiCaprio. With some prosthetics including stained false teeth, Scorcese turns one of the smartest men in Hollywood into the unattractive, avaricious, weak and sometimes conflicted Ernest Burkhart.

Definitely a front runner for Oscars 2024, this is a movie for cinema lovers. Not for the faint hearted, or weak bladdered though 🙂