LE MONDE'S OPINION – A must-see

After The Irishman (2019) was confined to Netflix, it's a delight that 80-year-old Martin Scorsese's latest film, financed by Apple, is making its way into cinemas. The remarkable Killers of the Flower Moon, his 27^th feature film in his 60-year career, unfolds as a territorial epic – but with a secret side. It tells a dark tale of insidious invasion and evil contamination, painting one of the most appalling pictures of American history.

The film draws on the historical vein of Scorsese's body of work (such as The Age of Innocence, The Aviator and Silence), is a counterpoint to his punkish moments (namely, The Wolf of Wall Street and Bringing Out the Dead) and brings him back to his typical formal extravagance. In fact, this adaptation of journalist David Grann's investigation unfolds with the characteristics of a more classical style of filmmaking, in the noblest sense of the term, that is sure of its strengths and not without an instructive aim.

Indeed, the aim is to bring to light a massacre buried by history and committed discreetly, that of the Osage Nation Native American tribe that was targeted by white despoilers in the 1920s. At the end of the 19^th century, as the film begins with reconstructed fake newsreels, oil deposits were discovered in Osage territory in their Oklahoma nature reserve. Its exploitation caused the people to become "the wealthiest social group in the world per capita" overnight.

The region's industrial development immediately attracted a diverse range of opportunists, including seemingly respectable businesspeople, offended by these affluent Indians as if it were an affront to the natural order, and they had come to redirect these streams of wealth into more respectable pockets, which they considered to be their own. Gradually, violent killings on the Osage side grew in such proportions that they eventually justified the intervention of a federal police force in its formative period, under the direction of John Edgar Hoover.

The story opens in the aftermath of the First World War, when Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio), an out-of-work veteran, took the train to Gray Horse, a boomtown that had sprung up in the oil-rich plains. There, he met his uncle, William Hale (Robert De Niro), a prominent local rancher. Under the guise of philanthropy, the patriarch nicknamed "King," a self-proclaimed protector of the Native Americans, orchestrates a sordid inheritance grab by marrying off his sons and nephews to Osage young ladies, who are then slowly eradicated.

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