When oil is discovered in 1920s Oklahoma under Osage Nation land, the Osage people are murdered one by one—until the FBI steps in to unravel the mystery.
Eschewing a classical linear narrative forecloses on a cathartic liberal reading so typical of other historically-informed dramas (and so inappropriate here).
A few people are surprised by Jack Fisk's bar/barbershop combination; indeed, even Fisk himself implies it might be an anachronism. However, there's at least one of these in the opening moments of Howard Hawk's Rio Bravo (1959).
Ernest starts the film as a taxi driver, reminding us of Scorsese the modernist auteur of the 1970s [ie. Taxi Driver], who here reasserts himself outside of this naturalistic movie in its coda, where the lie of entertainment mirrors the contemporary scenes of the cleaners in The Zone of Interest. In Europe there are museums for these horrors, their history expressed in piles of shoes and eyeglasses. In America it’s called showbiz.
— A. S. Hamrah (n+1)
