There's a bit of a 'if Martin Scorsese made it it must be good regardless of the quality' sheen to this movie, and I think it's why it attracted the likes of Robert De Niro and Leonardo DiCaprio. If it had been a made for TV movie without big name talent and been shot and edited exactly the same way it wouldn't have had anywhere near the same recognition.

Not because it isn't well made, simply because it struck me as being a curiously tiny story in a much grander canvas, and the canvas is what I found far more interesting.

As you probably know if you're a cinephile but even if you haven't seen it, it's set against the ruthless and murderous land grab by wealthy white elites against a Native American people who happened to discover they were sitting on enormous oil reserves in the 1920's.

The non fiction book on which the film is based is partly about how the whole mess led directly to the formation of the FBI, and I think I would have found that a much more interesting story.

Instead, Scorsese, his writer Eric Roth and input by DiCaprio famously changed the whole approach, and the film instead zeroes in on the story of a returned WWI vet turned taxi driver, Ernest (DiCaprio) and the unfathomable way he treated his native wife Molly (Lily Gladstone).

When Ernest returns home to his dustbowl Oklahoma hometown, he falls under the wing of his Uncle, the seemingly kindly ranch manager William (De Niro), who guides and advises him on his career and prospects to make a fortune from the Osage people's newfound good luck.

But William and everyone like him is actually a robber baron, trying to appear friendly and caring to his Native American peers and community, but (it's not a spoiler to say so, surely, as it's the basis behind the whole story) he's actually behind a series of murders targeting people who stand in the way of his looting the land and the money it holds from under them.

It's his idea Ernest ingratiates himself with Molly, convincing her to marry him and the pair having three children. But he also starts administering a poison intended to slowly kill her, hidden in plain sight as the medication she has to take for diabetes, all at William's urging.

William is consolidating his position by having members of Mollie's family killed off – leaving ownership of the land to her – and then have her die last, the ownership then transferring to Ernest, who he knows he has firmly under control.

But even though she doesn't suspect her husband of murder, Mollie is wily enough to know her people are being targeted, and in the face of corrupt court cases and institutional indifference, she takes a delegation to Washington DC to make a plea to the President.

It leads to an agent from the nascent FBI (Jesse Plemons) travelling to their Oklahoma town to investigate, and the trail immediately leads to William, Ernest and all their misdeeds, the wheels quickly falling off the enterprise.

The whole thing is capped off by a frankly bizarre depiction of a 50s's style radio show, performed live on stage with sound effects and a band as they were, with Scorsese himself as the announcer telling the audience the denouement of the story and where the characters all ended up.

Along with several of his contemporaries, Scorsese doesn't know how to make a bad film, I just spent a lot of the time wondering why I should care about this particular aspect of a much larger story.

It didn't help that DiCaprio was the lead character and I never quite got a handle on him. He seemed to really love Mollie, but also very knowingly arranged for most of her beloved siblings to be murdered, followed by Molly herself. As one column I read about it asked; was he a dumb hick or a pitiless sociopath?

You don't need to completely understand every motivation a character has to find them interesting or relatable, but in this case I don't think Scorsese or DiCaprio themselves had even figured that out.

On top of that, there's also the problem that Scorsese is just too powerful and prestigious a director to be reigned in anymore, and although the tones are completely different, The Wolf of Wall Street was similarly unfocused and overlong – I checked the time more than once.