Watch Sarah's Oil with your Kid

A great movie for financial literacy and enjoyable

A movie about an 11-year-old who needs to convince a down-and-out wildcatter to explore for oil on her land didn’t sound particularly exciting to me for taking the kids. It also seemed the movie’s real message might be something I didn’t want them to see.

But then I came across the YouTube trailer: a Texas handshake, an oil rig exploding, Zachary Levi staring out across a field as if negotiating with fate. I figured it was worth a Saturday night. The acting didn’t look cheap either, which is rare for a movie like this. Not all of us made it; one of the kids was already sleepy, and my wife stayed home.

It’s tough finding a family movie these days that isn’t animated, loud, or condescending. The preview promised something different: oil, trouble, a slick tycoon, a poor but determined family, and an 11-year-old girl who somehow understood business better than half the adults around her. It hinted at the unwritten law, not courtroom law, but the old kind, the one about property, promise, and grit.

And for once, it wasn’t built on sex, violence, or vulgarity. That alone felt like a small victory.

Oh, and based on a true story. For kids, knowing that helps them imagine the past better.

It’s important to make the effort and go see something together. It reminds the kids that entertainment has value when it costs time and attention. You buy the tickets. You buy the popcorn. You sit still. You give it a chance to mean something. I still checked my phone a few times (I’ll admit I’m not used to sitting still anymore either).

It kind of shows that this form of show business may not last. Are we losing something? When I picked up the popcorn, I told the cashier he seemed like he’d been around for a while. He smiled and said he was retiring after eighteen years.

I thought about how the building had no memory, but the man did. Maybe law begins there: not written down, just carried forward by whoever remembers how things are supposed to work.

Sarah, the 11-year-old, and her father are looked down on and thrown out of a few offices as they try to convince an oil company to take a chance on their land. One finally does, led by Devnan, but he doesn’t have good intentions. After beginning the exploration, he leaves and says they can have the land and the equipment. It is the first trick. Devnan does that expecting to come back later and buy the land for nothing.

Sarah does not sell. Instead, she meets Bert, played by Zachary Levi. Bert is a wildcatter who has lost almost everything but keeps moving, like a man running on fumes and pride. He agrees to help her drill, though neither truly trusts the other. That is the tension. Her faith in nature against his faith in paperwork. She sees the land as a promise. He sees it as a gamble. But the humor, and charm and what makes the movie great is that part of her trust stems from their first meeting which he forgets in a diner that doesn’t allowed “colored” people but she needs a glass of water and he told the waitress to buy her lemonade on his tab…as he is looking at obituaries to woo new widows. He’s not an ah-shucks pure of heart type of guy. He’s a bit of a hustler. So we the audience don’t even know his true intentions.

They finally agree on a Texas handshake. It is binding, even in Oklahoma.

Watching with the kids, I could feel them trying to decide what they would do. That is the strange thing about movies like this. We act as if law begins in offices and courthouses, but it starts in the fields, in how people treat what they believe is theirs.

Oil, property, respect. They are all part of the same argument. Who decides what belongs to whom, and who pays when we get it wrong.

As I wrote the notes in preparing this, I asked my daughter what she remember and she blurted out “stop cursing.” I forgot that part of the film since it was a small scene. And who doesn’t curse now?

In a world where everything gets louder, she found a way to speak quietly and still have authority. It reminded me that law does not always arrive from the top down. Sometimes it begins with the smallest corrections. A word. A tone. A boundary.

I thought about my own house. About how often I let small things slide because I don’t want to be the bad guy. Saying no gets tiring. It feels heavy. But watching her stand up to grown men over a simple line of respect, I saw the difference between rules and order. Rules tell you what not to do. Order is how you act when no one is watching.

She had order. Bert had rules. The rest of us, somewhere in between.

It struck me later that there are two other stories like this set in the same place. Killers of the Flower Moon and There Will Be Blood. Both are about land, oil, power, and who gets to decide the rules.

I still think Killers of the Flower Moon is the best film of this century. It’s a microcosm of life in America right now, though I doubt the actors—or even Scorsese—realize it. There Will Be Blood shows the same arc from another side: how ambition turns to obsession, how success drifts into darkness. Sophia’s Oil bridges the two. Smaller, simpler, but cut from the same soil.

Oklahoma has always been the test ground for American law. The place where ambition and justice shake hands, and one of them usually walks away richer. You can feel it in the dirt. Every boom carries a betrayal close behind. There’s even Tulsa King, the latest hit on Paramount by Taylor Sheridan. You may never visit Oklahoma, but the spirit of the country still lives there.

Sophia’s Oil shows history through smaller people. A girl and a speculator, trying to do what the government, the church, and the courts always claim to do—find fairness while the land keeps its own set of rules.

Watching it, I realized we are still living the same story. The setting changes, the accents change, but the deal never does. Someone with less power still has to stand on principle while someone with more tries to write the rules around it. And in every deal, there is always someone who manages to snatch loss from the jaws of victory. In this story, that is Bert.

He won. He found the guzzler. He was going to make out big, but his widow-chasing days caught up to him. They were the ones who funded his venture after his money ran out, and he promised them more than the deal could pay. So he ran. And Sarah, in her wisdom, saw him clearly. Some people are meant to help for a while and move on. That is their purpose. Their fate. (Another great show about that kind of man is Landman, another Taylor Sheridan creation.)

By the time the credits rolled, the kids were already talking about the dog that got shot, Bert’s partner who gets shot off-screen, the oil rig, taxes, contracts, judges, and who was right. I let them argue. There is a lot to unpack.

On the drive home, I kept thinking about Sarah and Bert. She wanted her dream to come true. She believed in it completely. He wanted to strike it rich again. The land did not care either way. It was up to them to seize the moment.

For two hours they had been still. That is rare now. Maybe that is why theaters still matter. They remind us that attention has a cost, and that meaning comes from sitting through the whole thing, even the slow parts.

And, as usual, my wife was right. She wanted to see it and nudged me to take them.

Enjoy Veteran’s Day

After an amazing rally, and slightly lower trading volume, a good day to take notes and stock of everything.

BW is doing amazing.