Taylor Sheridan won acclaim for writing recent crime
dramas Sicario and Hell or High
Water, which afforded him the chance to direct his own script, Wind River. Beginning with the murder of a young woman on an isolated Wyoming
Indian reservation, the story follows Cory Lambert (Jeremy Renner), a tracker grieving
his own loss, as he helps Jane Banner (Elizabeth Olsen), a newbie FBI agent, stalk
the killer. As he says early on, he “hunts predators.”
Olsen’s arc feels trimmed down in editing and her
character ultimately gets pushed aside. As the mystery deepens and Banner
investigates the death alongside Lambert, she fades further and further into
the background and never progresses beyond the outsider
rookie striving to prove herself and facing resistance at every turn because of
her youth and gender.
While Banner feels like a waste of a fantastic performer in
Olsen, as well as a potentially intriguing, if Silence of the
Lambs-esque arc, Renner delivers his best performance to date.
Lambert is a staid modern frontier man, quietly coping with—or at least containing—his
own haunting pain. He approaches the world with a stoic sense of perspective
and philosophy that masks deep wounds. The character falls right in line with protagonists
like Chris Pine in Hell or Emily Blunt in Sicario,
where measured, calculated exteriors cloak churning emotion beneath.
Wind River lacks the social edge of the
most obvious cinematic comparison, Thunderheart. And, as
with Olsen, it’s hard to shake the feeling that there’s more to the story that
we don’t see, especially as far as it concerns the setting. Focusing on a white
man living on Native land—Lambert’s ex-wife is a member of the tribe—there’s an
obvious culture clash element, but one that never factors into the narrative.
This isn’t a “White Savior” type scenario, and by and large,
the film is respectful of the culture—with Gil Birmingham, Graham Greene,
Martin Sensmeier, and Tantoo Cardinal, it features a who’s who of Native
American actors (except, you know, the two main characters). Still, it’s easy to
ask why position this story in this place,
when it never functions as anything more than a moderately interesting stage and could have been much more. Again,
there’s a missed opportunity to explore interesting thematic territory that
falls by the wayside in favor of noir-ish machinations.
There’s also one of the most gratuitous sexual assault
scenes I’ve come across in quite a while. Not gratuitous in a graphic sense,
though it is unsettling, but gratuitous in an unnecessary sense. It represents
a jarring shift in perspective at a key moment, which also derails the pace. I
understand why it exists—for lack of a better description, the script paints
itself into a corner. We come to a point in the narrative where we need certain
information in order to move forward, and there’s nowhere else to go, no other
way to impart this knowledge.
Even with Sheridan’s Elmore Leonard-influenced loaded
dialogue, Wind River doesn’t quite hit the highs
of his other works. The script is solid, but not as honed and razor sharp as his others. But, missteps and all, it’s a taut, cold mystery, and a
strong directorial offering, especially for a filmmaker with only one other
feature under his belt. [Grade: B]
This is an expanded version of our capsule review
from the Seattle International Film Festival.
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