Movie Review: Wind River

Wind River *** ½ / *****

Directed by: Taylor Sheridan.

Written by: Taylor Sheridan. 

Starring: Jeremy Renner (Cory Lambert), Elizabeth Olsen (Jane Banner), Gil Birmingham (Martin Hanson), Jon Bernthal (Matt Rayburn), Julia Jones (Wilma Lambert), Kelsey Chow (Natalie Hanson), Graham Greene (Ben), Martin Sensmeier (Chip Hanson), Tyler Laracca (Frank Walker), Gerald Tokala Clifford (Sam Littlefeather), James Jordan (Pete Mickens), Eric Lange (Dr. Whitehurst), Ian Bohen (Evan), Hugh Dillon (Curtis).

 

Over the last few years, writer Taylor Sheridan has been busy craving out a name for himself as the writer of genre pieces – crime dramas that at once feel somewhat old school, almost like Westerns, and yet modern in the issues they address. His previous screenplays for Denis Villeneuve’s Sicario and David Mackenzie’s Hell or High Water are undoubtedly what got him the opportunity to direct again (he apparently directed a low budget horror movie years ago – one he didn’t write). Wind River is very much of a piece with those other two films – it feels like a modern Western, full of tough characters in a lawless land. Wind River feels slightly more awkward than either of those films – the dialogue is at times too on the nose, and explains too much, or while the direction is quite good – it lacks the style of Villeneuve’s, or the workmanlike perfection of Mackenzie’s. Wind River isn’t quite the film that those other ones are – and yet, it’s another sign that Sheridan is interested in doing the type of mature, adult genre pieces Hollywood doesn’t make anymore – and the sign that he’ll be a great director in his own right – someday anyway.

 

Wind River takes place in Wyoming, in the dead of winter. Cory Lambert (Jeremy Renner) works essentially as a hunter – when a predator of some kind finds its way to close to people, or starts killing livestock, it’s his job to track it, and it kill it. On one of his assignments – on the Wind River Native Reservation – he finds the body of a teenage girl, shoeless, and miles from anywhere. She knows the girl – she was the best friend of his own teenage daughter, who died in similar circumstances a few years before, leading to the dissolution of his marriage to a Native American woman. He calls the tribal police – led by Ben (Graham Greene), who has to call in the FBI. They send the closet agent – Jane Banner (Elizabeth Olsen) – who arrives from Las Vegas, in no way ready for the cold. SO starts the investigation.

 

Sheridan really isn’t interested in making a whodunit though in Wind River. The investigation unfolds in a fairly straight line – with one clue leading to the next, and so on, without so much as a red herring along the way (honestly, it could have used one or two). Sheridan is more interested in his characters than anything else – and he is helped by the strong performances of Renner, Olsen, Greene, Gil Birmingham (so memorable in Hell or High Water last year) as the dead girl’s father, and in what amounts to a cameo by Jon Bernthal – one of the few modern actors, who always feel authentic, even on shows like The Walking Dead (who has missed him terribly). It did feel a little odd to me when Sheridan ends the movie with an onscreen card telling the audience that no one is tracking missing Native American women, and it’s a huge problem, not because it isn’t a huge problem (it is, and in Canada as well, and it’s to our shame that Canada has taken so long to do anything about it) – but because while the film is about Native American issues, the Native characters themselves are supporting ones. To the films credit, it at least knows this – it is remarked on a few times how ironic it is that these white people are “here to help” and how little help they’ve been in the past.

 

Overall though, Wind River is the type of adult genre piece that used to be common, that now rarely hits multiplex screens (it may have taken a month to get there, but Wind River did open in my local theater – a rarity for a film like this). Sheridan has written better screenplays than this (is it possible he dusted off an earlier screenplay to direct himself? It kind of feels like it) – ones that aren’t quite as reliant on monologuing as this one. But the actors sell those monologues, and more importantly, they sell those quieter moments – those are the ones that will haunt you. Wind River isn’t a great film like Sicario or Hell or High Water were – but its further proof that Sheridan is the real deal.