Review: WIND RIVER

WIND RIVER 
★★★
(CRIME-DRAMA/MYSTERY-THRILLER)
Directed by Taylor Sheridan
Screenplay by Taylor Sheridan
Starring: Jeremy Renner, Elizabeth Olsen, Graham Greene, Gil Birmingham, Jon Bernthal, Julia Jones, Kelsey Chow, Martin Sensmeier, Tyler Laracca, Gerald Tokala Clifford, James Jordan, Eric Lange, Ian Bohen, Hugh Dillon, Matthew Del Negro, Teo Briones, Tantoo Cardinal, Apesanahkwat
Rated R for strong violence, a rape, disturbing images, and language.
107 minutes
Verdict: Grim and atmospheric, with a lot on its mind but little to say, WIND RIVER is a gripping crime-thriller from a first-time director.
YOU MAY BE INTERESTED IN WIND RIVER IF YOU LIKED:
HELL OR HIGH WATER  (2016)
SICARIO  (2015)
FARGO  (1996)
SMOKE SIGNALS  (1998)
WINTER'S BONE  (2010)

WIND RIVER is described as the third part of a loose trilogy of films written by Taylor Sheridan, a "Frontier Trilogy" comprised of the 2015 drug war thriller SICARIO, directed by Denis Villeneuve, the 2016 cops-and-robbers story HELL OR HIGH WATER, directed by David Mackenzie, and now WIND RIVER, directed by Sheridan himself.  It isn't exactly much of a trilogy, obviously not in terms of narrative, but also not all that much thematically.  They're all neo-westerns (that applies more to WIND RIVER and HELL OR HIGH WATER than SICARIO) and they all deal with relevant social, political and economic issues of modern life in the rural Southwestern United States, but some filmmakers just have recurring themes and films in the same genre without it having to be a trilogy or series or whatever, and these films are about as connected as that.  The idea that Sheridan has expressed though, is of showing how much and how little the western frontier has changed.  The lawmen and bandits have traded in their ponies for trucks, and the concepts of civilization and law are tenuous at best, and the harshness of the land is a cruel reality.
In WIND RIVER, Jeremy Renner stars as Cory Lambert, a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service agent who works in and around the Wind River Indian Reservation in Wyoming by killing predatory animals like coyotes and mountain lions that pose a threat to local livestock (the movie makes no moral commentary on this type of work), and one morning while tracking a lioness and her cubs on the reservation, he discovers the frozen corpse of a young Native American woman who was beaten and raped before running out barefoot into snow and below-zero temperatures where she died.  Tribal Police Chief Ben (Graham Greene) calls it in to the FBI, and a driven but inexperienced special agent, Jane Banner (Elizabeth Olsen), arrives to investigate but with little inside knowledge of the community or terrain, so she recruits Lambert, and despite being surrounded by uncooperative locals and weather, they begin to peel away the layers of dark secrets to reveal the bitter truth.
Renner's Lambert is a curious contradiction, both advising the victim's father (played by Gil Birmingham, who appeared as Jeff Bridges' Texas Ranger partner in HELL OR HIGH WATER) to not hide himself away from or internalize the grief while steeling up his own like a traditional western strong-man quietly burdened by his guilt and taking the case more personally than he lets on.  Jane mirrors Emily Blunt's SICARIO character as a somewhat naïve but also more good person in the midst of a world that refuses to be governed by law or decency.  It's strange to have this story come so heavily from the perspective of two white characters, even while Birmingham and Greene pull a lot of weight in their screentime, but it's not a case of the movie whitewashing an Native American story in the manner of something like DANCES WITH WOLVES (which, to be fair, is more misguided than outright wrongheaded).  WIND RIVER blurs the lines between tradition of Cowboys and Indians, where Lambert, the "cowboy", is loosely tied to the tribe by marriage, having married an Arapaho woman, and even though they have since divorced, he's trying to be a good father to their young son and associate him to his mother's culture, even after she has left the reservation for good.  He's a familiar presence, but an outsider in important respects. 
Like HELL OR HIGH WATER, WIND RIVER raises questions without getting to direct about things, and rarely with answers, and it doesn't feel like a specific metaphor or commentary.  It's a raw story about modern western frontier, and that brings up questions on its own.  While bringing something more interesting to the table than HELL OR HIGH WATER, Sheridan is clearly not yet as accomplished a director as those who have directed his previous screenplays, and occasionally it feels like a beat has been missed; whether intentionally or not, the effect can be confusing.  It doesn't have the aggressive power of SICARIO, but the material has a lot of strength to it, and the acting is great all around, adding up to a solid and richly atmospheric piece.

                                                                                                                                              Images via The Weinstein Company