Wind River
Taylor Sheridan, the screenwriter of last year’s socially conscious crime drama “Hell or High Water,” proves an undeniably strong director with his second effort in that job, “Wind River.” The movie opens on a breathtaking night sky and snow-capped mountains, with a young woman running over a long stretch of open land. “There’s a meadow in my perfect world,” a female voice says. The juxtaposition of the imagery and the poetics make for a peculiar opening. Eventually it all makes tragic sense.
Here, Jeremy Renner plays Cory Lambert, a federal wildlife officer who hunts predatory animals at the Wind River Indian Reservation in Wyoming. He seems on intimate terms with the residents there; his ex-wife, with whom he has a young son and had a daughter, is a Native American with family on the reservation. While searching for a mountain lion that has been attacking livestock, he finds a corpse frozen in the mountain snow. The dead young woman, who suffered a head injury and was also raped, was the best friend of Cory’s daughter, who died three years earlier under similar circumstances.
Homicide on an Indian reservation, as it happens, is a federal crime.
The F.B.I. — which, going by the attitude of the reservation’s quiet police chief, is consistently less helpful than it should be — dispatches Jane Banner (Elizabeth Olsen), a seemingly very green agent, to head the investigation. She shows up wearing an F.B.I. windbreaker, and Cory calmly informs her that she’ll be dead within five minutes if she goes up the mountain dressed like that.
“See what they send us,” one resident says mournfully, shaking his head. In a different movie, the introduction of Jane and Cory would be a meet-cute. But Mr. Sheridan, who also avoided injecting a romantic theme into his script for “Sicario,” in which Emily Blunt played an F.B.I. operative, has different, more serious reasons for making this character a woman. Jane acts partly as an audience surrogate, a well-intentioned outsider whose empathy and sincere desire to act on behalf of the female murder victim only gets her so far.
The case lights up a cold fury in Cory. He reassures the victim’s father, “I’m a hunter.” He demonstrates to Jane that in this terrain, it’s the landscape that will yield the most important answers, not the frequently recalcitrant Indians whom Jane wants to interview. He’s right, of course, and his wisdom is borne out in some gut-wrenching ways.
Under David Mackenzie’s direction, “Hell or High Water” tended to overstate its hard-times-in-the-United-States theme; it seemed that every fifth shot or so showed a house foreclosure sale sign or a bankruptcy lawyer’s billboard. As a director, Mr. Sheridan is a little more subtle than Mr. Mackenzie. This is kind of surprising; frequently, writers turned directors really like to bring the hammer down on their subtexts. But Mr. Sheridan limits himself to one shot of an American flag being flown upside down. Other than that, he lets the terrible situation on the reservation speak for itself. An actor before he was a screenwriter, Mr. Sheridan clearly spent a lot of his time learning about filmmaking on movie sets; his direction is assured throughout. A standoff scene near the movie’s finale would not be shamed if put next to one of Michael Mann’s better set pieces.
The performances Mr. Sheridan draws from his cast are all excellent. Mr. Renner, who’s been spending too much of his career imparting convincing humanity to a second-tier Marvel superhero, is in excellent form as Cory. Ms. Olsen, who has been co-starring in those Marvel films with Mr. Renner, is sympathetic as Jane. Graham Greene brings his customary quiet power and dry wit to the role of the police chief.
