Wind River (2017) [Blu-ray]
Crime | Drama | Mystery | Thriller

Tagline: Nothing is harder to track than the truth

When U.S. Fish and Wildlife employee Cory Lambert stumbles upon the frozen body of a teenage girl, FBI Agent Jane Banner is quickly dispatched to get to the bottom of the mystery. Unprepared for the harsh conditions, she enlists Cory as a tracker.

Storyline: A veteran tracker with the Fish and Wildlife Service helps to investigate the murder of a young Native American woman, and uses the case as a means of seeking redemption for an earlier act of irresponsibility which ended in tragedy.

Reviewer's Note: Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman, November 9, 2017 One of the most eye opening things I ever experienced as a kid was when my father took me to the Four Corners area, where Utah (where I grew up), Colorado, Arizona and New Mexico join in the only such "cross like" confluence of a quartet of state boundaries. It's a somewhat barren region, though also remarkably scenic in its own almost atavistic way, but what raised my little boy eyebrows was the manifest poverty I saw a number of Native Americans living in throughout the region (the Navajo Nation actually manages the Four Corners Monument). I grew up in the era when most kids' knowledge of "Indians" (as they were regularly called then) came from movie and television westerns, and where even when they were the "bad guys" (which they typically were), they were often adorned in feathered regalia and seemed muscular and well fed. To see an elderly Native American man wrapped in a scraggly blanket, gaunt, malnourished looking and barely conscious due to what I assume must have been heavy alcohol use, was in its own peculiar way a very formative image for me. According to the closing credits, Wind River was filmed in Utah (though it supposedly takes place in Wyoming), and while it's purportedly about a murder investigation which brings a Fish and Wildlife worker named Cory Lambert (Jeremy Renner) and an FBI agent named Jane Banner (Elizabeth Olsen) together in an unlikely alliance to solve the case, there's a lingering subtext of socioeconomic misery which runs through this film and which perhaps unavoidably reminded me of my childhood event. The Native Americans in this film are resolutely proud, but they're also almost inherently defeated in a very real way, feeling themselves trapped not just by the "situation" of their ethnicity, but also due to the very geography in which they live.

Taylor Sheridan provided the screenplays for Sicario and Hell or High Water, but Wind River marks his first "multi hyphenate" outing as both writer and director. Sicario and Hell or High Water each offered rather interesting takes on some quasi-western formulations (perhaps more appropriately southwestern in both of these cases). Wind River continues that developing tradition by offering a somewhat melancholic update on the whole idea of "cowboys vs. Indians", albeit with regard to subtext rather than actual plotting. Wind River begins a bit discursively, with the frightening sight of a barefoot young woman obviously terrified and running across a vast frozen expanse in the middle of the night while a voiceover calmly proclaims the blandishments of a generic "meadow". It's a deliberately disjunctive way to begin the film, which thereafter settles into a more traditional narrative flow, with one notable exception which will be discussed below.

Cory is out and about in his guise as a Fish and Wildlife employee more or less tracking predators who are preying on local livestock. He drops by the home of Native American ex-wife Wilma (Julia Jones), ostensibly to pick up their little boy Casey (Tio Briones) for visitation, but it's immediately apparent that there is something going on with these two that is inherently sad, perhaps even tragic. Wilma's father has reported the death of one of his cattle on his property, and Cory wants to go out to investigate, taking Casey along. The first signs of the underlying sadness of Wind River with regard to Native Americans on their "designated" land comes as Cory drives by a bunch of ramshackle mobile homes (not even double wides), outside of which someone has hung a tattered American flag — upside down.

Cory and his ex-father-in-law quickly determine that a mountain lion is probably to blame for the carnage, and that in fact it is a mother training her cubs how to hunt. Cory decides to set off on a snowmobile to trace the animals' whereabouts, which is when he discovers the frozen and obviously traumatized body of Natalie Hanson (Kelsey Chow), just as obviously the distraught young woman seen in the film's opening scene. The authorities are alerted, which include tribal police chief Ben (the great Graham Greene), as well as young FBI agent Jane Bannon, who arrives spectacularly ill equipped to deal with the frigid weather conditions, after having been summoned from Las Vegas as the closest available investigator. Jane also seems emotionally ill equipped to handle the delicate dance required to deal with tribe members, as evidenced by a really disturbing scene involving Natalie's father Martin (a superb Gil Birmingham) and mother (who is only seen briefly in what is the most disturbing part of this sequence).

The "procedural" elements proceed apace in Wind River, especially once a second corpse is found, but what really propels this film is the characters and relationships. There's a bit of a pat feeling to the predictable denouement involving Cory's sadness, a family tragedy that plays into his desire to bring Natalie's killer or killers to justice, but even with some kind of rote plot formulations, Wind River regularly offers some very forceful emotional content on a whole variety of levels, not the least of which stems from various indignities suffered by assorted Native Americans.

All of this said, the "mystery" at the core of Wind River is never that compelling, and it's potentially ruined one way or the other by a somewhat baffling structural artifice that reveals what led to Natalie's fate right before what is ostensibly the "real" climax of the film. It's an at least partially understandable artifice, but it's almost willfully disruptive, and (for me, anyway) robbed the closing moments of the film of some power. It also presages a completely ludicrous showdown that defies logic (would any potential bad guys really attempt to take out a bevy of local and federal police officers just to protect themselves? — how would that work, anyway?). Perhaps notably, then, these potential misfires are only short speed bumps in what is an often emotionally devastating portrait of loss both personal and communal.

Sheridan ends this film with a couple of text overlays documenting how virtually every demographic group imaginable has a database keeping track of missing persons — with the exception of Native American women. That's certainly a salient piece of information, but it seems almost tangential to a much wider story of (emotional and physical) displacement and sadness that permeates this film. Wind River isn't especially "easy" to sit through, and it contains at least one glaring bit of hyperbole late in its going that defies logic, but it's another extremely compelling piece from Taylor Sheridan. Technical merits are strong, and Wind River comes Highly recommended.

[CSW] -4.3- The screenplay was tight, no wasted dialog, unnecessary characters or gratuitous or overly long scenes. Characters are developed frame by frame and with effective dialog, fun to watch. Very well cast with wonderful performances by all. The cinematography is amazing, capturing a landscape that's beautiful, stark and frightening all at once. Then there's direction. The writer/director Taylor Sheridan wove a story that grabs you in the first 2 minutes and holds you breathless till the final credits roll. Sheridan keeps you in the film, less like you're watching the action remote and safe more like you're right there just out of frame but close enough to feel the tension, feel the dread. An excellent film, somewhere between 4 and 5 stars and when it was over I went back to watch several scenes over again. Excellent and touching.
[V4.5-A4.5] MPEG-4 AVC - No D-Box


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