“Sometimes I get so mad I just wanna fight the whole world, you understand?”
“Yeah, I do. But I fight the feeling. I figured the world would win.”
In Wind River, US Fish and Wildlife Service agent Cory Lambert (Jeremy Renner) is hunting mountain lions that have killed various amounts of livestock throughout the Wind River Indian Reservation. During his hunt, he comes across the body of a young indigenous woman named Natalie, a friend of his late daughter’s. After being declared a homicide by young FBI agent Jane Banner (Elizabeth Olsen), she and Lambert partner up to solve the young woman’s murder.
Director Taylor Sheridan’s third entry in his “Modern American Frontier trilogy (along with 2015’s Sicario and 2016’s Hell or High Water, both of which Sheridan wrote) Wind River is yet another gritty, realistic take on current sociopolitical issues in the West that affect downtrodden people that have been cast aside. This describes perhaps no group as well as it does North America’s Indigenous, Native people. The film serves as a glimpse into life on the reservation, or “Rez Life”, for natives and what their abandonment and isolation has done to both their lives and their psyche. The events that unfold on screen, from Natalie’s death, to that of Lambert’s daughter Emily, mirrors the real life plight of Indigenous women. The movie closes with the factoid that missing Indigenous women are not kept track of statistically, so it is unknown exactly how many are missing. 1 in 3 Indigenous women will be sexually assaulted in their lifetimes, with 85% of the perpetrators being non-Native men. Then you have Canada’s infamous “Highway of Tears,” a remote section of Highway 16 in western Canada where countless women, mostly Indigenous, have either gone missing or turned up murdered since 1969, and their fates unsolved or unknown due to Royal Canadian Mounted Police neglecting to take the issue seriously until the publicity of what was happening became too much to bear. The pain of being discarded from the rest of society, your pain and condition ignored, is the central theme of the film and is something that I was happy to see finally explored on screen in a major film release. The Indigenous experience in total is on display, not only from the mistreatment of Native women, but in how the men on the reservation feel despondent and hopeless. As Hollywood is pressured to diversify the tales it tells and reacts in kind, it is easy to focus on groups that are usually at the forefront of these debates and forget groups that are even more marginalized and ignored. Wind River highlights and examines the struggles of a segment of former colonial societies that we perhaps owe the most to.
While Wind River does touch upon the plight of Indigenous people, I would be remiss if I did not point out that the two leads of the film are white. Olsen’s Banner being white makes sense in the framework of the story and while Renner’s Lambert is given a backstory that makes his presence and acceptance among the reservation’s Native population plausible, I did wonder what the movie would have been like if a Native actor had been given a chance to act in his stead. Lambert was integrated enough into the environment that I didn’t get a lot of “white savior” vibes until the final, climactic scene but, I do understand it a bit if some viewers draw that conclusion about the character.
Wind River stands as the latest example of Sheridan’s skill at immersing the viewer within the culture of regions and people that they might not encounter on a regular basis, if at all. Much like in Hell or High Water, while watching this film, I felt as if I were right there in remote, rural Wyoming surrounded by those people who snowstorms, and mountains, and livestock are all they know. Getting those viewers from backgrounds and locales to totally relate to foreign environments and cultures and feel as if they’ve taken a trip to the heart of these unfamiliar places is not easy and Sheridan has now shown that he has full control over the ability to do so. Sheridan also superbly handles the reveal of what happened to Natalie through a flashback sandwiched in-between the final confrontation the authorities have with her attackers. The way the two scenes are edited together is an excellent piece of film-making that both deftly explains and creates an intense emotional response. We are not introduced to the villains of the film until it’s almost over. But once we are, the extent of their evil is made so plain that in ten minutes, you already despise them and root for their demise. In a summer movie slate featuring some pretty good villains, the ones in Wind River are perhaps the most hated that I watched on screen this season. Getting that reaction out of a viewer in such a short amount of time is a testament to Sheridan’s writing and directing, even if it does feature some hard to watch imagery.
Wind River is a good, murder mystery that slowly builds tension and explodes with a satisfying reveal, while also containing enough heart and to make the viewer emotionally invested in a theme that explores a real, serious sociological issue. While at times it is far from an easy watch, it is definitely worth any moviegoers time and those that are concerned about the treatment of Indigenous people.
Image: The Weinstein Company
