Rivers run deep in this chilling tale of injustice
With a leading man as rugged as the scenery ...
LAST year’s wonderful Hell Or High Water, superbly written by Taylor Sheridan, practically made an additional character of the sun-scorched plains of west Texas.
Here, in a film Sheridan has directed as well as scripted, the same applies to wintry Wyoming. It is not merely a bleakly beautiful backdrop to a story of rape, murder and the pursuit of justice; there would be no story without it.
An alpha-male, sharp-shooting agent with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Cory Lambert (Jeremy Renner) is separated from his Native American wife (Julia Jones), their marriage evidently undermined by a family tragedy which turns out to have been the disappearance three years earlier of their teenage daughter.
At the end of the film, a caption tells us that there are no missingperson statistics for Native American women, the only U.S. demographic for which this is so.
American society evidently considers them expendable. Sheridan, whose picture in some ways recalls the Coen brothers’ Fargo, could have adapted his title from another Coen film. This stretch of Wyoming is no country for young women.
While Cory is tracking a mountain lion that has been killing livestock on the Wind River Indian Reservation, he discovers the freezing corpse of one of his daughter’s friends, 18-year- old Natalie. She has been savagely and repeatedly raped and either murdered or, almost worse in these parts, left to die in agony in the snow.
A rookie FBI agent called Jane ( Elizabeth Olsen) arrives to investigate. She has been sent by the Bureau’s office in Las Vegas, or maybe by that mysterious FBI training centre that exists only in the movies, at which all female agents are young, slim and gorgeous. In the Sheridan-scripted Sicario, you’ll recall, it was Britain’s own fragrant Emily Blunt in the bulletproof vest.
Never mind. The various implausibilities in this film do not diminish its tremendous watchability, and in particular the lead performance of Renner.
He is not a classically handsome leading man — at best, he looks like Daniel Craig’s much plainer cousin — but he brings real dramatic heft, convincing not just as a rugged outdoorsman who can zoom through fir trees on a snowmobile like James Bond crossed with Father Christmas, but also as a still-grieving parent. There are a couple of heart-rending scenes in which he empathises with the dead girl’s father, nicely played by the Comanche actor Gil Birmingham, who also excelled as Jeff Bridges’ Texas Ranger partner in Hell Or High Water.
With the help of Wind River’s police chief — a lovely, lugubrious turn by Graham Greene — Cory and Jane close in on those responsible for Natalie’s death. An extended flashback, in which another fine actor, Jon Bernthal, gets a brief role as her lover, enables us to get to the truth a little before they do.
That doesn’t matter, since Wind River is not really a thriller in the conventional sense. Rather, it’s an absorbing portrait, seen through the prism of a small human tragedy, of a slice of Americana carved out of historical injustices.
The hard-bitten Indians of Wind River are only there because the white man stuck them there, and it’s an unforgiving place. ‘This isn’t the land of back-up, Jane,’ says the police chief, when she requests reinforcements. ‘This is the land of
you’re- on-your- own.’ It is also a land forged by the climate. ‘Did you people get the memo that it’s spring,’ quips Jane, trudging through the snow.
As we have come to expect from Sheridan, there is plenty of great dialogue. ‘ You don’t catch wolves looking where they might be, you look where they’ve been,’ says Cory, manly resourcefulness emanating from him like vaporised breath.
I don’t suppose we’ll ever see a Wind River 2, but he’s too good a character to leave in the snow.
SPEAKING of snow, when I emerged from a gripping, scary adaptation of Stephen King’s 1986 novel, I actually looked in a shop window to check my hair hadn’t turned white.
If I have a criticism of Andres Muschietti’s impressive horror film, it’s that the scares end up coming so thick and fast that the currency is devalued. By the end I was jumping barely two inches out of my seat. If you’ve read King’s book, or remember the 1990 TV mini- series, you’ll know that the story is set in the fictional New England town of Derry, an idyllic-looking place of the kind Norman Rockwell might have painted — though he’d have left out the terrifying, shape-shifting clown, Pennywise ( horribly well- played by Bill Skarsgard), who lurks in the sewers and lures a young boy, Georgie, to a ghastly fate.
Derry, we learn, has been visited by evil ever since the violent deaths of all 91 original settlers, centuries earlier.
In this version, it’s now 1988 and Derry’s own missing-person statistics are six times the national average. Why the townsfolk aren’t scarpering in their droves, or at least calling for help from the FBI, if not the army, need not detain us. The fact is most of the missing are children, so it is a gang of children who lead the investigation.
Besides, all the adults in town seem to be creeps and weirdos. Derry’s gallery of grotesques makes The League Of Gentlemen’s Royston Vasey look like Milton Keynes.
Our young crew have plenty of headaches even before they start grappling with the demonic Pennywise. One of them is Georgie’s heartbroken older brother (the excellent Jaeden Lieberher), another is Beverly ( Sophia Lillis), the only girl in the group, who is being sexually abused by her father. And all of them are routinely bullied at high school; King never did like to portray the best of small-town America.
What’s so clever about this film, though, is that the horror is counterpointed by an engaging, Stand By Me vibe. These kids don’t just confront evil, they also do the things all kids do; cycling, swimming, playing in the woods, and bantering with genuine wit. They have adolescent crushes, they swear, they seem real. Which in turn lends authenticity to the dreaded Pennywise.
I once went with a friend of mine to see the hypnotist Paul McKenna, who attempted, semisuccessfully, to cure her of her lifelong, morbid fear of clowns. This movie could finish her off.