Wind River
“Almost” sounds damning, but when you consider that his writing includes the scripts for “Sicario” and the Academy Award-nominated “Hell or High Water,” it’s certainly not.
As with those films, Sheridan plants us squarely in the middle of a world about which we may have some preconceived notions, but really don’t know at all. This time it’s a Native American reservation in frozen Wyoming, the setting of a violent crime that trains a lens on a tapestry of depression and desperate living. As one character says, this is not the land of back-up. This is the land of you’re-on-your-own.
The film begins with a young woman running through snow in the dark, clearly trying to get away from … what? In the barren tundra, it could be anything.
Then we see Cory Lambert (Jeremy Renner), a U.S. Fish and Wildlife ranger who hunts predators like mountain lions to protect the local herds.
While tracking one day he comes across a body — the frozen corpse of the young woman we saw in the film’s opening. She’s been raped and has a head wound. And Cory knows her — she was a friend of his daughter.
It’s a murder on a reservation, a federal crime, so the F.B.I. is called in, in the person of Jane Banner (Elizabeth Olsen), a rookie so out of place she shows up in a windbreaker. (You’ll be dead in five minutes, Cory patiently explains.)
In a nice touch, Jane doesn’t pretend she knows more than she does. Stationed in Las Vegas, she was simply the nearest agent available. She wants to classify the crime as a murder and bring in a team to solve it.
It doesn’t work out that way, for reasons that are physiological (it has to do with how you die in sub-zero temperatures) and, one suspects, political. Ben, the local police chief, played by the terrific Graham Greene, will help out, but he knows resources are limited.
And the best resource is Cory, who also brings, we learn, a personal interest to the case.
Sheridan avoids clichés — there’s no tacked-on Cory-and-Jane romance, though they begin to trust each other. When Jane asks Cory how well he knows the land, he replies, “Like it was my job.”
And Sheridan doesn’t shy away from the hopelessness of the lives of many people, particularly the young, on the reservation. One young man was a baseball star who had a real shot at playing in college. Now he’s a meth addict, too strung out to do much, but still cognizant of the chance he wasted.
In “Hell or High Water,” Sheridan used a somewhat-traditional Western platform to comment on the cost of the
The mystery at the center of the film, in fact, isn’t particularly compelling; the trail of clues leading to the culprits is straightforward. A scene after the crime proper is solved is more intriguing, and certainly more morally complicated.
But as with all of the films he writes, Sheridan takes us to places that are foreign to many of us, yet immerses us so deeply into the sense of place that everything feels familiar, recognizable. It’s a trip worth taking, making “Wind River” another stop on the unique cinematic travelogue Sheridan is building.