Hollywood zooms in on Middle America
‘Wind River,’ ‘Detroit’ and ‘Lucky Logan’ tell the here-and-now stories of an underserved audience
Taylor Sheridan sees the cultural divisions in America when he drives his truck into L.A. with Wyoming plates and gets “redneck!” shouted at him, but he also witnesses similar prejudices as a Hollywood filmmaker living out West.
“You write what you know,” says Sheridan, a native of Texas and writer/director of new thriller Wind River (in theaters Friday in New York and Los Angeles, expands nationwide Aug. 18). “I know the West; I’ve met versions of the people I’m writing about. And it’s telling a story that I think matters.
“One of the most fascinating things cinema can do is introduce an audience to a world they didn’t know existed, even though they may have driven through it.”
In today’s politically contentious climate, though, Sheridan and others are taking narratives that reflect Middle America and the common man to cineplexes to give audiences something to chew on after the credits roll. “That’s really what I want to do: create something that asks some real questions,” he says.
Three movies out this month aim to give moviegoers more than just summer escapism:
Wind River stars Jeremy Renner as a wildlife tracker and Elizabeth Olsen as a rookie FBI agent who hunt the murderer of a Native American girl who is left on sacred land in Wyoming.
In Kathryn Bigelow’s Detroit (in select cities now, including New York, Detroit, Chicago, Atlan- ta and Los Angeles, expands nationwide Friday), John Boyega is a security guard who gets embroiled in the unrest of the 1967 riots.
Detroit opened in 20 locations last weekend with an impressive $18,000 per-theater average.
Steven Soderbergh’s heist comedy Logan Lucky (in theaters Aug. 18) centers on two West Virginia brothers (Channing Tatum and Adam Driver) who, tired of being underestimated, scheme to rob the Charlotte Motor Speedway during a big NASCAR race.
Sheridan’s last screenplay, 2016’s Oscar-nominated Hell or
High Water, garnered acclaim with its story of Texas siblings (Chris Pine and Ben Foster) who rob banks to save their rural family ranch, a theme that spoke to “the here and now,” says Jeff Bock, senior box office analyst for Exhibitor Relations. “Films of that nature for the next four or eight years ... are going to be very poignant and pointed.”
Detroit mirrors headlines with its images of 1960s police brutality against African Americans, and Bigelow hopes her film encourages a dialogue among audiences, no matter which side they fall on, “so that we’re not looking at this again, getting another alert on our phone about somebody being pulled over for a faulty tail light and being killed for that.”
Middle America as characters and as cinematic locales in movies is “tremendously underserved and definitely left out of the equation” in Hollywood, says Paul Dergarabedian, senior box office analyst for comScore. Not only is it a huge part of the country, “there’s a lot of great stories to be told.”
Dergarabedian adds: “That audience often feels marginalized, like Hollywood doesn’t care. ... There’s a missed opportunity.”