☆☆☆☆½
It begins in loneliness, isolation and, yes, fear. A solitary figure, it seems to be a woman runs through a hostile and unrelenting landscape, clearly afraid of whatever might be following her. What has she done? What has been done to her?
She collapses, and that's the moment that sets up the story of the bleak but utterly mesmerizing Wind River, which is set on a sprawling Native American reservation in Wyoming. It's an area the size of Rhode Island -- 3,400 square miles with a population of 40,000 people. But this isn't a society filled with cops and CSI investigators and the kinds of crime-fighting characters you see on TV. Writer-director Taylor Sheridan, whose script for Sicario turned that into one of the most aggressive and disturbing crime dramas in a very long time, knows how to turn an stark, uncompromising environment into a backdrop for compelling drama, and very little about the Wind River reservation is anything less than stark and uncompromising.
This is not a film like The Revenant, in which the wilderness was seen as vast, untamable but beautiful, or a standard Western that's set against a backdrop of striking desert vistas, ready to be settled by strong-willed men and women.
Wind River is brutal. "Did you guys get the memo that it's spring?" asks the freezing, shivering FBI agent Jane Banner (Elizabeth Olsen) to a group of local law-enforcement officials who laugh at her joke from somewhere deep within multiple layers of fleece and down. Jane has come from Las Vegas to investigate the murder on the reservation, and she has come alone.
It remains unspoken throughout Wind River, but there within the uncomfortable pauses and knowing looks, there's a clear message: Americans don't care what happens on Indian reservations. Sure, maybe the casinos, but those are way out on the fringes of the territory; what happens deep inside, where people have their lives, is something we don't want to know about.
The most unnerving thing about Wind River isn't the mystery at its core, though that turns out to be pretty unnerving, but the way it lifts a heavy, opaque curtain on a part of American life that most people are quite content to keep hidden. This is a world of desperation, with little access to standard resources, nothing in the way of the kind of daily support we are so used to receiving, and a basic assumption that, you know, they're Native Americans, they like it like this.
Within moments of arriving, Jane is aware that she -- and the couple of law-enforcement agents on the reservation -- is in way over her head. She has no idea where to start. She gets help from a local U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service hunter named Cory Lambert (Jeremy Renner), who works the land to keep predators away from the livestock. He has spent his life looking for tiny clues in the snow and in the woods that other people would overlook.
Cory used to be married to a local woman. They're divorced now, and she's bound and determined to get off the reservation and make something of her life. She's not going to get caught here the way he has been -- trapped not just by the land and its circumstances but by memory: She and Cory used to have a daughter, who was also murdered.
Through sparse dialogue that spends almost no time on words it doesn't need, Wind River becomes increasingly complex. The tribal police chief Ben (Graham Greene) knows a lot of things he wishes he didn't about the desperate lives of the people he protects. The father (Gil Birmingham) of the dead girl does not know how to begin to grieve. He is lost; another bit of his own history has been stripped away from him.
And then there is Natalie (Kelsey Chow) herself, whose story turns out to be nothing at all what we imagine it will be. Wind River is like that, it begins with a lot of correct assumptions about what we think of Indian reservations and the people who live on them, and then it slaps them away -- violently, sometimes, even angrily. But never with righteousness. It turns out Wind River has a lot it wants to say, but writer-director Sheridan makes sure never to lose sight of the striking procedural drama at its core. It's an aching, sad, maybe even bitter film, but it's also one of the best murder-mysteries in a long time.
Its large and convincing cast reflects the vast canvas on which the very personal story plays out, and though the movie has a lot of characters and a lot of story to tell, it's all held together by the two arresting central performances by Renner and Olsen. Wind River uses Renner's sleepy, sad and slightly battered face to its best advantage; Cory is a man who is just on the verge of giving it all up himself.
And Olsen has the kind of strength and clear-eyed intelligence that people say movies don't give women a chance to display. This one does. Olsen is a revelation here, an FBI agent who maybe grew up herself watching Jodie Foster play Clarice Starling and has used that merely as the foundation for her own inspiration. As played by Olsen, Jane is deeply aware of her limitations (early on, she's got one of the best off-handed bits of character exposition in movie history) and of her deep sense of justice and integrity. She does not believe the people she is trying to help are being treated fairly, but she also knows there is little she can do about it except solve the crime and try to help them find some closure. She'll follow the clues where they lead.
And where they lead is nowhere you'd expect. Wind River reaches a thoroughly satisfying, genuinely unexpected climax: bloody, shocking, intense. So much of the rest of the film has been slow and tense, like the buildup to a winter storm. When it hits, it's a whopper. So's this movie.
Viewed Aug. 18, 2017 -- ArcLight Sherman Oaks
1945
She collapses, and that's the moment that sets up the story of the bleak but utterly mesmerizing Wind River, which is set on a sprawling Native American reservation in Wyoming. It's an area the size of Rhode Island -- 3,400 square miles with a population of 40,000 people. But this isn't a society filled with cops and CSI investigators and the kinds of crime-fighting characters you see on TV. Writer-director Taylor Sheridan, whose script for Sicario turned that into one of the most aggressive and disturbing crime dramas in a very long time, knows how to turn an stark, uncompromising environment into a backdrop for compelling drama, and very little about the Wind River reservation is anything less than stark and uncompromising.
This is not a film like The Revenant, in which the wilderness was seen as vast, untamable but beautiful, or a standard Western that's set against a backdrop of striking desert vistas, ready to be settled by strong-willed men and women.
Wind River is brutal. "Did you guys get the memo that it's spring?" asks the freezing, shivering FBI agent Jane Banner (Elizabeth Olsen) to a group of local law-enforcement officials who laugh at her joke from somewhere deep within multiple layers of fleece and down. Jane has come from Las Vegas to investigate the murder on the reservation, and she has come alone.
It remains unspoken throughout Wind River, but there within the uncomfortable pauses and knowing looks, there's a clear message: Americans don't care what happens on Indian reservations. Sure, maybe the casinos, but those are way out on the fringes of the territory; what happens deep inside, where people have their lives, is something we don't want to know about.
The most unnerving thing about Wind River isn't the mystery at its core, though that turns out to be pretty unnerving, but the way it lifts a heavy, opaque curtain on a part of American life that most people are quite content to keep hidden. This is a world of desperation, with little access to standard resources, nothing in the way of the kind of daily support we are so used to receiving, and a basic assumption that, you know, they're Native Americans, they like it like this.
Within moments of arriving, Jane is aware that she -- and the couple of law-enforcement agents on the reservation -- is in way over her head. She has no idea where to start. She gets help from a local U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service hunter named Cory Lambert (Jeremy Renner), who works the land to keep predators away from the livestock. He has spent his life looking for tiny clues in the snow and in the woods that other people would overlook.
Cory used to be married to a local woman. They're divorced now, and she's bound and determined to get off the reservation and make something of her life. She's not going to get caught here the way he has been -- trapped not just by the land and its circumstances but by memory: She and Cory used to have a daughter, who was also murdered.
Through sparse dialogue that spends almost no time on words it doesn't need, Wind River becomes increasingly complex. The tribal police chief Ben (Graham Greene) knows a lot of things he wishes he didn't about the desperate lives of the people he protects. The father (Gil Birmingham) of the dead girl does not know how to begin to grieve. He is lost; another bit of his own history has been stripped away from him.
And then there is Natalie (Kelsey Chow) herself, whose story turns out to be nothing at all what we imagine it will be. Wind River is like that, it begins with a lot of correct assumptions about what we think of Indian reservations and the people who live on them, and then it slaps them away -- violently, sometimes, even angrily. But never with righteousness. It turns out Wind River has a lot it wants to say, but writer-director Sheridan makes sure never to lose sight of the striking procedural drama at its core. It's an aching, sad, maybe even bitter film, but it's also one of the best murder-mysteries in a long time.
Its large and convincing cast reflects the vast canvas on which the very personal story plays out, and though the movie has a lot of characters and a lot of story to tell, it's all held together by the two arresting central performances by Renner and Olsen. Wind River uses Renner's sleepy, sad and slightly battered face to its best advantage; Cory is a man who is just on the verge of giving it all up himself.
And Olsen has the kind of strength and clear-eyed intelligence that people say movies don't give women a chance to display. This one does. Olsen is a revelation here, an FBI agent who maybe grew up herself watching Jodie Foster play Clarice Starling and has used that merely as the foundation for her own inspiration. As played by Olsen, Jane is deeply aware of her limitations (early on, she's got one of the best off-handed bits of character exposition in movie history) and of her deep sense of justice and integrity. She does not believe the people she is trying to help are being treated fairly, but she also knows there is little she can do about it except solve the crime and try to help them find some closure. She'll follow the clues where they lead.
And where they lead is nowhere you'd expect. Wind River reaches a thoroughly satisfying, genuinely unexpected climax: bloody, shocking, intense. So much of the rest of the film has been slow and tense, like the buildup to a winter storm. When it hits, it's a whopper. So's this movie.
Viewed Aug. 18, 2017 -- ArcLight Sherman Oaks
1945
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