Wind River Review and Taylor Sheridan Retrospective to Hell or High Water and Sicario

On the heels of acclaimed films Sicario and Hell of High Water, screenwriter Taylor Sheridan’s latest film (this time he directs as well), Wind River, is a snowy noir that continues to solidify Sheridan’s brand. Despite the admirable placement of female leads in these films, Sheridan’s brand is one of rugged masculinity and a desire to explore different slices of Americana through a fine-tuning of the tropes collected from westerns, police thrillers and noirs. While Hell or High Water is his grandiose neo-Western, Sicario is his police thriller, and Wind River is his inversion of a noir, there’s a relative thinning of the walls between all three genres in these films.

Sheridan displays not just a strong penchant for vividly-painted settings but for arenas where the American dream is in danger of imploding from within. Sicario explores the threat to the integrity of American law enforcement when the pressure from violent cartels forces the good guys to play dirty. Hell or High Water re-frames the housing crisis as the classic American Western all over again with the Western ranch—an image ingrained in American iconography--seen as something under threat not by Injuns but by a loose regulatory system. The social commentary here is that the true “bad guys” are laws and infrastructures that undercut American integrity.

Similarly, Wind River is a fully immersive experience with a haunting sense of place but it’s also underlined by a social message, or at least an attempt of one. As revealed in the closing text scrawl before the credits (and interviews with Sheridan himself), the semi-autonomy of Indian reservations has the unintended side effect of lawlessness because all police below the federal level don’t have jurisdiction. A problem here is that this extremely specific message (more of an observation) is more on deep background than something that’s implicitly known to the viewer (at least this one).

Elizabeth Olsen plays an FBI agent who flies to Wyoming’s Wind River reservation to investigate a dead body found in the middle of the woods. Like a game of Mist, this is a story that’s nicely devoid of any hints. Was it a murder? Who even knows?  She’s extremely unprepared (the natural Hollywood inclination to cast an actress climbing her way up the A-list here doesn’t do this film any favors if it wanted to aim for realism and cast someone who reads at least 25) and relies on a hunter from the National Fish and Wildlife Service (I think?) played by Jeremy Renner and a police chief played by Graham Greene for help.

Through the investigation we see a bleak picture of a place where kids are more likely to get into drugs than go to college, the promise of a bed and warm meal makes jail comforting, and the loneliness of a drill job brings out the worst instincts in men. What’s even more telling is the expression on the faces of the local populance: In particular, Graham Greene and Gil Birmingham (two of only three Hollywood actors of Native American origin I can name offhand. If it threw in Adam Beach, we'd have the trifecta) go about their business with a cynical weariness. The latter is somewhat understandable because, well, he just lost his daughter, and his relationship with Renner’s character is the emotional centerpiece of the movie (and bonus points to the film for not pivoting it to a romance since, again, Olsen looks like she’s 20 and it’s a bit cradle-robbing).

Renner’s backstory is pretty standard (child killed, unsolved mystery, yada yada yada) but he’s a capable lead who fits nicely into the film’s meditative pace. What’s perhaps more interesting is he’s unabashedly Caucasian but identifies with the community because he married into it and has two Indian kids…ok, maybe it’s not that interesting after all (Score one for identity politics? Score one against identity politics? Is there a point in keeping track?).

Like Sicario, the film culminates in a massive release of violence. In that film, it made more sense since the death toll is so immense (at least in the public imagination) along the Rio Grande. In this case, there’s a Mexican stand-off which is a bit jarring. To expect that every single person at that rig would be comfortable not just covering up a murder as well as a rape is a bit much, but this is a film that asks us to believe they’d all casually decide “let’s kill a dozen more people”. Up until this point, it’s a filmic world that really puts a lot of care into realism of violence and the value of a life. The shoot-out gives us a sense that the screenwriter cared very little whether three or five or nine people died in that scene so much as guns were firing and people were falling down. 

On the whole, Wind River is ambitious, beautiful, and highly watchable. Despite a conclusion that left me unsettled (to be honest, Sicario didn’t end satisfyingly for me either), this is another one in the plus column for Taylor Sheridan.