Wind River is the kind of film that I had heard great things about on Rotten Tomatoes and some other professional film critics that I follow, but I hadn't seen a single trailer for it and I hadn't really had any expectations built up before I went and saw it just a few days after I got back from a month-and-a-half long trip to Spain. It was one of those films that, while I had expected it to be good, I didn't expect to be as blown away by it as I was. I had seen Taylor Sheridan's two other neo-Western films, Sicario and Hell or High Water, both of which I enjoyed, so I knew he was someone capable of putting together a compelling neo-Western, but unlike those films, he was in the director's seat here and he definitely needed to prove himself to be as good of a director as he is a screenwriter. And he definitely did that here. This is easily one of the best directorial debuts I've ever seen.
The film's title comes from the Wind River Indian Reservation in Wyoming, where the entirety of the film is set. It's a bleak, cold, snow-and-ice-covered place, where the only people who live there don't have anywhere else to go and are suffering because of it. One unique exception to this rule is US Fish and Wildlife Service agent and hunter Cory Lambert, a recently divorced man who lives outside the reservation and knows the land better than almost anyone.
One day, while he's out hunting, he happens to come across the frozen corpse of a local teenage girl named Natalie, who had been the best friend of his deceased daughter. Finding her barefoot, in a nightgown, and with a blood stain on her pants over her groin, he decides to call the Feds to find out whether a murder has transpired, and they arrive in the form of rookie FBI agent Jane Banner, who is completely disoriented by the reservation's unspoken rules and deeply embedded culture clashes that she's almost instantly faced with.
Once an autopsy is done on Natalie's body, the medical examiner finds evidence of blunt trauma and sexual violence, but is unable to definitively conclude that the cause of death was murder, as she ultimately died from a pulmonary hemorrhage. Now all but prevented from calling an FBI investigative unit, Banner decides to take matters into her own hands and team up with Lambert to help figure out what exactly happened to Natalie: why was she out in the snow, barefoot and in a nightgown? Did she actually run six miles in the snow or was it something else that got her out there?
What follows from here is not your typical "whodunnit" murder mystery, but rather, it's a thrilling, deeply poignant portrait of what life is like on these reservations. Writer/director Sheridan clearly has spent a considerable amount of time on Indian reservations, as the amount of painstaking detail he put into getting every little thing right in this film is stunning. And rather than just physical detail, he also illustrates the psychological issues that are all-too prevalent on reservations, such as alcoholism and culture clashes that can result in primal behavior that can sometimes result in tragedy.
Many of these psychological issues are really brought home during the films quietest moments, such as the scenes between Lambert and Natalie's grieving father, played in a quietly powerful performance by Gil Birmingham. He and Jeremy Renner (who plays Lambert) bring out the best in each other's performances, as they are both grieved by pain from the loss of their daughters to the point where the stock characters they might represent in a typical neo-Western film (the "cowboy" and the "Indian") are rendered all but meaningless.
Renner, in particular, gives what I think is the best performance of his career in this film, a performance that was equal parts Stoic Leading Man and Grieving Father and Justice-Seeking Gunslinger, but done in a way were he never overplayed any of these types. Elizabeth Olsen (who plays Banner) also continues to prove herself as one of the best actresses working today, being totally believable as the rookie FBI agent in way over her head in this part of the world. And the moments when Renner and Olsen are together, especially one scene toward the end of the film, are really quite powerful and understated and show you the natural chemistry that the two of them seem to have together.
But while there are plenty of those quiet moments and subtle commentary about the contemporary Native American struggle on these reservations, Wind River is still very much a thriller -- a slow-burn thriller, but still a thriller with gun battles and one flashback sequence in a trailer that is one of the most intense sequences I've seen in a long time. In many films like this, the director will fill it to the brim with gunfire to the point where you become numb to it, but Sheridan smartly parcels these scenes out so that, when they come, they're all the more powerful and intense.
One of the many things I've wanted to do in recent years is go back and watch old classic Western films. It's not a genre I'm very familiar with, even though I do know many of the stereotypes thanks to other things I have seen. But after watching this film and Sheridan's two other films, I definitely feel like I've seen three great Western films put in a contemporary context. And Wind River in particular, exposed me to a part of the country that I didn't know very much about prior to seeing it, and it painted it in a way that equal parts interesting, respectful, and deeply poignant. This is easily one of the best movies of the year, and it might even be one of the best movies of the last decade. It just went into wide release this weekend, so please go see and support this film. It is truly a masterpiece of filmmaking.
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