August 4, 2017 2 min to read

Wind River

Wind River navigates complicated emotional moments with nuance and skill.

by Zach Saul

Wind River is a tough movie to watch. But that’s exactly what director Taylor Sheridan intends; for the viewer to fully bear the weight of the protagonist’s plight. It’s a movie that chooses a more subdued tone to express it’s crescendos and a more dystopian brush to paint the problems that exist on the Wind River reservation. It’s a community stricken hard by grief and grappling with the reality certain inequities will never change. That resentment surfaces when an FBI agent from the city begins investigating a homicide that took place in Wind River. Cory (Jeremy Renner) and Jane (Elizabeth Olsen) spend much of the movie investigating both in their own journey and the victim’s journey what it means to operate outside the law and what might posses a person to adopt a different code of ethics. Wind River is a movie that pretty effectively explains why both our protagonists and villains might behave in ways that are unpleasant for the average viewer to think about. After leaving the theatre I felt Wind River was at it’s best when exploring the differences between how two well intentioned people from different backgrounds approach fear, threat, anger, and confusion.

The culture that exists in Wind River is a nuanced one, full of apathy, wisdom, complacency, beauty, and imprisonment depending on who you ask. Jane (Elizabeth Olsen) acts as a lens to help us “city folk” navigate the grief stricken people of Wind River. Ultimately however it’s Cory who I identified with the most, a cunning, calm, and wise protagonist who manages to stay several steps ahead of his counterparts without verging into preachy-ness or pretentious territory (as characters similar to him often do).

The Good: The movie has a very unique tone, and navigates complicated emotional moments with nuance and skill. The action sequences had me on the edge of my seat in the movie’s final third, and as a whole the mood felt really consistent and well thought out. Even in challenging bits of the film the unpleasant images feel intentional. Jeremy Renner is outstanding, and Cory’s brand of vigilante justice had me silently cheering as the film came to a close.

The Bad: Wind River is definitely slow in the first half. It’s hard to know what to focus on as none of the characters are given much backstory, and Jane’s character in particular is pretty shallow. It’s fair to say that a stronger presence from the villains in this movie would have given a nice context to the action sequences.