Because there are so few of them, any movies about Americans living east of Los Angeles and west of Chicago will nowadays be labeled “important” on first sight. Taylor Sheridan, who grew up on a Texas ranch and moved to Wyoming after 20 years of intermittently rewarding acting work in L.A., has more of a claim than most in Hollywood to being able to tell stories about flyover country. With Wind River, his latest screenplay and his directorial debut, nobody can fault Sheridan’s motivation—a desire to upend stereotypical portrayals of Native Americans on film and bring attention to underreported statistics about violence against Native American women. But he tries too hard to make his movie say something significant.
Sheridan has a gift for crafting compelling scenarios out of places with personality and characters who have been sketched out just enough to get you to root for (or against) them. In Wind River, he’s trained his eye on the eponymous Indian reservation in Wyoming, where game tracker Cory Lambert (Jeremy Renner) discovers the barefoot body of Natalie (Kelsey Asbille), a young Native American woman several hours dead in the snow. (The film’s distributors have chosen to release this dead-of-winter tale in the middle of summer as an effective bit of counterprogramming.) Noticing that the body shows signs of sexual assault, the tribal police chief calls in a female FBI agent, Jane Banner (Elizabeth Olsen), to aid an investigation that would otherwise have been carried out by an all-male team.
The movie tries to get a lot of mileage—perhaps too much—out of Jane’s relative unfamiliarity with the day-to-day lives and habits of the Native Americans on the reservation, to say nothing of the cold and unforgiving climate. Even though Jane is a bit of a formulaic character—a fish-out-of-water type, a proud Floridian shivering in the snow—Olsen brings to the role just enough grit and empathy that we never doubt her as a fed.
Renner is given more to work with, as the story orbits around Cory and his reasons for agreeing to help Jane investigate the murder. We learn twice over that Cory is still recovering from the loss of his own daughter several years earlier: once from the words Sheridan puts in his mouth and more powerfully from the wince perpetually stretched across Renner’s rugged face. Renner and Olsen have great screen chemistry—and, mercifully, Sheridan doesn’t try to foist a romantic subplot on them.
For about an hour and 10 minutes, Wind River proceeds as a standard procedural. Jane gathers information about Natalie and her possible abusers, growing frustrated when legal technicalities get in the way (the town coroner can’t declare the case a homicide because, to speak with medical precision, Natalie died of natural causes when her lungs filled up with too much subzero air). Meanwhile, Cory circles the periphery of the investigation like a hawk, scouting for clues and danger. There’s a shootout or two and just enough cutaways of the Wyoming mountainside (the film was shot on location in Utah, but we’ll let it slide) to instill in us a sense of how the vastness of this place can paradoxically create its own kind of claustrophobia. Just as Jane and her crew are narrowing in on their prime suspect, Sheridan tosses in an unforeseeable twist that both allows the dead Natalie to tell a bit of her own story and also introduces the most gratuitously upsetting scene in a film not lacking for grisly images; let the viewer beware.
By the film’s final half-hour, I found myself thoroughly gripped by the story—but in spite of the storytelling, not because of it. Sheridan seems to have learned well from Denis Villeneuve and David Mackenzie, the directors who turned his last two scripts (Sicario and Hell or High Water, respectively) into intense cinematic experiences, but he has a ways to go before he catches up with them: There are many more needlessly obfuscating cuts than there are clever or enlightening ones, a telltale sign that Sheridan has more to learn about planning and blocking scenes.
A bigger problem, though, is Sheridan’s on-the-nose dialogue. This isn’t a new feature of his writing (by now it’s almost a cute quirk of his screenplays that his characters tend to talk in portentous, morally serious dictums), but it is especially glaring in Wind River, where most of the characters saddled with reading these lines are Native American actors and actresses channeling a white guy’s overzealous interpretation of their lives. Sheridan’s intentions were admirably humble: “I didn’t know if I could make a good movie,” he told Rolling Stone. “But I knew I could make a respectful one.” Yet he frequently fumbles the execution by relying too much on linguistically and culturally inappropriate dialogue that clashes with his desire for slice-of-life realism.
Contrast Sheridan’s film with Chloé Zhao’s overlooked 2015 gem Songs My Brothers Taught Me, shot on location in South Dakota with Lakota Sioux non-actors. In Zhao’s film, you’re never broken out of the spell of her intensely physical filmmaking by dialogue that doesn’t ring true to the lives depicted onscreen. The realism in Zhao’s film is, of course, partly a product of the shoestring budget that necessitated it; the comparative luxury of Sheridan’s larger budget means the onus was on him to recognize when he should have turned the story over to people who knew better how to tell it.
Fortunately, Sheridan cast two actors whose presence gives us a glimpse of what a truly great version of Wind River might have looked like. I found myself most moved by the story when Sheridan turned it over to Graham Greene and Gil Birmingham, both of whom have aboriginal ancestry. To the role of the tribal police chief, Greene brings a layer of sharp wit and irreverent body language that barely conceals exasperation with both the FBI and the reservation’s many lawbreaking youngsters. In his two brief scenes, Birmingham, playing the murdered girl’s father, switches believably from a default catatonic posture to unguarded paroxysms of grief. Each actor’s presence in the film speaks more to the collective hopes, frustrations, and despairs of the Native Americans at Wind River than any clichéd line of Sheridan’s overeager script. The movie that’s happening silently on the margins of Sheridan’s film is the one that leaves the most lasting impression.
Tim Markatos is a writer living in Washington, D.C.
