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.
