After exploring drug-related violence along the US/Mexico border in Sicario, and examining bank robberies in economically destroyed West Texas in Hell Or High Water, Taylor Sheridan completes his trilogy of neo-Westerns with Wind River. Again addressing oft-ignored communities and territories in America, Wind River explores a murder that occurs on a Wyoming Native American reservation, and the struggles facing the people there.
Jeremy Renner plays Corey Lambert, a white man who was previously married to an indigenous woman until a tragedy tore their lives and marriage apart. Corey’s straddling identity allows him to help out FBI agent Jane Banner (Elizabeth Olsen), and navigate the physical and cultural terrain when a young indigenous woman is found raped and murdered on the reservation.
Sheridan’s screenplay touches on the huge difficulties facing indigenous communities. With little governmental protection or benefits, poverty and poor education leads many teenagers to drugs and degeneracy, while sexual violence against indigenous women by outsiders is rampant. There’s also the physical hardship of living in isolated and unforgiving regions. Sheridan, shooting in Utah, captures the penetrating cold of the ice-covered mountains, as his characters shiver in the face of the oppressive snow and the cold-blooded violence at the heart of their investigation.
Sheridan’s interest in taciturn masculinity and the motives of men on both sides of the law emerges again in Wind River. Renner’s tortured stoicism is affecting and contrasts with Olsen’s youthful naiveté – though the casting of two white characters as saviour-types is questionable.
The thin procedural plotting of Wind River unfurls rather anti-climactically, proving less enthralling than his previous films. But Sheridan has proven that he has a unique perspective on America and an ability to tell the untold stories. We should all be listening.