Yet there was something about her performance that didn’t hit the mark she strained to hit the emotional notes that the actors beside her managed with ease and subtlety. Her character is written as being out of her depth, an outsider to this world who stumbles around, but has good intentions. Corey is an outsider to both the land he stalks, and the comfort and community he can’t quite grasp.Įlizabeth Olsen is one of the few frustrating parts of this film I don’t know whether it speaks about her ability and range, or if Sheridan failed in bringing out the best in his actors. Yet it’s not entirely grim or foreign even with storms and heartache raging, the Hanson home on the reserve is like any other middle class home - pictures on the wall of the family, a relative haven of comfort and normalcy. There is something haunting about the landscape, the “snow and silence the only things that haven’t been taken” from the people of Wind River. While Hollywood definitely needs to open up to more authentic Indigenous stories, for what it is, Wind River treats its subject matter in a way that doesn’t seem exploitative. There is something to the idea too, that things might have gone off the rails and been even more problematic had Taylor Sheridan written this story trying to presume the perspective of a Native main character. I don’t think the idea that it could be worse is any comfort - but 10 years ago, Jeremy Renner would have been playing a Native character. As one character remarks to Corey after he slips and uses “we” when relating to the struggles of the reserve - “The only thing Indian about you is your ex-wife, and a daughter you couldn’t protect.” Early drafts played with the idea, but when it came to the screen, there was at least a self-awareness of the choice made. I think that Taylor Sheridan was keenly aware of Hollywood’s and the Western genre’s propensity for “white saviour” stories. Even the murdered woman the plot revolves around, Natalie Hanson, is played by non-Native actress Kelsey Chow. Tribal Police Chief Ben (Graham Greene) and grieving father Martin Hanson (Gil Birmingham) are the only Native actors and characters to get any real amount of screen time. There has been a lot of controversy regarding the casting of this film, and that a story so rooted in the Native American experience and history has two white leads. The film follows a murder investigation on the Wind River Indian Reservation by Fish and Game tracker Corey Lambert (Jeremy Renner) - a man haunted by the loss of his own daughter - and rookie FBI agent Jane Banner (Elizabeth Olsen). You won’t find many dynamic shots or creative blocking - but in a way, the simplicity fits the Western-noir tone of the film, and also gives room for the script and themes to breathe. It’s also the first he’s directed, which is evident stylistically in the lean approach he takes to what is shown on screen. In Wind River, Birmingham delivers a quietly devastating performance as the dead girl’s father.Wind River is an engrossing (yet not perfect) thriller, and the third in the trilogy of modern Western films written by Taylor Sheridan after Sicario and Hell or High Water. You could imagine a younger version of Hell or High Water’s Jeff Bridges in the Lambert role but another actor from that movie makes it to this one: Gil Birmingham, who played junior partner to Bridges’ senior and retiring Texas Ranger. He’s a taciturn wildlife officer and experienced woodsman, who works as a hunter eliminating predator animals deemed a threat to local residents and their livestock. The fleeing girl was Natalie (Kelsey Asbille) an 18-year-old Native American living on the Wind River Indian Reservation, where her frozen body was found by Cory Lambert (Jeremy Renner). The intense winter frost is never far from anybody’s mind here, especially when it hits smack dab into the deep freeze of bureaucracy and cross-cultural hostilities. Cinematographer Ben Richardson invests it with a look of savage grace, just as he did for the waterlogged hinterland of Beasts of the Southern Wild. It’s the reverse this time, in a movie set in a place that’s considered the most remote territory of the United States. Sheridan was the pen behind last year’s Oscar-nominated Hell or High Water, a bank-heist western where the extremes of man exceeded that of nature. Thus begins the deceptively simply detective thriller Wind River, an auspicious directorial debut for writer/director Taylor Sheridan that premiered at Sundance earlier this year. The night chill is cold enough to burst lungs, making her final gasps all the more painful. 18AĪ bloodied and barefoot young woman runs in mortal terror across a snowy Wyoming wilderness that resembles a lunar landscape. Starring Elizabeth Olsen, Jeremy Renner, Graham Greene, Gil Birmingham, Tantoo Cardinal, Kelsey Asbille and Jon Bernthal.
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