*Half spoilers*
In the opening scene
of Wind River (2017), you’re immediately transported into a
half-told narrative. A battered and bleeding woman is running across an icey,
open tundra, but it’s unclear as to who or what she’s running from. What stuck
with me though was the haggard and relentless sound of the woman breathing as
she moved across the unforgiving landscape. In this way, Wind River is
not much of an action “mystery” after all since from the very start, the
audience should be well aware of where the movie is heading. Spoiler alert:
it’s not very pretty.
This isn’t to say the
movie itself isn’t gorgeous to look at. One of Wind River’s most
enjoyable features is getting to watch the characters traverse the epic Wyoming
landscape, whether it’s FBI Agent Jane Banner struggling through the snow (played
by Elizabeth Olsen) or Cory Lambert rocketing
through it on his Ski-Doo (Jeremy Renner). Both characters are compelling to
watch throughout, but surprisingly Ms. Olsen’s out-of-towner guise seems more
credible than her more veteran counterpart’s. Perhaps this is more
attributable to flawed dialog than Renner’s acting of which unfortunately, there is plenty to be had. The movie is littered with Cory Lambert one liner’s
such as when talking to his son learning to ride a horse, “let her feel you,
let her smell you, let her know you.” At times later in the movie, Lambert’s
more wise dogma may have seemed appropriate, but only if we hadn’t already been
subjected to his five previous pontifications.
Fortunately, where the
dialog occasionally sags, the film’s gut-wrenching action scenes more than pick
up the slack. Taylor Sheridan (writer of Sicario and Hell or High Water) seems
to currently hold the number one spot for masterfully creating sequences that
are simultaneously haunting and suspenseful. In fact, the film’s helter-skelter Peckinpah-esque finale is the complete opposite of a letdown; it’s so much
white-knuckle gun fighting that it almost feels like the single best case for
the movie ever being made in the first place. Sure, there’s still more philosophy
courtesy of Cory Lambert and his face-painted Native-American friend in the
closing scene. But I almost wish there wasn’t. Maybe Sheridan should have taken
a cue from a better movie like There Will Be Blood and ended a
dark movie on a matching dark note.