Taylor Sheridan’s Wind River opens on a body in the snow. The victim is 18-year-old Natalie Hanson, of the Northern Arapaho tribe, found frozen on the Wind River Indian Reservation in Wyoming. The man who finds her is Cory Lambert, a tracker for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. He knows the ground, the cold, and what the cold does to a person. What he does not know, yet, is who left her there.
Trailer, via VVS Films.
Renner and Olsen Carry the Case
Jeremy Renner plays Lambert. Elizabeth Olsen plays Jane Banner, the FBI agent sent to investigate a possible homicide. She arrives without a coat made for the weather and without the authority to call in more help. The reservation is not hers, the case is not officially a murder, and the Bureau’s interest in it is thin.
That gap is the film’s engine. Banner cannot get additional help from her supervisors because the medical examiner refuses to classify Natalie’s death as a homicide. An autopsy shows blunt trauma and rape. It also confirms Lambert’s deduction that Natalie died from pulmonary hemorrhage caused by inhaling subzero air.
Sheridan wrote and directed Wind River, his third film about the modern American West. It runs 107 minutes. It premiered at Sundance in 2017 and opened in the United States on August 4, 2017. The Weinstein Company released it in theaters; in October 2017, after reporting on numerous sexual abuse allegations against Harvey Weinstein, Lionsgate acquired the home media rights.
Martin Hanson Gives Up a Name
Natalie’s father, Martin, played by Gil Birmingham, tells Banner his daughter had been dating a new boyfriend whose name he did not know. Natalie’s brother Chip gives Lambert the name: Matt Rayburn, a security guard at a nearby oil-drilling site. Jon Bernthal plays Rayburn.
Lambert and Banner find Matt’s naked, mutilated body in the snow. Whatever happened on that reservation happened to two young people, not one.
Banner goes to the drilling site with tribal police chief Ben Shoyo, played by Graham Greene, and other officers. Curtis, the security supervisor, and several guards meet them. The guards say Matt left a few days earlier after an argument with Natalie. Then one guard mentions he heard Natalie’s body had been found. Banner points out that Natalie’s name had not been released to the public. The guards say they got it from a police scanner.
One of Banner’s team sees the guards slowly surrounding them and draws his weapon. The standoff escalates fast. Banner defuses it.
The Night in Matt Rayburn’s Trailer
A flashback shows the night itself. Matt’s drunken colleagues barge into his trailer while he is in bed with Natalie. Matt is provoked. The film does not stage the attack as a mystery. It stages it as a thing that happened to a girl whose name was not released to the public.
Sheridan has said he wrote Wind River to raise awareness of the high number of Indigenous women who are raped and murdered, both on and off reservations. That statement is the film’s spine. It is also the part the film handles least well.
The story is built around two white investigators and a dead Native woman. Graham Greene’s Ben Shoyo and Tantoo Cardinal’s Alice Crowheart are the Native characters with the most presence, and both are working in support of Lambert and Banner’s case. Kelsey Asbille plays Natalie, who exists in the film mostly as a body in the snow and a flashback. The film names the problem and then builds its plot around the people who are not the problem’s victims.
That is a real limit. It is not a fatal one, because the film is honest about the machinery that lets these cases go unsolved: no examiner willing to call it a homicide, no Bureau resources, no jurisdiction, no one to notice. Wind River is a crime film about a system that declines to classify a crime.
Emily Lambert and the Unsolved Three Years
Lambert tells Banner that his 16-year-old daughter Emily, Natalie’s best friend, died in a similar manner three years earlier. That case is still unsolved. Julia Jones plays Wilma Lambert. Teo Briones plays Casey Lambert. The film lets Renner carry that weight quietly, and he does. This is the best work of his career in a serious register, and Olsen is nearly as good with less to do.
The tagline is “Nothing is harder to track than the truth,” and Sheridan means it literally: the tracking is the solving. Lambert reads snow the way other detectives read files. The film’s tension sits in the search, not in a courtroom, and it holds because the film has spent its runtime teaching you how to read the ground.
What Wind River Gets Right and Wrong
Wind River is a lean, cold, well-made thriller with a genuine point and an incomplete argument. The performances are excellent. The standoff at the drilling site is the best sequence Sheridan has written. The film’s anger about missing and murdered Indigenous women is real, and it is also filtered through two white leads, which is a choice the film never interrogates.
The numbers: 107 minutes. $45 million grossed against an $11 million budget. A 2017 Sundance premiere and an August 4, 2017 U.S. release. Metacritic 73 out of 100.
That the film made $45 million on an $11 million budget is the fact worth sitting with. Wind River was a box office success, which means the audience for a story about a murdered Arapaho teenager was there. The film’s failure is not that it went unseen. It is that Sheridan had the platform and spent it on Lambert’s grief instead of Natalie’s life.
Wind River earns its reputation as one of the better crime films of 2017. It does not earn the bigger claim it reaches for. Watch it for the tracking, the standoff, and Renner. Notice what the film does with the girl in the snow, and notice how little time it gives her.
Wind River: 7.3 of 10
Numbers Behind the Film
- Title: Wind River
- Year: 2017
- Director and writer: Taylor Sheridan
- Runtime: 107 minutes
- Genres: Crime, Mystery, Thriller
- Lead cast: Jeremy Renner (Cory Lambert), Elizabeth Olsen (Jane Banner)
- Supporting cast: Gil Birmingham, Graham Greene, Jon Bernthal, Kelsey Asbille, Teo Briones, Tantoo Cardinal, Matthew Del Negro, Hugh Dillon, Julia Jones, James Jordan
- Premiere: 2017 Sundance Film Festival
- U.S. release: August 4, 2017
- Budget: $11 million
- Gross: $45 million
- Metacritic: 73/100
- Clay Tribune score: 7.3/10
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