I was offered the opportunity to see Wind River for free in a movie theater after the projector broke down in the theater that was showing Columbus, the movie that I actually wanted to see for the third time. I accepted the refund. I believed that Wind River was a good movie based on word of mouth. I just did not want to see it on the big screen because rape. Because I see too many movies, I am also a little weary of stories with abused women always being set in a cold and barren land. We get it-inhospitable nature, inhospitable to women, but rape occurs in other climates too, filmmakers. I also love Marvel movies, and I unofficially considered this movie as the Avengers without powers trying to get some serious acting credits. At home, streaming with as little effort put into seeing this film as possible was my method of choice.
I did not know until after I saw Wind River that Taylor Sheridan wrote and directed it. It was his second feature film that he directed. Sheridan is best known for writing Sicario, which was amazing, and Hell or High Water, which I was indifferent to seeing until I discovered that all these films are his American frontier trilogy, and I am a completist so I will be seeing the latter soon. Unfortunately he also wrote Sicario: Day of the Soldado, which was dreadful so I may be making a terrible mistake. We will see.
Sheridan claimed that he wrote Wind River to bring attention to the epidemic of rape against Native American girls and women, which is noble. It is a solid film, but a little bit old fashioned. It is like watching Mississippi Burning if you want to learn more about 1960s Civil Rights era—revolutionary at the time for even tackling the issue, but as more equitable representation starts to occur behind the camera, the movies begin to centralize the voices of those people actually experiencing the injustice, not the people investigating it or affected by it. I am not suggesting that Sheridan break the first rule of writing and not write what he knows by writing from a Native American’s perspective if he does not effectively think that he can do so, but it is another story where rape primarily affects men, the fathers, brothers or boyfriends. Our everyman, relatable protagonist is Hawkeye, the white guy who lives with Native Americans, was married to a Native American woman and has Native American children therefore is practically a Native American because that is how it works, which makes it totally ok and not racist when he pulls a Charles Bronson/Clint Eastwood fairly early in the film and blows away a bunch of Native American meth heads because US Fish and Wildlife Service agents can totally do that, right? Oh, while screaming that he is not one of “them.” It is just a scared straight episode on the road to rough justice.
Wind River’s protagonist combines two tropes: white savior and mighty whitey trope. If the latter does not sound familiar, trust me, you already know it. It is Avatar where the human being is a better Na’vi than the Na’vi. Hawkeye follows and teaches others how to do things the Arapaho, not the cowboy way and acts as the protector of the land and Native Americans from predators, human, animal and alien, j/k! He also gets the bonus of an old cop, young cop pairing made popular by infinite Law & Order seasons with and mentoring Scarlet Witch, who plays an inexperienced FBI agent sent to help with an investigation of the brutal death and rape of a Native American woman. Agent Witch is so young that she fits into his daughter’s clothes, which is a good thing because she arrives unprepared for the climate so she becomes a surrogate to remind us constantly of his daughter.
Wind River is ultimately a rape revenge mystery in which one (white) father gets collective revenge on behalf of himself and Native Americans against rapists. The investigation has personal symbolic significance for him. Thankfully the film does manage to briefly make it about the pain and courage of the actual victim, but really it is all about Hawkeye finally getting closure, Agent Witch getting to reveal what a bad ass she is when she has to be and the viewers getting some amazing exponential John Woo standoffs with a satisfying murder mystery story, which apparently equals neo-Western so I suppose that I love neo-Westerns now. I apparently liked them for awhile (No Country for Old Men, Lone Star, Brokeback Mountain and Robert Rodriguez’s films), but I did not know that it was a genre.
I am an unreliable ally because the denouement of Wind River is flames, and I can easily ignore the use of a serious issue exploited as a veneer of respectability and a twist to dress up what is otherwise a pretty standard story. The present standoff is paralleled with the past, and if you believe that certain land is cursed once something bad happens there, this film will confirm your preconceptions. Both confrontations are so effectively tense and cathartic because of great acting, choreography, editing and directing. We finally get to see the victim and her boyfriend, played respectively by Kelsey Chow and The Punisher Jon Bernthal, which adds another added layer of unrelated, but associated pathos to the story. The whole thing is so epic and sensationalized that it becomes ridiculous, but a viewer is unlikely to question it because you will be too busy being invested in who lives and who dies, but more importantly, who dies the most excruciating death. You will want revenge too and forget about the slight technicality that no one seems to care about which laws got violated to get there. It is all rough justice, no court rooms or procedures here.
On a pure action level, Wind River does for Jeremy Renner, what the Avengers never did for Hawkeye. He brandishes shovels, shot guns and the elements. Elizabeth Olsen as the fish out of water FBI agent made what could have been a thankless role into a character whom I was completely invested in. They were complementary and not at odds. Also praise be to Sheridan for not doing the predictable thing and injecting a romantic storyline, which would have completely undermined the gravity of the story and also been the usual pablum of an older man with a younger woman. Say yes to intergenerational, professional relationships and no to He may traffic in tropes, but he does it effectively and knows when to stop. No one is thinking sexy times while investigating a rape.
Trigger warning for people who cannot watch graphic rape scenes and violence, but Wind River is a solid movie, but maybe not as meaningful as it would like to believe. On the other hand, considering how under-represented Native American people, including women, are in films, someone needs to get the ball rolling for Native American stories to get screen time, develop and evolve to eventually get a film with a Native American protagonist and Native American filmmakers.