Wind River (2017)
“You didn’t see it?! You didn’t see it.”
Wind River, staring Jeremy Renner and Elizabeth Olsen, is the conclusion of Taylor Sheridan’s New American Frontier trilogy (alongside Sicario and Hell or High Water). Sheridan made his directorial debut with this movie, and though parts of it are over simplistic and expository, it’s still a really interesting film. It addresses the crisis of Missing & Murdered Indigenous Women (MMIW) by setting the story around the death of a beloved young woman on the Wyoming reservation of Wind River. The story steps away from a typical ‘who dunnit’ plot and instead focuses on the systemic roadblocks that enable both violence and unsolved cases. Gil Birmingham returns to play a grieving father, and veteran actor Graham Greene plays head of the tribal police with the imposible task of patrolling a massive territory with next to no support.
As moving and surprising as this movie is (holy shit, that shoot out), it still makes the age old mistake of centering men grieving female trauma (isntead of the women themselves), and is clearly directed at non-indigenous audiences. I wish that the story had given the indigenous characters more angency — Jeremy Renner’s character is a little white-saviour-y and Elizabeth Olsen’s fish-out-of-water character arc takes priority over others. I also wish they’d explored more of the environmental themes. Renner is the only character who seems at peace with the harsh landscape, but indigenous people have always been at the forefront of defending land from paramilitary corporate encroachment.
Despite those issues, if this movie prompts you to learn more about the MMIW as well as the truth & reconciliation movement (as well as the government’s continued inaction/retaliation), then I’m sincerely glad you learned something.
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