Wind River (Part I) (2017)

January 21, 2017 (Sundance Film Festival), August 4, 2017 (United States), release dates

Directed by Taylor Sheridan

Screenplay by Taylor Sheridan

Music by Nick Cave, Warren Ellis

Edited by Gary D. Roach

Cinematography by Ben Richardson

Jeremy Renner as Cory Lambert

Julia Jones as Wilma Lambert

Teo Briones as Casey Lambert

Graham Greene as Ben Shoyo

Elizabeth Olsen as Jane Banner

Gil Birmingham as Martin Hanson, Natalie’s father

Kelsey Chow as Natalie Hanson

Jon Bernthal as Matt Rayburn

Martin Sensmeier as Chip Hanson, Natalie’s brother

Tyler Laracca as Frank Walker

Gerald Tokala Clifford as Sam Littlefeather

James Jordan as Pete Mickens

Eric Lange as Dr. Whitehurst

Ian Bohen as Evan, deputy officer

Hugh Dillon as Curtis

Matthew Del Negro as Dillon

Tantoo Cardinal as Alice Crowheart, Wilma’s mother

Apesanahkwat as Dan Crowheart, Wilma’s father

Althea Sam as Annie Hanson, Natalie’s mother

Distributed by Acacia Entertainment

Produced by Tunica-Biloxi Tribe of Louisiana, Savvy Media Holding, Thunder Road Pictures, Film 44

Wind River opens with the words INSPIRED BY ACTUAL EVENTS, which fade away to a black screen, and then viewers hear a woman’ voice-over reciting two and a half stanzas of a poem:

There’s a meadow in my perfect world

where wind dances the branches of a tree

casting leopard spots of light across the face of a pond.

The tree stands tall and grand and alone,

shading the world beneath it.

. . . It is here, in the cradle of all I hold dear,

I guard every memory of you.

And when I find myself frozen in the mind of the real—

far from your loving eyes, I will return to this place,

close mine, and take solace in the simple perfection

of knowing you.

Before reaching the end of the last line of the first stanza, the black screen lightens to show a woman sobbing and running across a snow-covered field. She stumbles and falls, and the last shot of the sequence is one from a distance: She continues running and crying.

My post title mentions that this post is Part I, and that’s because I intend to devote a second post to the poem and to the writing in Wind River. This post focuses more on the noir details of Wind River: grief, vengeance, murder, fate, violence, betrayal. Viewers learn that Emily Lambert, the daughter of one of the main characters, is the author of the poem, but I’m guessing that means Taylor Sheridan, the writer and director of the film, or someone he knows is the author.

Cory Lambert, a Fish and Wildlife Service agent, finds the woman’s dead body frozen in the snowy wilderness of the Wind River reservation. Because murder is suspected, and because it was committed on federal and tribal land, an FBI agent, Jane Banner, is called in to help the investigation. The film follows their joint investigation into the circumstances behind the young woman’s death.

(This blog post about Wind River contains spoilers.)

Cory Lambert leads FBI agent Jane Banner to the location where he found the woman’s body. Here is part of their conversation, in which Cory describes how the woman died:

• Cory Lambert: “Now it gets 20 below here at night so if you fill your lungs up with that cold air when you’re running, you could freeze ’em up. Your lungs fill up with blood, you start coughing it up. So wherever she came from, . . . she ran all the way here. Her lungs burst here. And she curled up in that tree line and drowned in her own blood.”

• Jane Banner: “Well, how far do you think someone could run barefoot out here?”

• Cory Lambert: “Oh, I don’t know, I . . . . How do you gauge someone’s will to live? Especially in these conditions. But I knew that girl. She’s a fighter. So no matter how far you think she ran, I can guarantee you she ran further. . . .”

This conversation near the start of the film helps to introduce many details about the plot, and it also demonstrates the power of the landscape for this particular story. The landscape, the snow, and the cold are important details: They are powerful forces that can destroy, but they also provide guidance in the form of clues to help solve the mystery.

Everything about this film—the landscape, the weather, the soundtrack—contributes to the grief felt by the characters and to the sense of alienation. Most of Wind River takes place outside, in the grand landscape of the West, but the grandeur accentuates the alienation and loneliness of several of the main characters. The many shots of the expansive wilderness in winter make the humans seem small and inconsequential in comparison, even though their stories are full of heartbreak. The music on the soundtrack is especially effective in Wind River. It adds to the mood of tension and mystery, and it sometimes includes lines from the poem I mentioned at the beginning of the post. Muted color is used throughout the film, and it also accentuates the somber story.

There is only one flashback, but the way it is used and its placement late in the film make it very unsettling. The point where the flashback is inserted heightens its intended effect because viewers are not prepared for it. They are not expecting a flashback precisely because none have been used so far. The content of the entire flashback sequence shows the events immediately preceding Natalie’s run across the snow-covered field, and they are marred by violence and tragedy.

Fate certainly plays a large role for the female victims of the film. It plunks them into situations they never asked for and emphatically don’t want. The people who love them are set on a trajectory trying to cope with their respective losses as best they can. The threat of violence becomes more pronounced as the movie progresses, and the flashback showing the violent events preceding Natalie’s death is thus incredibly dramatic because of its content and because of its placement.

The film is about justice and vengeance. The boundaries between “good” characters and “evil” characters seem clear, but several characters on all sides are looking for justice in the form of vengeance, and vengeance is a central theme.

Wind River has been called a neo-Western (Wikipedia is one example), and I will not quibble with categorizing it as such. But I would also put the film in the category of neo-noir. As I have written in this blog before, I’m happy putting any film into more than one category. No matter what category you choose for Wind River, it is a powerful film, not easy at all on viewers. In fact, the violence against women that is presented so powerfully in one particular sequence, in the flashback, might upset survivors of assault.

But viewers can skip through the flashback and still understand the powerful message of Wind River. It’s worth seeing. There’s not a whole lot of dialogue in many sequences, and the visuals are full of clues about the characters’ travails and about Natalie’s death at the start of the film. In fact, Wind River is worth seeing more than once because of its complexity and the joy of seeing more and more details with each viewing.