With back-to-back screenwriting successes like Sicario and Hell or High Water, it’s no wonder Taylor Sheridan would finally get a shot at directing one of his own screenplays. Wind River, his directorial debut, is a disappointing return on that investment. The film is a brooding murder mystery set in the Winter Wastelands of Wyoming, where a professional hunter, Cory (Jeremy Renner), finds a local girl dead in the snow. The FBI sends a fresh, out-of-touch and shockingly un-empathetic agent, Jane (Elizabeth Olsen), to cover the case. The young girl is a member of a local Native American family, and a former friend of Cory’s daughter who died years before under similar circumstances. For obvious reasons, Cory finds himself helping the clueless Jane, both toward understanding the harsh, unforgiving climate of the town and the underlying tensions in the area between bored, predatorial whites and the helpless indigenous. Taylor Sheridan directs this movie like a screenwriter, and more over, this is one of his weakest screenplays. Renner is fine enough in this film, all low-energy, sobering regret, but Cory as a character proves to be not only a white savior for Native Americans in the area, but also a know-all male in the face of Elizabeth Olsen’s hopeless FBI agent. Sheridan sprinkles in a little of Jonathan Demme’s The Silence of the Lambs in his more suspenseful sequences, but Sheridan doesn’t seem to truly fathom Lambs‘s still-relevant gender politics. One could argue with the concept of Elizabeth Olsen and her character even being in the movie at all. Sheridan is too talented, I think, to totally dismiss, but Wind River continues a trend of his: putting female characters in position of power without any of the agency or knowhow to exploit it. It’s not a good look.

 

Written and Directed by Taylor Sheridan