Wind River

Conor was up this week, and he brought us a recent crime drama directed by Taylor Sheridan, 2017’s Wind River.

As might be inferred from the title, the film takes place in Wyoming’s Wind River Indian Reservation.

Columbia Sportswear paid $500,000 for their products to NOT be featured in this film

As the film begins, we see a young woman running through the snow at night – she’s not apparently being chased, but she’s escaping something.  She falls dramatically into the snow during a voiceover, which can’t be good.  As we’re shown later in the film in a flashback, she was visiting her new boyfriend, one of several security guards at a nearby drilling site when the rest of the security crew got a bit drunk, and things went bad.  Natalie (that’s our victim here) was brutally raped and her boyfriend was beaten to death, which gave her the window to escape, barefoot, into the winter night.

The hammer is my rifle..well, it’s ON my rifle, it strikes the firing pin, which…oh never mind

She made it several miles before succumbing to blood clots in her lungs due to the cold air.  Sometime shortly thereafter, she was found by Cory Lambert (Jeremy Renner, who spends the bulk of the movie doing his best Nathan Fillion) who works as a hunter/tracker for Fish and Wildlife and who had really only hoped on that day to find a livestock-poaching mountain lion.  To give the exposition early again, it turns out that Natalie and Lambert’s daughter had been best friends, and only a few years past Lambert’s daughter died under similar circumstances (though presumably excluding the rape) – she disappeared from a party on a winter night and was found dead in the snow.  It wasn’t in fact related to the case in this movie, nor was it ever suspected to be, and not only does Lambert not know why she died, he isn’t going to find out here.  This isn’t really much of a film for catharsis.

Number 3?  Number 3?  Ma’am, I think your combo meal is ready!

At any rate, the FBI sends in their greenest possible agent Jane Banner (Elizabeth Olsen, whose magical powers apparently include stealing every last bit of acting talent and life sense from her older sisters) to assist, and we go through the typical progression you would expect.

There’s the interview of the parents of the deceased, who obviously aren’t taking it well and whom Banner has no clue how to handle (Lambert of course does – he knows the father well as their daughters were friends).

There’s the autopsy, which confirms the rape, but does not allow the medical examiner to list the cause of death as a homicide, followed by the revelation that the FBI won’t send out any assistance if the cause of death is not listed as such – which necessitates Banner to bring a reluctant Lambert and the local police on in assistance.

There’s the “Chekhov’s Gun” moment of Lambert milling and powdering his own bullets for a high-powered rifle.

There’s a false lead which takes them to the home of some local ne’er-do-gooder druggies (which includes Natalie’s brother, estranged from their parents) which results in a pretty good shootout (which does NOT include Natalie’s brother) even though the ne’er-do-gooders hadn’t actually done anything bad this time around.  Remember, kids!  Don’t throw down on the cops if they’re likely to give you a tongue-lashing and then leave.

And of course, there’s the discovery of Natalie’s boyfriend’s body.

Take THAT, Reservoir Dogs!

This leads the whole crew (sans Lambert, who for some reason is out tracking the mountain lion again) to the drilling site, where the security boys act all suspicious and have guilty knowledge and try to outflank the authorities, leading to a good old Wyoming Standoff.  Banner manages to defuse the situation, only for the security boys to ambush them anyhow.  Security gets the best of the situation (largely because some security dude hiding in a trailer has a fully automatic machine gun…yeah, OK) and Banner, who took a shotgun blast to the vest is the only one left alive by the time Chekhov’s Gun Rule comes into effect. Yes, Lambert, getting himself distracted from bagging his lion and having found some snowmobile tracks (this movie has more snowmobile than any movie I have ever seen) from the boyfriend’s body that lead to the drilling site, has followed those instead, witnessed the shootout, and does his best in picking off what’s left of security with these massive game rounds he made earlier.

Banner is hurt pretty badly (spoiler: she lives) but she sends Lambert off to chase down the last remaining security baddie.  Well, it turns out snowmobile beats dude on foot, and Lambert captures the guy (the actual rapist, it turns out), beats him cold, then takes him up above the treeline where he tells him that he’ll give him a chance to escape in exchange for a confession.  Well, a confession he gets, so Lambert gives the guy the same chance Natalie was given – a barefoot escape through several miles of hostile ground to the nearest road.  Dude makes it a couple of hundred feet and dies of the lung blood clotting thing atop a mountain where he’s not likely to get found.

I knew we were doing Y.M.C.A. tonight, but I didn’t realize we were doing a KISS crossover!

Lambert returns to give the news to Natalie’s grieving father, who sees things looking a bit up as his estranged son has finally called him after several years of silence.  (Sure, it was to ask to be sprung out of jail following that other shootout, but, you know, baby steps.)  The end.

I enjoyed this one a lot – I liked the acting in particular.  If I had to complain (and of course I will) it was that some of the plot elements just didn’t line up.  I wasn’t a big fan of the parallel deaths of Lambert’s daughter and Natalie – we get enough (and more meaningful) parallelism with the death of the rapist, so it felt unnecessary.  And some of the logic didn’t seem to fit.  It wasn’t clear why Natalie would run through the wilderness when there obviously must be a road leading to the drilling site.  I’m not entirely sure why they were unable to track the snowmobile from the boyfriend’s body back to the drilling site when they found it.  I mean, it allowed them to set up Lambert in sniper position but that whole set up feels a bit forced.  And frankly, the motivation of the drilling crew seems pretty suspect.  I mean, not only do we have a really sudden gang rape and murder, but what exactly do you plan to do once you’ve wiped out a half-dozen cops and an FBI agent?  Oh, and where exactly did you get a fully automatic?  Are weapons that have been illegal for like 80 years just standard issue for drilling site security?  But, I guess you need bad guys in a movie like this.  The good guys were really well drawn.  The bad guys?  Not so much.