Editor’s Note: Wind River opens in wide theatrical release today, August 11, 2017.
The “white savior” narrative gets a remarkable workout in writer-director Taylor Sheridan’s Wind River, a surprisingly shallow, generic mystery-thriller set on a Native American reservation. An unfortunate cross between Thunderheart and Mississippi Burning, Wind River tries valiantly to tackle serious, weighty issues about the treatment of Native Americans, everything from benign neglect to outright, violent hostility, colonialism and imperialism, but repeatedly fails, not through a lack of talent or skill (Sheridan wrote, but didn’t direct, Sicario and last year’s Oscar-nominated Hell or High Water, films that combined thematic depth with narrative complexity), but through a lack or failure of nerve likely the result of the commercial compromise needed to obtain funding for Wind River. Otherwise, it’s difficult, if not impossible, to explain why Sheridan would deliver a surface-deep “white man knows best” narrative that turns most of its Native American characters into background, bit players in the lead character’s redemption tour through the icy, isolated wastes of a Native American reservation in Wyoming.
Wind River’s combination of conventional plotting and the white savior narrative results in a sense or feeling that Sheridan has done a major disservice to the supposed Native American story he apparently wanted to tell.
Wind River opens with one of the most beautiful, lyrical scenes in recent memory: A young woman runs desperately through the snow, fleeing pursuers or attackers until the cold and the altitude eventually end her life. Sheridan juxtaposes the young woman’s ill-fated flight with a poem read by an off-screen narrator. The poem speaks of life, connection, the future, all things the young woman will no longer have the opportunity to experience. But that scene isn’t a sign of things to come. It’s the opposite, an attention-grabbing scene filled with mystery that the rest of Wind River’s running time will never equal or match. Hours later, a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service hunter/tracker, Cory Lambert (Jeremy Renner), inadvertently discovers the young woman’s body in the snow. Not only does Lambert know the identity of the young woman, Natalie Hanson (Kelsey Asbille) , he’s close friends with her father, Martin (Gil Birmingham). The news understandably devastates Martin, but it also ties back to Lambert (everything ties back to Lambert): He lost his only daughter three years earlier under similar circumstances.
As a character, Lambert represents everything problematic about “white savior” narratives. He’s a man of two worlds, the white man’s world and the Native Americans, but as a professional hunter/tracker, he’s more Native American than the Native Americans we meet in Wind River. As Martin laments, the Native Americans of the Wind River Reservation have lost touch with their traditions, their culture, and inevitably, their spirituality. Lambert’s skills extend beyond near-superhuman tracking, however. He’s also a man prone to dropping wisdom with the best philosophers, Native American or otherwise. Not even grief, new or old, can slow down Lambert. He has to right words and phrases for every situation. And when the FBI sends a junior field agent, Jane Banner (Elizabeth Olsen), from the Nevada office to investigate Natalie’s mysterious death, Lambert’s always at the ready, guiding Banner to make the right decision at every juncture. If Lambert has any flaws, Sheridan makes little effort to expose them, maybe because he can’t bring himself to give Lambert any.
An unfortunate cross between Thunderheart and Mississippi Burning, Wind River tries valiantly to tackle serious, weighty issues about the treatment of Native Americans but repeatedly fails, not through a lack of talent or skill, but through a failure of nerve, likely the result of the commercial compromise.
Sheridan does give Lambert a strained relationship with his Native American ex-wife, Wilma (Julia Jones), and a semi-neglectful relationship with his son, Casey (Teo Briones), but they exist primarily as extensions of Lambert’s grief process, a loss (his ex-wife), and a partial win (his son). Sheridan reveals their relative importance to Wind River, a film ostensibly about more than a murder-mystery, by leaving them out entirely from the second half of the film. They barely get a mention or nod as Lambert’s predictably clichéd relationship with the well meaning, if ill-prepared, Banner (she makes her first appearance wearing a light jacket in a snowstorm) becomes the focal point of Wind River’s unfolding storyline. The tribal police chief, Ben (Graham Greene), gradually emerges as a semi-important character, if only to continue Banner’s schooling in the ways of reservation life, before unceremoniously exiting Wind River in the last moments, never to be seen or spoken of again. Despite a final scene that brings Lambert and Martin, old friends newly reunited by shared grief, together, it feels like too little, too late. By then, Wind River’s combination of conventional plotting and the white savior narrative results in a sense or feeling that Sheridan has done a major disservice to the supposed Native American story he apparently wanted to tell.
An unfortunate cross between Thunderheart and Mississippi Burning, Wind River tries valiantly to tackle serious, weighty issues about the treatment of Native Americans but repeatedly fails, not through a lack of talent or skill, but through a failure of nerve, likely the result of the commercial compromise.
