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      Movie Review: Wind River  

      Wind River (2017), directed by Taylor Sheridan and starring Jeremy Renner, Elizabeth Olsen, Gill Birmingham, Kelsey Asbille, Julia Jones and Graham Greene, is a staggeringly beautiful and brutally painful movie. It centres on the murder of two young, Native women in an Arapaho reserve, one two years previous and one fresh. The film manages to be a genuine Western-noir crime thriller, but is also mixed with an affecting story of parents and community processing (or not processing) grief. It is potently underscored by the scandalous reality of missing and murdered Native women in North America. 

      The story is told from a White perspective, but unlike many other movies it features many Native characters who are wonderfully filled out, not caricatures, but living, breathing, deciding humans living under shattering pain and a near-hopelessness that is represented by the bleak coldness of the surroundings.

      One man, the father of one of the girls who was killed, paints a “death face” for himself as he contemplates suicide. Renner's character asks how he knows what it is supposed to look like, and he responds, ”I don’t know. I made it up. There is no one to show me.” An earlier discussion between the two on what to do with pain and grief is remarkably insightful for a Hollywood movie.

      Director Taylor Sheridan (Sicario, Hell or High Water) is working in the vein of Clint Eastwood here, and doing it well. There are the familiar tropes of vengeance and karmic retribution, but at least they are acknowledged as "necessary" but imperfect.