Chasing after the wind

If you see Wind River, a dark crime thriller set in the snow-driven landscape of the titular Wyoming Indian reservation, bring a sweater. Every character, including the dead Arapaho teenager discovered barefoot in an endless tract of snow, has to fight the brittle cold. The cold serves the theme of the film, in theaters now: the challenges the Indian reservation’s population faces daily, even the brutality of the climate where the U.S. government settled these tribes.

Tracker Cory Lambert (Jeremy Renner) works in Wind River for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to hunt predators preying on livestock. One day while on the hunt in the wilderness, he finds the body of a teenage girl. Lambert joins the tribal police and FBI agent Jane Banner (Elizabeth Olsen) to solve the crime. We soon learn that he has faced tragedy himself, one that has split him from his Arapaho wife. Renner—in an exceptional performance—gives us a real hero rather than the in-vogue anti-hero. He’s a loving dad and an adept frontiersman.

Taylor Sheridan, who wrote last year’s acclaimed Hell or High Water and previously Sicario, makes his directorial debut here. Hell or High Water touched on the struggles of Native peoples, and Wind River makes that the central narrative. This is a promising start to his directing career—though I was disappointed this film had fewer Coen-brothers-style zingers than Hell or High Water to temper the darkness of the crimes in the story.

The Texan Sheridan gives us a new kind of Western, and the sometimes overwritten dialogue is styled that way. “Luck don’t live out here,” Renner growls. “Luck lives in the city.” In response to the Las Vegas–based FBI agent’s request for backup, the tribal police chief (Graham Greene) returns, “This isn’t the land of backup."

A recommendation of Wind River isn’t possible because of the film's brief but distressing rape scene, the crime at the center of the story. The film is rated R for that and another particularly violent shootout. The rape scene does serve the film’s larger purpose, telling the forgotten crimes against Native American women.

The story of this one sexually assaulted Arapaho teenager stands in for the horrific amount of sexual violence that Native American women experience—56 percent have been victims of sexual violence, according to the Department of Justice. Native American women are 10 times as likely to be murdered as other Americans, according to The New York Times, and the rate of prosecution of these crimes is much lower than in the rest of the country. The film delivers a quiet punch at its conclusion with another statistic printed across the screen, which I won’t divulge.

The real-life Wind River Reservation has the bleak numbers to back up the movie’s portrayal: Life expectancy is 49 years, according to a New York Times investigation. Unemployment is at about 75 percent, and crime is rampant. As in the movie, Wind River had until recently just six police officers overseeing an area the size of Rhode Island and Delaware and a population of 14,000. The most recent numbers I found show the police force is now up to nine officers. Alcohol is involved in most of the reservation’s violent crimes–and Sheridan seamlessly weaves these threads into his well-executed but disturbing movie.