Wind Riv­er

The third film writ­ten by Tay­lor Sheri­dan con­sol­i­dates recur­ring themes, images and obses­sions into a dis­tinc­tive per­son­al voice. Yet Wind Riv­er, the only one that Sheri­dan also direct­ed him­self, might be the dullest of the three. As with the pre­vi­ous two fea­tures, this one fol­lows a duo of cops work­ing in a spe­cif­ic ter­ri­to­ry with its own rules, peo­ple and con­ven­tions. In Sicario, it was the Tex­an bor­der with Mex­i­co; in Hell or High Water, West Texas. Here, the set­ting is the Wind Riv­er Indi­an Reservation.

There is some­thing imme­di­ate­ly excit­ing about watch­ing a film tak­ing place in a rel­a­tive­ly under­rep­re­sent­ed and unfa­mil­iar loca­tion. By law, Indi­an reser­va­tions are iso­lat­ed from the rest of Amer­i­ca. They are not man­aged by state gov­ern­ment, but rather by the Native Amer­i­can tribes who live with­in them. These tribes in turn answer to a fed­er­al gov­ern­ment agency, the US Bureau of Indi­an Affairs. It is because of this unusu­al sta­tus that when a young woman is dis­cov­ered mur­dered on the reser­va­tion, an FBI agent is sent to inves­ti­gate, rather than a tra­di­tion­al police detective.

It would have been inter­est­ing and orig­i­nal to fol­low Eliz­a­beth Olsen’s Jane Ban­ner, the young agent straight out of sun­ny Los Ange­les, as she nav­i­gates this unknown and unfor­giv­ing land. But Sheri­dan instead opts for a more com­mon and uncom­fort­able for­mu­la, pair­ing the rook­ie agent with a local white man. In fact, Banner’s pres­ence only serves to high­light the exper­tise of Jere­my Renner’s Cory Lam­bert, a US Fish and Wildlife Ser­vice agent who serves as guide to the young woman, and thus prac­ti­cal­ly leads the investigation.

Not con­tent with sim­ply repro­duc­ing the sex­ist dynam­ic between Emi­ly Blunt’s ide­al­is­tic FBI agent and Josh Brolin’s prag­mat­ic CIA oper­a­tive from Sicario, Sheri­dan also makes Lam­bert into a ​‘white sav­iour’ fig­ure, sum­mar­i­ly strip­ping both Ban­ner and the Native Amer­i­can locals of any real agency in the action. The film attempts to rid itself of this awk­ward­ness by fram­ing Lam­bert as a sto­ic hero stuck between the white and Native Amer­i­can worlds. But giv­ing him such a rich his­to­ry results in an even stronger imbal­ance: a par­tic­u­lar­ly uncom­fort­able scene has him deliv­er a lengthy mono­logue about grief to the father of the mur­der vic­tim, as though a white man could some­how have more expe­ri­ence with loss than a Native Amer­i­can person.

Wind Riv­er peaks with its pre-cred­it sequence, in which it still seems as though Sheri­dan is tak­ing into con­sid­er­a­tion the poet­ic poten­tial and dra­mat­ic weight of the land­scape, its spe­cif­ic his­to­ry and inhab­i­tants. Yet as the film pro­gress­es, Sheri­dan strips away every­thing that ini­tial­ly makes it so dis­tinc­tive, adding arti­fi­cial­ly dra­mat­ic moments and ten­sion that feel tired and irrel­e­vant to life on the Reser­va­tion. In much the same way that Sicario feels emp­ty on clos­er inspec­tion – hav­ing ulti­mate­ly very lit­tle to do with the sit­u­a­tion of drug car­tels at the Mex­i­can bor­der – the Indi­an Reser­va­tion in Wind Riv­er is cheap­ly used as a short­cut to dra­ma, but nev­er actu­al­ly comes alive.