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Old August 30th, 2017 #1
steven clark
Senior Member
 
Join Date: Dec 2003
Posts: 2,277
Default Wind River

Wind River is the new film by Sheridan Taylor, who wrote the screenplay for Raising Hell, the film last year about Texas bank robbers taking on the system.
This film stars Jeremy Renner as a wildlife agent who is a tracker, shooting coyotes threatening sheep. This is a pattern for his life, for he knows the wilderness (here a bleak, wintry and Aryan like Wyoming), and he's instinctively protective of his family.
He finds a dead Indian girl when he begins to hunt a mountain lion that's been killing cattle, and since it's on an Indian reservation ('the res'), the FBI is called in, here Elizabeth Olson as an agent from Vegas/Florida somewhat out of her depth, but is a fast learner.
Renner becomes involved in the investigation, and the story is a bleak procedural/ modern western with a strong sense of place and mood.
I enjoyed the way it made Wyoming almost a character, causing people, both Indians and white, to despair, go nuts, or draw into themselves. Also, a lot of rugged individualism comes out, as Graham Greene, playing the police chief, tells Olson 'this is the land of no back-up.'
Taylor says he wrote this script and directed it because he was concerned about the hundreds of Indian women who disappear on reservations, and ends a poignant film with stats of abuse of Indian women that kill the effect he'd kept of reconciliation, suffering, and nature.
I'm sure Indian rape is bad, but it would be nice to see Sheridan or others do a movie about white rape…but, as we all know, whites have a certain affection for Indians. I'd say Taylor is an Indian lover.
In the movie, Renner is divorced from an Indian woman, and yet his whiteness, hunting skills, and responsibility place him apart from Indians. he's the go-to guy when they need to get things done.
It's a lonely, evocative film, and I found it sympathetic to some of what we stand for, and is a good updating of the western. it also has a nasty showdown at the end.
 
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