The where of 'Wind River' makes all the difference

In its unnerving opening scene, “Wind River” establishes an explicit sense of place that blankets the unnerving murder mystery at the center of the film.

It follows a terrified young woman running barefoot across a vast, snow-covered plain surrounded by wilderness in the dead of night. We learn later the location is a barren stretch of the Wind River Indian Reservation in Wyoming, and the girl in question is one of many Native American women who suffer similar, unexplained fates in the area.

“Wind River” is never not about that opening scene and what it means to the people who have suffered loss there. Even when the film stumbles occasionally into over-scripted confrontations, writer/director Taylor Sheridan never loses sight of its devastating emotional core. It treats the victim as a real person — something hundreds of episodes of procedural television shows fail to do on even a basic level.

Sheridan, an actor known from his role on the series, “Sons of Anarchy,” has had an exceptional couple of years as a screenwriter — both “Sicario” and last year’s “Hell or High Water” depict specific environments and the people struggling for identity and purpose there. While “Wind River” is probably the weakest screenplay in how it depicts its lead characters, the film still manages to build an original collection of lived-in, believable supporting characters.

The film’s shortcomings unfortunately stem from the inconsistent characterizations of the leads — Jeremy Renner as a Fish and Wildlife officer who has suffered a prior loss, and Elizabeth Olsen as the young FBI agent assigned to investigate the death of the women from the opening scene. Olsen’s Agent Banner hails from a warmer climate and arrives mid-blizzard wearing a thin windbreaker. Renner’s Cory Lambert, who is an expert tracker and marksman, reluctantly agrees to assist Banner in the investigation.

Though Renner seems to want to play Lambert’s grief more subtly, the screenplay often requires the character to make declarative statements on the nature of loss. The speeches drive the plot forward but often come out in clunky, inconsistent bursts, and it doesn’t really mesh with Renner’s muted mannerisms.

At least Renner gets more to work with than Olsen, a terrific actress who is straddled with an underwritten part minus a couple of exceptional climactic scenes.

It’s clear Sheridan is trying to balance Agent Banner’s efficiency as an investigator with her overwhelming lack of experience in the field, to the point where Renner’s character all but spells out that conflict in another over-declarative speech near the end. The problem is her lack of involvement in the film’s major showdown, and there’s one especially damning sequence that leans too far into the character’s inexperience. It’s a frustrating imbalance that gives Olsen little to work with as Renner’s character is handled too much like a superhero (with a Hawk eye for shooting, by the way).

“Wind River” also seems to be missing an opportunity with the casting of Renner in the lead role. The character of Cory Lambert has a Native American ex-wife and Native American children, and the character’s “whiteness” doesn’t serve a narrative purpose. Olsen’s character, thinly-written as it is, at least provides an interesting dynamic — she’s an outsider who struggles to understand how things operate on the reservation. Lambert isn’t an outsider in any sense, and, if anything, he comes off as more enlightened and as a savior of sorts to the supporting characters.

It’s always tough to gauge the impact of diversity in film, and obviously having a star like Renner in the role helps the movie get made and seen. It just seems like a more interesting choice to have the character be played by a Native American, and it often seems like Sheridan wrote the character with that specific intention. It isn’t a criticism of “Wind River” to wonder what the movie looks like with a different star, but in this case that external conversation distracts from the overall effectiveness of the film.

With that in mind, Sheridan still manages to find some surprising pockets of wrenching emotion in its final minutes. The storytelling of the investigation itself is efficient and satisfying, and the supporting performances by Graham Greene and Gil Birmingham especially serve as powerful connective tissue to the tone the film introduces in that first scene. And though a provocative title card spells it out, “Wind River” exits with a specificity that lingers beyond its crime-genre conventions.

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Tyler Wilson can be reached at twilson@cdapress.com