Justice Best Served Cold

Rating: 9/10 (16 February 2019)

LOSS. GRIEF. HEALING.
Wind River is screenwriter Taylor Sheridan's directorial debut, one that earned him an eight minute standing ovation at the Cannes Film Festival. Wind River tells the story of a young woman's death and those looking to bring her justice. Like other works written by Sheridan, there are only a few main characters the plot focuses on while the cast of secondary characters is meant to either develop our main characters more or help to drive the plot forward. This type of writing can be problematic if the story being told is one on a larger scale, however for the focused writing found in this film and others bearing Sheridan's name, it works to allow for the audience to form a real relationship with each of the main characters. Jeremy Renner and Elizabeth Olsen act as our main driving forces in the film, backed by a solid performance from veteran actor Graham Greene to round out the story's main characters. The movie gets its title from the location the film takes place in, the Wind River Reservation, Wyoming. Large panning shots help to transport audiences to the desolate landscape that is the state of Wyoming, the least populated state in the Union. Quiet, haunting music, scored by the talented duo of Nick Cave and Warren Ellis, the same men who oversaw the score for Hell or High Water, slides throughout the film, constantly reminding the audience of just how alone all of the characters on screen are through the use of sound. When a young woman's body is discovered by Fish and Game Officer Cory Lambert (Jeremy Renner) and he recognizes her as his deceased daughter's best friend Natalie, he calls the Wind River Police Chief Ben Shoal (Graham Greene) to begin an investigation into her cause of death. When it is discovered that she had been raped shortly before dying, Chief Shoal calls the FBI and they send their closest agent, Agent Jane Banner (Elizabeth Olsen), from Las Vegas to investigate. Banner is immediately thrust into the harshness that is the Wyoming wilderness, dealing with suspicion and the general mistrust of government authority from those living on and around the reservation. The plot takes many twists and turns as more circumstances of Natalie's death are uncovered. One of these twists is that the audience learns that the reason why Lambert and his wife are divorced is because their daughter was kidnapped and killed and their marriage crumbled due to their grief and guilt over her death. One of Sheridan's best qualities as a screenwriter is that everything that takes place throughout the plot happens for a specific reason and one is able to see that in his directing style also. Every shot is necessary to moving the film forward and nothing is wasted or feels frivolous. When the rapists and killers are found, the gunfight is not only gory and brutal, it happens in such a way that it feels like a gunfight that has taken place in real life, injuries and casualties hitting both sides of the conflict, Chief Shoal meeting his end and Banner catching buckshot in the chest although she is mostly protected due to her bulletproof vest. After the dust settles and the shooting stops, we find Lambert on top of the tallest peak in Wyoming with the man responsible for not only for Natalie's rape but her subsequent death as well as her boyfriend's murder, a security guard for one of the local drill sites named Pete Mickens. Giving Pete an opportunity to confess his crimes, the man does so and Lambert then frees him. When Pete asks him what he should do, Lambert tells him that Natalie ran six miles barefoot in the snow before succumbing to the elements and that is the chance he is giving the man responsible for her murder. Pete refuses to move until Lambert shoves the barrel of his gun into the man's face, forcing him to dash away into the snow. The murdering rapist makes it maybe 600 feet before he dies, drowning in his own blood just as Natalie died days previous. This film takes on the difficult emotion of not only loss and the grief that follows, but the different ways one can heal after the fact. When Lambert is comforting Martin (Gil Birmingham), Natalie's father and his good friend, he shares with him something a grief counselor told him after his own daughter had been killed. The quote is this, "I got some good news, and I got some bad news. Bad news is you're never gonna be the same. You're never gonna be whole, not ever again. You lost your daughter. Nothing's ever going to replace that. Now the good news is, as soon as you accept that, and you let yourself suffer... you allow yourself to visit her in your mind, and you'll remember all the love she gave you, all the joy she knew." This statement is extremely powerful and it speaks to the struggles Lambert himself has had to face in the wake of his daughter's murder, one that was never solved. Taylor Sheridan isn't afraid to tackle this challenging topic, and he takes it one step further. The ending shot of the movie is a silent shot of Lambert and Martin mourning their lost daughters together as text appears on the screen highlighting the fact that there are no statistics kept on Native American women who disappear and that there are thousands of cases that remain unsolved. Wind River is a stark look at not only life in Wyoming or on an Indian Reservation, it tackles the intertwined topics of not just loss and grief but the healing that has to take place afterwards and the different ways one can heal after the loss of a loved one.