Winding dribble

Rating: 4/10 (25 December 2017)

Writers don't necessarily make directors, which is never more obvious than this film. Sheridan produced a competent if ultimately unsatisfying script for Sicario, which led me to Wind River. But he's a fish out of water here at the helm of a novice effort that achieves little visually but to capture a few stills of the majestic Wyoming snow-scape.
Poor casting choices are mitigated by Jeremy Renner's strong performance. Without his brooding backwoods character, along with Graham Greene as the token "real" Native American, the film would look like an episode of "Survivor" - a bunch of urbanites dropped into difficult country without a clue how to act. The movie doubles down on this casting strategy by choosing Elizabeth Olsen as the dumbfounded out-of-towner FBI agent (female, or course), whose emotions are meant to enhance the audience's own wonderment at this Wild West wilderness. Never mind that hardly any of the other characters in the film belong any more than Olsen or the audience.
Sheridan wraps his movie in the cloak of advocacy for Native Americans. Yet, he simultaneously blames his Native American characters for most of their plight - the drug epidemic is the result of individual choice, the young men could have joined the army or gone to college, and so on. At a time when the American dialogue is more than ever trained on social vs. individual responsibility, Sheridan could have explored these issues in more depth if advocacy was really a goal.
As for plot continuity, Sheridan's script produces and drops characters and story lines like so many snow flakes melting on impact: Cory's wife and son are forgotten after the opening act, and the action barely stops to acknowledge the sheriff's demise. The cause of Natalie's death, which the coroner stubbornly refuses to acknowledge as a homicide and is supposedly problematic for the FBI's investigative jurisdiction, thereafter never impacts the FBI's actual investigation. Cory's tracking ability, which serves law-enforcement as a potent investigative tactic in the first half of the film, is disregarded in favor of rather drawn-out and questionable violent scenes to conclude the movie. If this wasn't an "indie" film (whatever that means these days), I would suppose the studio heads demanded a rewrite to include typical Hollywood bloodshed.
The only reason to watch "Wind River" is if you're a big fan of Jeremy Renner, who delivers a characteristically good performance. Without his dominating presence, you'd basically be watching a "B" movie.