Interesting but incomplete

Rating: 7/10 (2 October 2017)

"Wind River" has a strong sense of authenticity. The performances are uniformly strong. Set primarily on the Wind River Indian Reservation in Wyoming during winter, the background and characters are interesting. Dialogue is strong. And yet, the movie seems incomplete and somewhat dissatisfying, particularly compared with the writer's previous "Sicario."
Part of the problem stems from a muddled dramatic perspective. The film begins with a shot of the victim fleeing some unidentified threat with a voice-over reading a poem, which we assume she wrote. But later, we learn the poem was actually written by somebody else entirely, who may have been a victim of a similar fate. Later, we abandon the story's linear timeline for a flashback of the crime from an omniscient observer's perspective, which undermines the whole detective story angle by giving the audience superior information in the middle of the movie. To further complicate matters, most of the potential witnesses are abruptly killed in a shootout that doesn't make a whole lot of sense in terms of character motivations. Fortunately, our intrepid amateur sleuth can figure out what happened from tracks in the snow, despite the fact that it's been snowing intermittently for days since the crime.
Further detracting from the story is the over-reliance on jiggly-cam shots. Somehow, I imagine a skinny eleven-year-old kid struggling to hold a twenty-kilo camera steady. The shots aren't quite as unsteady as the cellphone videos posted on Facebook, but it looks as if the camera operator used a self-balancing skateboard instead of a Steadicam rig.
The movie leaves several loose ends untied. Solving the crime should give the protagonist some sort of closure regarding the death of his daughter which should have some positive impact on his relationship with his son, but it's left open. The romance angle is left dangling. Perhaps I missed something, but it's not clear if there was some relationship between the victim and the protagonist's daughter or the poem. We're not quite certain what happened to the lions. It's an unpleasant bit of business that would make the protagonist seem less sympathetic, but it drifts into Chekhov's gun territory.
"Wind River" is an interesting film and worth viewing for its positive elements, but could be better. Somebody should set up a crowdfunding site to buy Sheridan a tripod.