In Deep Water

Rating: 8/10 (5 September 2017)

The opening titles declare "Wind River" to be "inspired by actual events." The opening scene is a protracted one of an Indian girl—barely an adult—running then crawling across an open expanse of snow, trying to make the tree line as she recites in her mind a poem of hers: "A Meadow in My Perfect World." The poem has the view­point of up in a tree. It's almost as if she is longing for higher ground. It could conceivably be an arche­type of a widespread flood.
Next is a scene of a wolf worrying some Wyoming sheep. Wild­life official Cory Lambert (Jeremy Renner) takes care of it. Now we start thinking in terms of Noah who shepherded a passel of animals into an ark. Noah according to the book of Enoch was an albino, and Cory is dressed in camouflage white.
Next stop is the town of Lander where Cory picks up his eight-year-old boy. Of course, after the ark landed, Noah himself would be a *lander*, the name of the town. Here's where it gets positively weird. There's a globe on the shelf next to Cory as he warns his ex-wife Roma about the oncoming blizzard. Of course, Noah had preached about a coming world­wide flood.
It's more of the same from here on. Noah's wife was evidently too old to bear children after the flood—she didn't have any more—and likely not able to shortly before it either. Their youngest Ham was conceivably the off­spring of a maid­servant, per the custom of the time. The servant girl did not make the cut for the ark ride, but Noah had custody of Ham when they took it. Like­wise, Cory has custody of his kid this day, and his ex- has a job inter­view, her location being defined by her work.
Next we get to a scene where Cory teaches his kid how to dominate their riding horse. After the ark landed, God renewed man's dominance of the animals (Gen 9: 2), "And the fear of you shall be upon every beast of the earth." Then comes Cory's wildlife patrol where he discovers some cat tracks next to a slaughtered steer ("It's a lion, all right.") Multiple tracks ("Mama's teaching her kids to hunt.") Once that happens she has doomed her whole family. Here in Oregon we'll put down a rogue wolf that kills live­stock. Here it seems to be a matter of their family business, not individual character but the pattern of their paw prints. Oh, well.
Now comes the gist of the story proper. Seems the body of the introductory scene Natalie is discovered frozen having succumbed to weather as a proximate cause, from evident foul play earlier. Cory is drafted by local law enforcement to simply drive around a green FBI agent Jane Banner (Elizabeth Olsen), and then his tracking expertise kicks in. His own daughter had been brutalized three years ago, so he is self-motivated to seek justice for this new death. It's similar to the way the antediluvian world was full of violence causing God to flood it out. There­fore Noah didn't want to see violence introduced into the cleaned-up world. Gen. 9:19-27 relates an incident that cast's Noah's youngest son Ham in a bad light for having looked upon his father's nakedness. According to *The Interpreter's Bible*, Vol. I, p. 556, "In the primary, popular form of the story there probably occurred here—as shown by the reference in vs. 24 to 'what his younger son had done to him'—an account of an indecent attack by ((Ham)) on his father." In the film some stir-crazy drunken boys living in this isolated region wanted to practice voyeurism on Natalie ("All I want is a little peep"), which escalated into some­thing far worse. We are spared much of the details, just as the Bible story spares us.
There's an accounting to be had by the tracker who will search out all the miscreants. Noah pronounced a life of servitude on Ham's offspring. The Tracker like­wise will give his targets a chance rather than kill them out­right if he can avoid it.
For the record, Noah's other two sons (righteous Shem and Japheth) can have their off­spring represented by the whites ("crackers") and the native Americans in this film, traveling the rocky road to some kind of integration, (Gen. 9:27) "God shall enlarge Japheth, and he shall dwell in the tents of Shem." Integration of blacks is not dealt with in this movie, and does not follow the same formula in the archetype. Ham's oldest son Cush—Hebrew for black—settled in Africa where real lions dwell. How­ever, it can be projected that Cory is a negrophile on account of the women's magazine article he reads about the ten ways to tell he's into you, which includes him looking in your eyes during conversation. Cory does look into the mountain lion's eyes in its den where it is pitch black.
This is, like, one strange whodunit, "not in the land of backup, but the land of you're on your own." There is minimal police procedure—just some jurisdictional wrangling—but justice proceeds more on atavistic grounds, as, say in the days of Noah where they were not surrounded by the safe­guards of civilization, although God seemed to trust Noah in his judgment. Noah's travails seem to be the best paradigm to relate this movie to, although there is lots of human and wilderness appeal without considering any of that. It just impressed itself on my mind that way, and it's not an unheard-of story, so I put it in my review.
I quite enjoyed the show going along at a slow pace, punctuated at the right time with flared-up violence. Unless you're set in some more traditional formula, I find it worthy of my recommendation.