Enough with the Vigilante Movies

Rating: 5/10 (19 December 2017)

Last year Taylor Sheridan wrote the screenplay to "Hell or High Water," a rural thriller that asked us to feel pity for the poor and working class folks wasting away in America's dying towns. I might have felt the pity Sheridan asked me to, had the film not been full of a bunch of hot-headed white men with guns and itchy trigger fingers, who take justice into their own hands with a macho Texan swagger that Sheridan was all too clearly proud of without a hint of irony (not to mention compunction about the current state of gun violence in America).
This year, he's both written and directed "Wind River," another gloomy rural thriller, this one set in Wyoming. Yet again, we're given a white male who goes vigilante in order to seek vengeance on a bunch of horror show redneck goons. He has to, you see, because the only people helping him are a couple of inept Native American police officers and a white female FBI agent who's thoroughly incompetent because she's from -- GASP!! -- the city. In Sheridan's world, apparently, people who live in cities are pampered and worthless and don't know how to do pretty much anything, and it's only the tough country folk who know how to get the job done. You could cut the condescension with a knife.
I don't expect artists necessarily to compromise their visions in order to contribute productively to a given cultural conversation, but it would be nice if they at least engaged in it. In our current cultural climate, with the very serious division between urban and rural populations of America that has experts talking somewhat seriously about the possibility of a new kind of civil war, a movie like "Wind River" feels not only facile, but also rather irresponsible. With the rampant stereotypes being thrown every which way about various populations of America, and the gun problem, and the rise of militia groups with vigilante attitudes, do we really need a movie like this?
Oh, and at the very end, Sheridan throws in some facts about the prevalence of Native American women who end up as missing persons, and tries to turn what has been a white boy's revenge fantasy into a public service message. Nice try.
Grade: C