pushing against the wind

Wind River is an intense, beautifully made movie about a hunter and an FBI agent investigating the death of a young woman on a Native American reservation in snow-strangled Wyoming. The landscape is a character in itself, often a villainous one. When 18-year-old Natalie Hansen (Kelsey Asbille) is found barefoot in the snow, six miles from anywhere, raped and bleeding, the medical examiner can’t list homicide as the cause of death because technically the cold killed her. This creates a jurisdictional nightmare, because Agent Jane Banner (Elizabeth Olsen) can’t call in FBI assistance unless it’s officially a murder. But there are only six cops (led by Graham Greene, who plays the part with world-weary humor) on the whole reservation, so without backup, the investigation is fucked.

Getting the weather report.

The snow holds tracks and covers them. Blizzards shut down roads and obscure views. Long shots of snowmobile caravans making their way across a white snow-desert conjure images of The Hurt Locker as much as the presence of Jeremy Renner as a local hunter/tracker does (because Detroit is also out now, my brain did a spectacular crisscross and I thought I was watching a Kathryn Bigelow movie the whole time; sorry, Taylor Sheridan). Someone observes that here, it takes fifty miles to go five and says “Welcome to Wyoming.”

O-jai, nice to see you.

In a flashback, Natalie and her boyfriend do some California dreaming about where they might like to live, landing on Ojai. Think of Southern California as a metaphor for being white and middle-class, possibly male. When you want to live your life, you step outside and do it. Rural Wyoming is what it’s like to be Native and poor. You step out your door and the land and weather fight you every step of the way. The world for you is harsh at best, deadly at worst. It’s not a coincidence that this is the kind of place the U.S. herded its original inhabitants into; analogy and reality merge here.

Enter Jeremy Renner with his snowmobile and ability to read tracks like tea leaves. As a local and as the father of two mixed-race children—the older of whom also died in the snow—he is the Man For The Job. To extend the metaphor, he’s an ally doing what allies should, putting his skills and access to use for the good of people who could use a hand.

Cowboy on a great white snowmobile.

The movie is also a contemporary Western, with Indians and cowboys, good guys and bad guys and a shootout that exposes toxic masculinity for the tragicomic clusterfuck that it is. Agent Banner—a rookie who is as petite as Mary Kate and Ashley—puts her gun down and gets control of the situation. She is not fearless, and at times she’s in over her head, which makes her badassery that much more admirable. Similarly, Wind River works as an action movie because the victims and the grief that blooms in their wake are never just plot devices.

At the end of the movie, a couple of lines of text note that no statistics are kept on how many Native American women disappear each year.

I cried hard as the credits rolled, because how could I not think of Roxy the whole time? As we left the theater, I said to AK, “I don’t say this often, but right now I’m really feeling like ‘Fucking men.’” I paused. “I guess white people aren’t so great either.”

At home, we thanked AK’s mom for watching Dash (and doing the dishes, god bless her). He was still tossing and turning, so I curled my body around his and thought about Roxy’s kids, who had a great mom and who now have no mom because some guy could not find his way out of the dark. Jeremy Renner’s character says to Chip, Natalie’s angry drug-addict brother, “I wanted to fight the whole world too, but I figured it would win, so I fought that feeling in myself instead.”

Angry young men.

“Dash is one of the good ones,” AK said.

There are plenty of good ones. There are. Wind River is a fantastic and important movie, but it would have been better if Jeremy Renner’s character was played by a Native guy. Ally metaphor aside, nothing much in the script would have needed to change. And to be honest, the movie passes the Bechdel test only on a technicality.

If Taylor Sheridan had written a movie with a Native protagonist, would people have criticized him for trying to speak from an experience other than his own? Not to be all “White people just can’t win!”—because it’s pretty clear white people do plenty of winning. But representation politics are complicated.

I’m glad Wind River exists. I will be thinking about it for a long time. We should produce more movies by Native writers and directors, starring Native actors. All these things are true at once.