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There is also an America that goes untold because it's better left unsaid. There's the America far from the cities of bright boulevards and futuristic skyscrapers. There is America, the real one, the one of the central states, of ranches, stones, and blood. Like Wyoming: slightly smaller than Italy and with half the inhabitants of Naples. Only mountains, forests, rivers, snow, and cold. And caravans, metal sheets, dilapidated houses where Native Americans are confined, outcasts in the land that was their ancestors'. Expelled from the (false) American dream that was also built on the systematic elimination of their forebears. Has anything truly changed in the unchanging Wyoming? Taylor Sheridan tries to tell the land and the blood of the secluded places of the states: the Mexican border littered with bodies in "Sicario" (Denis Villeneuve) or the Texas desert, the heart of America, in "Hell or High Water" (David Mackenzie). With "Wind River" (original title), Sheridan moves much further north, leaving behind the sun of the southern frontier and stepping behind the camera.
To explore one of the countless "frontiers" of the American heart, Sheridan relies on the classic crime drama modus operandi: corpse, investigation, conclusion. He entrusts the role of "detective" to the young and inexperienced Jane (Elizabeth Olsen), definitely unprepared for the harshness of the wild Wyoming. She, urbanized, is a perfect example of an America that does not know itself. Accompanying her is the gruff hunter Cory (Jeremy Renner), a solitary man hardened by ice and pain.
It's clear that Sheridan is not particularly interested in telling the actual "investigation": the film dwells little (and perhaps poorly) on finding the culprit. The director is more focused on delineating the world where this story of death seems to appear as routine, as simply flipping through one of the many tragic events of the small community. Here, life and thought are still (and always) governed by ancient laws of blood, violence, and private "justice". The narrative becomes a revelation of a social reality that struggles to be told in the states, that of native communities, confined, deliberately forgotten, topping the charts of drug consumption, suicides, and depression, where the "status" of being defeated by history seems to have become the norm, subject to the will of the white man. "The Secrets of Wind River", brushing away the snow that covers everything, is nothing but the staging of a reality that is already there. The repetition of abuse. And here, if the Arapaho are "strangers" in their land, Jane (the weakest character even from a writing perspective) becomes an example of a puppet foreign in an America that does not belong to her: an America where bad luck does not exist because "wolves do not eat unlucky deer, they eat weak deer".
The cold lands of Wyoming mirror the souls described by Sheridan, in a classic repetition of American cinematography that uses the cold landscape of the north as a representation of the frigidity of its lives (think of "Fargo" or titles like "Affliction" by Paul Schrader and "A Simple Plan" by Raimi): but if the character writing appears flawed, often too subordinate to the story and lacking real psychological depth, it's the aesthetics of the stunning locations that give strength to the film, which echoes the Coen brothers and relies on a minimalism as effective as it is necessary. The equally cold and subdued notes of Cave and Ellis provide an absolute guarantee of quality.
Sheridan is trying to carve a path toward an auteur cinema or one that attempts to be, and for now, he has focused on the open veins of America and its social, moral, and ethical contradictions in the geographical enclaves marking the states like few other nations on the face of the planet. His "Wind River" manages to work well with subtraction, minimizing action scenes (which, when they do break out, are clearly a homage to the old classic westerns) but falters in the crime narrative development that remains sketched and underdeveloped: because the director and author are more interested in inserting the background story into a macro (micro) cosmos that is the true narrative core of the film. And ultimately, it returns to the western and the origins of American history: and to quote the great French critic André Bazin, the western is "the foundational American genre".
7.5/10
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