Wind River
Now, that’s another Sicario. What happened Taylor Sheridan, why go from this to dross like Those Who Wish Me Dead? Is it the higher budget? The ego inflation from Sicario itself? I don’t get it.
This is a no nonsense police procedural, set in bumfuck, Wyoming. In a Reservation, nonetheless. Our main dude, divorced tough guy, is out doing his job, hunting predators, when he finds a body in the snow. Since it’s such a small town, he know who she is. I’m guessing the location is federal land, so the local Sheriff calls for the FBI. For that kind of shit job, they send the greenest agent they got, some kid straight from Vegas, wearing a cotton shirt in -20°F.
She is not only green, but also completely out of his depth. Starts by pissing off the parents of the victim, the other people don’t like her either, the usual jurisdiction friction. After picking up the body and some warmer clothes, a technicality prevents calling in the cavalry. The victim was bludgeoned, raped by potential multiple people, and found barefoot on the snow, but the cause of death is breathing air too damn cold, the alveoli collapse and the lungs fill up with blood. Still, the victim ran 6 miles in those conditions, must have been running from something horrible.
The main dude is semi-requested to help with this, but he doesn’t fight back that much. The nearest construction is an “house”, more like an habited shack, where the local drug addicts congregate. One of them is the victim’s brother, but they were estranged, on account of all the drugs. Anyway, the fed kid and the local Indian sheriff get on the main entrance while our main dude is smarter and holds on the backdoor. One of the drugged up guys talks with the pigs, then whips out some kind of cleaning fluid and burns their eyes, while the rest escape through the backdoor. “Escape”, but get boinked with a snow shovel right away. There’s still the other guy, who picks up a shotgun and nearly kills the kid, but she pulls a Kate and throws herself in the ground before killing the perp.
Turns out the brother doesn’t even know his sis was raped and dead. “What did the cracker do?”, using seemingly incorrect slang for his stereotypical Injun ethnicity. Our dude finds a track and convinces the kid they should check it out while it’s day and the snow did not cover it. That was a great job, they found another mauled body in the snow. Coming back down, our boy goes talk with the victim’s brother again, and he gets roughened up (deservingly!), mentioning the boyfriend’s name.
When they get ready to hit the sack, the fed visits our boy and he spills out the story on how his own daughter was found in the snow, half eaten by wolves, when he and his wife went hanky-panky in a motel. The daughter just threw a party that grew and grew, until someone that shouldn’t been there appeared and shit, it’s not important. That’s why they are divorced now. The girl who find the body is the victim now, that’s why he knows her.
Our fed greenhorn is being hit in the face with emotional shotgun blasts one after the other, they keep coming. She does have the information on the boyfriend and most importantly, understands why a guy from the BLM is so interested in the case. In the next day, the cavalry will hit the next lead, a refinery in the vicinities.
The local Sheriff is spooked, so he bring some local reinforcements, just on the safe side. Our boy resumes his job of killing mountain lions, but after finding digested human remains in the puma’s lair, he bolts towards the refinery, the tracks lead there directly.
At first the refinery guys are friendly, but they start flanking the cops, and there is a shouting match that turns into guns drawn. The fed outranks everyone, so they stand up and stand down. As she is about to get out of, a flashback explains the case more clearly: that place is an absolute sausage fest, the boys were angry, one thing other, and suddenly your lease expires. She escapes barefoot since her boyfriend must be dead.
The standoff turns into a Battle. Most die, but our boy appears in the nick of time, covered in white and firing long rifle shots. The fed is hit, bad enough to stay back, not bad enough to die for. This means out guy is goaded into meeting the sociopath, alone in the snow. He forces him to confess and gives him the same chances she got: half naked in the snow, barefoot, really freaking cold.
Our boy bonds really well with the fed, visits her in the hospital and brings a souvenir from home, a stuffed gator, since she said she was a Floridian. Nothing comes out of that, but she’s almost certainly confined to a desk job or even explicitly disabled now. Our boy keeps on living, and as a coda, finds the victim’s mother resting and the victim’s father leaving suicidal ideation behind, since the prodigal son has returned. Keep on trucking, Arapaho.
The whole controversy about a plot centred on Native Americans being badly treated ends with two dead natives and a lively white couple is not totally out of order. I guess the whole thing is good enough to get over that particular speed bump. Now, Harvey Weinstein being involved in films featuring naked female butts, that’s another crime right there.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.