Wind River

Wind River is the directorial debut of Taylor Sheridan, an actor and writer who penned the screenplays for the tense, atmospheric Sicario and the elegiac Hell or High Water. Wind River mines some of the same territory as Hell or High Water, another story of people in the American west trying to make their way against the unforgiving physical world as well as brutal social and economic circumstances.

 Set in the Native American reservation territory of the title, the film begins with Cory Lambert, a Fish and Game agent, discovering Natalie Hansen, a young Native American woman, dead in the snow of the Wind River range. Clearly, she was assaulted and then ran from her attackers, miles through sub-zero conditions until her lungs burst. It’s a grisly scene and is made worse by the fact that the young woman was a friend of Cory’s deceased daughter.

Jane Banner, the FBI agent called in to investigate, is based in Las Vegas and is unprepared for both the weather and the harsh realities of reservation life. Banner is played with intelligence and toughness by Elizabeth Olsen, and fortunately the film avoids all the easy, romcom, fish out of water jokes that could be made at her expense. It also avoids any romance between her and Cory who is played by Jeremy Renner. Instead, the two behave like professional adults who are simultaneously grieved by the murder and determined to solve it.

Lambert and Banner methodically track the clues back to the site of the Natalie’s attack where a flashback tells viewers how it happened. It is a difficult sequence to watch, and the shootout that takes place following the revelation only provides a glum, sad kind of satisfaction. This is no fist-pumping Death Wish-style revenge drama that glorifies violence and makes viewers feel better about the bad guys getting theirs. On the contrary, Wind River is a very sad film. While there are moments of great tension and it plays like a police procedural, it ultimately is about grief and how to process unimaginable loss.

For a first-time director, Sheridan is very confident. His style is neither showy nor flat. He has a confident, muscular style that compliments the rugged Western landscape where he set his story. The film is a little too slow and contemplative to be considered an action thriller but it’s also a far cry from just being some sad, slow moving indie film about being sad and slow. The sequence when Jane and her reservation sheriff counterpart are sprayed with mace as they try to enter a trailer full of drug addicts is terrifying and tense. The standoff between law enforcement and Natalie’s attackers is chaotic and agonizing. While not a thriller, Wind River has some legitimate thrills.

Jeremy Renner is an actor who sometimes seems bored with his roles but sometimes inhabits them and lives them completely. His performance as Cory Lambert is definitely of the second kind. His performance is organic and, at times, heartbreaking. It is the best performance I’ve seen him give since he first came to prominence in 2008’s The Hurt Locker. 

Elizabeth Olsen’s performance is smart and cagey. She doesn’t make easy, obvious choices and instead imbues her character with a prickly authenticity.  

Of course, there is the subject of having a white male director make a movie with two white leads that’s all about the difficulty of reservation life for Native Americans. The unfortunate fact is that the movie probably wouldn’t have gotten made without Renner and Olsen and that a Native director might not have even made it to a pitch meeting with this idea. Wind River really is a compelling film that moved me immensely. But it does make me hope for a time when a greater diversity of writers, directors, and actors can tell their stories themselves and get equal funding, attention, and treatment as they do so. 

But until that time, Wind River is worth seeing.    

Holiday Movie Wrap Up

Over Christmas break, I tried to watch as many movies as I could squeeze in between shopping, wrapping presents , eating, sleeping, visiting family, and walking the dog. It was the usual combination of new films in the theater, catching up with movies on disc that I missed during year, and streaming a few mystery films just to see what they were all about. I will discuss a couple of the movies I watched at greater length in the next couple of weeks, but for now, here is my annual post-Christmas, seven movie reviews in four minutes:

Edgar Wright’s Baby Driver is wonderful. Cool, exciting, sweet, funny at times, harrowing at others. The first ten minutes, the initial chase scene set to Jon Spencer Blues Explosions’ song “Bellbottoms” as well as the sequence of Baby getting coffee for his fellow thieves set to Bob and Earl’s “Harlem Shuffle,” are pure moviemaking genius.

The Planet of the Apes reboot trilogy has been one of the most surprisingly effective and poignant film franchises of the last decade, and it’s final installment, Battle for the Planet of the Apes is the best of them all. Again, Andy Serkis gives what should be a Oscar-nominated role as Ceasar, the wise, compassionate, haunted leader of a tribe of sentient apes, and the digital effects that transform him and other actors into their simian counterparts are literally flawless.

Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets reminded me a lot of 2015’s Jupiter Ascending – visually stunning with more detail and imagination than you can absorb in a half-dozen viewings, but narratively a hot mess from start to finish. It features a ridiculous script, bizarre performances, and a lead actor who, honest to goodness, seems to be patterning his character on early 90s Keanu Reeves. If you like beautiful sci fi and don’t mind the fact that everything but the visuals is a giant mess, this is the one for you.

Spiderman: Homecoming brings Spidey firmly into the Marvel Universe after languishing at Sony Pictures for years, and you can tell the difference. Snarky, slick, funny, and fast, it unfortunately loses some of the low-to-the-ground quirk and humanism from the Sam Raimi versions but fortunately loses everything from the Andrew Garfield reboots that sucked. Homecoming is fun, and Michael Keaton as the Vulture makes the best Marvel villain since Loki.

The Hero stars Sam Elliot as basically himself, an aging actor known primarily for his roles in westerns and his voicework in commercials for things like barbeque sauce. He’s at a standstill in his career and in his life, divorced, estranged from his daughter, and spending his time between commercial gigs smoking pot with his neighbor. Then two things happen: he’s diagnosed with cancer and begins a relationship with a much younger woman played by Laura Prepon. The film isn’t so much a story as it is a poem meditating on aging and mortality. Elliot is fantastic and certainly deserves more starring roles, especially in movies that actually have endings.

Detroit focuses on a specific incident that took place during the 1965 riots in our own beloved Detroit. A group of African American men and two Caucasian women were terrorized, brutalized, and some eventually murdered by Detroit police officers in the Algiers Motel. Director Kathryn Bigelow is a master of maintaining tension and a sense of structure throughout a story that is largely about chaos. It’s a harrowing film, not just for the events it portrays but for how timely the film feels over fifty years after these events took place.

I also watched Passengers with Chris Pratt and Jennifer Lawrence. I heard it was garbage but wanted to find out for myself. The film is proof positive that even the most charismatic performers and the biggest production budget cannot overcome a script that is ham-handed, clunky, and without a satisfying ending. If you haven’t already, skip Passengers.

The Greatest Showman

In every area of human endeavor, there’s a spectrum of quality. Whether you are a plumber, an architect, a baseball player, a teacher, a parent, or a professional competitive basket weaver, there’s that small number of life changers, a handful of really memorable good ones, and then a huge heap of “Yay” to “Meh.” It’s true with chefs, painters, accountants, and it’s certainly true of movies.

Hugh Jackman’s latest vehicle, the P.T. Barnum biopic musical, The Greatest Showman, is not a life-changer. It will probably not end up in the same pantheon as White Christmas, The Wizard of Oz, Oklahoma, or Fiddler on the Roof. This is not to say that it’s bad; it just doesn’t belong in that top layer of quality.

 

Hugh Jackman plays Phineas Barnum, the poor son of a tailor, who uses his drive, imagination, and not just a little flim flam to make himself a fortune as a purveyor of oddities, curiosities, and freaks. Michelle Williams plays his unfailingly supportive wife, Charity, and the two raise their superhumanly cute young daughters next to the bearded lady, General Tom Thumb, acrobats, and trapeze artists.

It’s a rags-to-riches story in which Barnum briefly loses his way as he is tempted by Jenny Lind, the Swedish opera singer he brings to the states in a bid for respectability, but ultimately  comes through for his family, his circus friends, and his own vision of himself.

The Greatest Showman is strongest when it fully embraces being a musical. There is some inventive choreography and staging. As a young Barnum is down on his luck, he sings to his wife and daughters on the roof of their tenement. As he dances with his wife and lifts her, all the sheets on the laundry line billow simultaneously at exactly the same moment. It’s a small detail but lovely, the kind of things that usually only happens in musicals. The songs are catchy and enjoyable, but they also seem to be ready-made for the radio rather than a musical. The very general lyrics are about being yourself and believing in your dreams and that sort of thing. They’re enjoyable but too general to really resonate and last.

The Greatest Showman’s biggest problem is its lack of a sense of real history. Barnum was, of course, a real person, an important, complicated figure during one of the most influential and turbulent periods in U.S. history. The film is glossy in both good and bad ways. Visually, it’s rich, composed, and slick. Historically, it glosses over Barnum as a man as well as major events like, for instance, the Civil War. I have no problem with a film based on true events streamlining things for the sake of telling a story. But it’s hard to take seriously a film that completely ignores the fact that one of Barnum’s most prominent oddities was a blind, disabled slave named Joice Heth who he promoted as the 161 year old nurse of George Washington and how, when she died, Barnum paid for a public autopsy of the poor woman to take place in front of 1500 people so he could supposedly verify her age. There are no public autopsies in the film and Barnum is touted as an agent of diversity rather than as a slave owner. The Greatest Showman simplifies the actual story to the point where it’s not really the same story. 

If you can overlook its almost complete lack of historical grounding, The Greatest Showman is enjoyable. Hugh Jackman is an immensely charismatic performer, and Michelle Williams, while underused, has a maturity that grounds the two of them as a couple. The film is not one of the greats, but there are some ecstatic moments of song, dance, cinematography, and editing that make it worth watching.