Back in 1997, a jogger 'went up' near Lander, Wyoming and disappeared without tracks. Some people think that's evidence of UFO's. But the current 'modern western directed and written by Taylor Sheridan 'Wind River' starts with a disappearance and then the discovery of the body of a teenage native American woman (Kelsey Asbille) deep on the reservation, and the uncovering of the dirty behavior behind it. The film reminds me of Coen Brothers material, with less dark humor, and a plot that reminds you of Cormac McCarthy.
FBI agent Jane Banner (Elisabeth Olsen) arrives and find she is in over her head, both with dealing with the oncoming early mountain winter (no global warming here) and the legal maze of tribal, state and federal law. (I remember a little of this from living in Minnesota and visiting Red Lake once.) Cory (Jeremy Renner), a US game tracker, will help her with the snowplow journeys into the wilderness, where they encounter some very bad behavior indeed by both natives and white oil field workers. There is an impressive sequence filmed around a workers' 'dormitory' trailer complex (that's how movie stars live for months on wilderness sets), that gets violent indeed. There's one particularly captivating shot of a mountain lion family in a den; the cats are left alone.
The film was actually shot in the Wasatch Range of Utah.� I did travel through the Lander and Wind River area in August 1994.
But I think I saw Square Top Mountain in the film.
Hollywood Reporter has a curious story about the distribution of the film.
Recently, NBC Dateline did a story about a good Samaritan rescue of a teenager who crashed a plane in the Big Horn Mountains, to the Northeast.
The end credit roll of the film points out that disappearances of young native-American women are all too common.
Name: 'Wind River'
Director, writer: Taylor Sheridan
Released: 2017
Format: 2.35:1
When and how viewed: R
Length: Angelika Mosaic, Fairfax VA, large audience, 2017/8/12, afternoon
Rating: R
Companies: The Weinstein Company TWC
Link: official
(Posted: Saturday, August 12, 2017, at 7:30 PM EDT)