Wind River

A guy who works at predator control for U.S. Fish and Wildlife (Jeremy Renner) works with the Bureau of Indian Affairs and a green FBI agent (Elizabeth Olsen) to investigate the death of a young woman on an Arapaho reservation in Wyoming in the winter.

I thought this was going to be about chasing a serial killer. Someone who should be easy to pin down, simply for lack of potential suspects, but they have so much room to hide. That's not what this is. It's more about people who feel lost. They live in a place where they see no opportunities, they see no way out to find other opportunities. They've seen what that does to their parents, their children, and they feel it's going to happen to them. And what all that does.

Of course, it's a movie about life on a reservation, and the two main characters are white folks, sooo, that's not the best approach. Renner's character at least was married and part of life there, and remains so even after the marriage fell apart. And Agent Banner is repeatedly shown to not have any grasp on what things are like here. She was sent from a training in Vegas, because she was simply the closest available agent. That's she honest about this, is willing to ask for assistance from people who know the area, and tries her best mitigates that somewhat.

Still, she is extremely naive about how the legal system works for someone who presumably would have been educated in that at some point on the path to joining the FBI. That really annoyed the person I was watching it with, the primary woman in the film being someone who has to have things explained to them constantly. It's a fair complaint.

For all that I just mentioned about what the film could have done better, for what it actually did, it was solid. At times, the education of Agent Banner feels like telling the audience, rather than showing, but at other times it does well at just showing the grief, depression, and difficulty of life in general. There are some quiet moments that work well. There's an awkward sort of chemistry between Renner's character and Olsen's where I felt at first he was being more open than I would expect, but the film explains that in a way that mostly makes sense.