BEFORE: Something seasonally appropriate, perhaps, tonight - I watched "The Frozen Ground" last year in January for pretty much the same reason. Tantoo Cardinal carries over from "Wendell & Wild". And let's send a "Get Well Soon" SHOUT-out to Jeremy Renner, OK? He was in a snowplow accident on January 1, and I'm pretty sure I programmed this before that news broke.
THE PLOT: A veteran hunter helps an FBI agent investigate the murder of a young woman on a Wyoming Native American reservation.
AFTER: This film was written and directed by Taylor Sheridan, who got really super-hot about a year later as the creator of "Yellowstone" - I don't watch it, but I know the show is huge because when we were in Atlanta at an Antiques Mall, it's all that the people we met were talking about. And now there are two prequel series, "1833" and "1923", and those are huge too, one of them's got Harrison Ford in it, I think. But before he directed "Wind River" he wrote "Sicario" and "Hell or High Water", so I get it. Now he's got a new show, "Mayor of KIngstown", also with Jeremy Renner in it, and I couldn't watch that even if I wanted to, because Paramount+ is one of the two streaming services we DON'T have. I don't have time for any more TV, anyway.
Speaking of TV, I watched this movie on Pluto TV, which is a really weird service. With most streaming sites you just select the movie or TV show you want to watch, press start and enjoy the show. But Pluto's got a number of streaming CHANNELS on its service, much like the channels on your cable box. So your favorite show is always on, you just have to select the "Happy Days" channel or the "Addams Family" channel or the "Top Gear" channel, and then just keep watching for the next 47 hours until your favorite episode comes on. Or just watch the one that's airing now, if you don't mind starting in the MIDDLE of the show. I don't quite get it, how i this an improvement over "pick and play"? It's not, right? They were advertising "Stop-motion Sundays", where they air "Corpse Bride", "Paranorman" and "Coraline" every Sunday at a certain time, so I guess if you like-a Laika Studios and make plans to tune in, you can binge three great stop-motion films in a row, but you could do that anyway if you just owned the DVDs. But hey, if you want none of the selectability of Cable on Demand, with all of the commercials of network TV, by all means, Pluto TV is the platform for you.
While we're talking about January, and snow, and snowplow accidents (sorry) let's also talk about the Sundance Festival, which is coming up on - jeez, January 19, this Thursday. "Wind River" played at Sundance in January 2017 (good news!) and got picked up (better news!) for distribution by the Weinstein Company (OK, two out of three ain't bad...). It was a box office success in August 2017, but by October the allegations against Harvey Weinstein totally torpedoed the company - thankfully LionsGate stepped in acquired the home and media and streaming rights to "Wind River", probably at a discount once TWC went under.
I'm glad this film managed to get released on streaming after all, it's a powerful story about sexual assault against Native American women, and a graphic at the end of the film informs us that missing persons statistics are kept for every demographic group in the U.S. EXCEPT Native American women, for some reason. That means crimes are not being reported, or counted for some reason? Doesn't seem right. I mean, that may be correct, but it ain't right.
The main character, Fish and Wildlife Agent Cory Lambert, we come to learn, has a Native American ex-wife and a daughter who died. I missed the part about how she died, or else that was implied and not stated directly. But her death may have been similar in nature to the death of the young woman he finds while hunting a mountain lion that is killing livestock in Wyoming. Lambert knows the girl's parents, it's possible she was a friend of his own daughter, so he offers to help the FBI Agent, Jane Banner, who comes to investigate the homicide. The dead girl had a new boyfriend, and all anyone knows about him is that he works as a security guard at a nearby oil drilling site. And for some reason the Medical Examiner is unable to classify her death as a homicide, because she died from the cold, not from her injuries. That's Wyoming, I guess.
The film takes a LONG time to get around to even coming close to solving the case - and a lot of that is also "because Wyoming". Due to the state's topography and the winter weather, vehicles sometimes have to drive 50 miles out of the way to travel 5. An ambulance could take an hour to reach a victim, so for some injuries like a police shooting, there's no real point to even calling it in. Or perhaps this is just a screenwriter taking advantage of certain situations to just tell the story he wants to tell, without getting all bogged down in police procedure. Lambert is told, for example, that he shouldn't interview a witness, because he's not a policeman and any evidence he gets from that interview isn't admissible. But he's known that teenager for years, so he does it anyway. Sure, throw the rulebook out the window, it's OK, "Law & Order: SVU" does it every other week.
Eventually there is a flashback that explains what happened to the dead girl - and her boyfriend. But it's almost TOO much information, or perhaps it doesn't come at the right time - I didn't realize at first those scenes were a flashback, I thought they were happening NOW because they were set in a trailer at the drilling site, and our investigative team was on the way over to that same trailer in the present. Cutting to a flashback at that location at that time was a mistake, because it implied that those actions were also taking place in the present, which they were NOT. Just saying, timing is everything. I know I'm usually in favor of "Show, don't tell" but it feels like they showed me a little too much.
I like the idea of a hunter - a federally licensed one, but, still, a hunter - as a central character in a crime drama, instead of a cop. He doesn't have to follow the police rules, he can follow his own sense of moral justice, and the law of the land, which is survival of the fittest. I don't see how a film could run that statement at the end about how "no animals were harmed during the production of this film" when there's clear footage of coyotes being shot. Was that CGI, or real footage of the coyote population being thinned out?
Lambert's actions near the end remind me of the Punisher, and the Punisher reminds me of Jon Bernthal, who played that character in the Netflix series of the same name. Bernthal is in this film, too, but he's criminally underused, he's maybe in the film for two or three minutes, tops. But yeah, you could think of this as the film where Hawkeye and the Scarlet Witch team up to solve the murder of the Punisher's girlfriend, if you want.
Also starring Jeremy Renner (last seen in "Tag"), Elizabeth Olsen (last seen in "Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness"), Graham Greene (last seen in "The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn - Part 2"), Julia Jones (ditto), Kelsey Asbille, Gil Birmingham (last seen in "The Space Between Us"), Martin Sensmeier (last seen in "The Magnificent Seven"), Althea Sam, Teo Briones, Apesanahkwat, Jon Bernthal (last seen in "The Unforgivable"), James Jordan (last seen in "Message from the King"), Hugh Dillon (last seen in "The Humanity Bureau"), Matthew Del Negro (last seen in "Hot Pursuit"), Austin R. Grant, Ian Bohen (last seen in "Sicario: Day of the Soldado"), Eric Lange (last seen in "You Don't Know Jack"), Tyler Laracca, Tokala Clifford (Tokala Black Elk) (last seen in "Hostiles"), Blake Robbins (last seen in "The Ugly Truth"), Norman Lehnert (last seen in "127 Hours"), Ian Roylance, Tara Karsian.
RATING: 6 out of 10 snowmobile tracks
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