Sicario is one my best-of-the-decade picks, and its writer followed that up with the script for the pretty great Hell or High Water, so obviously I had high hopes for Taylor Sheridan's writer/director debut Wind River. Oddly enough, Sheridan, the director isn't the weak link here, its his writer who doesn't quite seal the deal. Its a downgrade for sure, but going from Instant Classic->Pretty Great->Pretty Good isn't actually so bad. Its an Indian Reservation set police procedural, like Thunderheart (hey, Graham Greene is playing almost the exact same character in this one too), but this one is feels less like white-guy tourism, its got lots of great, lived in details and mostly strong performances (Jeremy Renner wears the shit out of some Carharrtts). Its a solid, even somewhat workman like adult thriller, the kind that gets so rarely made anymore. There's a few clunky passages and parts, but for the most part its a strong effort.
and speaking of massive talents falling a bit short, we've got Detroit to talk about. I'm pretty high on Kathryn Bigalow, her artistic ambition has lead her to some pretty crazy places. Point Break, for example, has no business being near as good as it is, but trying to hit every ball out of the park will do that, including making the best vampire Western and present day spycraft films of all time. But here she and her Zero Dark Thirty/The Hurt Locker writer bit off a bit more than they could chew. This film aims for the same sort of verisimilitude as Paul Greengrass is able to pull off more elegantly for his reality based thrillers (holy shit is Bloody Sunday/Captain Phillips great). But as a rule, when you're trying to be as real as possible, every false note is a bigger crack in the façade, the filmmakers laudable sympathies shine though on occasion which doesn't help the whole enterprise. The film chronicles an underreported event from amongst an also underreported time of turbulence in America (I'll cop to not even knowing about the existence of the Detroit riots of 67' prior to this year), and as such strains a bit to be educational and horrifying in its depiction of casual police cruelty, its better at the latter and is actually more instructive during its less didactic parts (which are thankfully rare). Its a tough watch, as it should be. But it fails to an extent to humanize much of the cast beyond them being victims, or even the cops beyond them being monsters. Its an unfortunate but still bracingly and infuriatingly effective (as it wants to be) muddle. I just wish its foremost quality wasn't brute force.
