Wind River (2017) Directed by Taylor Sheridan 7A
On a search for sheep-killing mountain lions, Corey (Jeremy Renner), a hunter/tracker for the Wyoming forestry service, discovers the dead body of a young native woman who appears to have been raped. Despite the fact that her body is found on a vast native reserve the size of Rhode Island, the FBI in the form of inexperienced Jane Banner (Elizabeth Olsen) gets involved. Corey, who is still dealing with his own family tragedy, is friends with the reserve's Chief of Police (a marvelous performance by Canada's Graham Greene), and is very good at finding clues. Knowing she is in over her head, Jane asks Corey to stay involved in the case, which he does so. The hunt is on to find the girl's killer. Wind River is writer Taylor Sheridan's first shot at direction--his scripts include Sicario and Hell or High Water, so it is no surprise that he gives himself a very good script to work with. The direction is a little clunky, though. Sheridan wants to avoid cliched genre moves and develop the story his own way. But the result is a movie whose rhythm takes some getting used to. In one key scene near the end we get so much unnecessary information, seemingly out of the blue, that the narrative appears derailed for a brief time. But Wind River has many strengths, too, and they outweigh the film's flaws. The story is a moving one, the cinematography of Wyoming in winter is spectacular, and Jeremy Renner gives one of the best performances of his career as a man who has found his own way to cope with tragedy by accepting the pain and living with it. Renner's acting is deeply internalized, tightly controlled and terse. Quietly dominating every scene that he is in, Renner lends the movie a heartfelt intensity that it might otherwise have lacked without him.
Side Note: Classic example of a 6.5, if I did 6.5s, which I don't. I think once people get into Wind River's rhythm they will like it a lot, so the higher score seemed more of an endorsement than the lower one. If Denis Villeneuve had directed this script, though, it might well have been a masterpiece.
Your neck of the woods appears to be my neck of the woods.
A Taxi Driver (2017) Directed by Hun Jang 6A
Based on a true story from 1980, a military dictatorship is trying to impose its will violently on protesters in Gwangjiu, South Korea, a conflict that the rest of the world knows nothing about. Following a tip, Peter (Thomas Kretschmann), a German journalist, flies into Seoul looking for some way, any way to get to Gwangju. No one in Seoul or anywhere else has the faintest idea what is going on as there is a military news blackout of the area. Hearing there is money to be made from a lucrative fare, Man-seop (Song Kang-ho) outsmarts the other taxi drivers and picks up Peter before they do. Poor but easy going, Man-seop is the kind of guy who borrows money from his landlord so he can pay the rent. A single father and a loving one, he speaks no German, only a tiny bit of English, and he has absolutely no idea of the hell that awaits him. For that matter, neither does Peter. Perhaps in an attempt to appeal to as broad an audience as possible, A Taxi Driver combines a number of different approaches, sometimes effectively, sometimes not. As a record of an important historical event in recent South Korean history, the focus is initially on the unsuspecting Man-seop. In a way that is quite pleasing, this provides an unexpectedly oblique angle to view the action. We seldom see historical events from the perspective of an everyday schmuck caught up unintentionally in the mayhem. But as the film moves into more serious waters, while the horror of the situation gets chillingly portrayed, the movie drifts into common hard-to-believe action movie tropes with a dollop of schmaltz thrown in, too (I'm not referring to the very moving coda, however). As for Man-seop, although Jackie Chan could have played this role adequately, Song Kang-ho provides something special as always. I've seen eleven of his movies now and not one of his performances has ever been less than entertaining or carefully observed. He is a marvelous actor who can bring depth and feeling to even the most mundane characters, as he does here. I left the theatre wishing A Taxi Driver could have been a little less ordinary in key moments, but I was still entertained by it.
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