THE RIVER WILD
A film review by Eric Mankin
Copyright 1994 Eric Mankin
A gloriously buff Meryl Streep floats--literally--through this lightweight but workable family-in-peril thriller. Streep plays Gail, former white-water river guide turned Boston teacher grown apart from her distant, workaholic husband (David Strathairn). The Rocky Mountain river run designed to Dad back together with Gail and his nine-year old son coincides with the escape of a group of armed robbers--who hijack the family, demanding that Gail take them through an impassable series of cataracts called the Gauntlet.
It's a smart idea for a movie, credibly giving the physical skills that are the key to the story to the mother, not the father--and Streep is convincingly physical, radiating power at the oars of her Zodiac. Unfortunately, she doesn't get a chance to do much more: director Curtis Hanson, as he did in his similarly clever but under-achieving HAND THAT ROCKS THE CRADLE, simplifies everything in the script (Denis O'Neill's first) just as it starts getting interesting.
Most of the problems are in the characterization of the crook leader, Wade (Kevin Bacon), who's initially made both charming and sexually appealing but turns, much too quickly and much too patly, into a simple, uncomplicated and uninteresting creep from nowhere. Streep, an actress who can do anything, is limited to making her I'm-going-to-kill-you-face, and trying to keep from being upstaged by Maggy, the family's loyal golden retriever.
It's not that Hanson doesn't know how to make things infinitely more subtle: he did it in a whole series of scripts, including SILENT PARTNER, NEVER CRY WOLF, and BAD INFLUENCE. The blandness and lack of shading seems, instead, calculated: something nice and simple, not too spicy, lots of pretty river scenery, to go with the Thanksgiving turkey. It's not bad--but the elements were there in all departments for a much better film.
Eric Mankin
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