THE RIVER WILD
A film review by Jef Poskanzer
Copyright 1994 Jef Poskanzer
Meryl Streep does a good job with flawed material in this rafting drama. She plays an aging former river guide who remembers the glory days on the river and is dissatisfied with her boring married life in Boston. She takes her son on a river trip, and her husband, after almost wimping out, comes along to try and save the marriage. But they run into trouble in the form of a wonderfully creepy Kevin Bacon. He hijacks their trip and they end up doing some much wilder whitewater than they had planned.
The story was riddled with minor idiocies and amazingly clumsy dialog. Too bad, all the problems I remember could easily have been fixed by a little script doctoring. Example: the plot requires that a man on foot in unfamiliar territory with no trails be able to get downriver faster than the boat. He does have a map, but in general it would be impossible. The exception would be if the river did a big meander that he could cut across. And in fact there was a scene of him way up high looking down on the river. All it would have taken to fix this bug is one shot of the map showing the meander, and another shot from up high looking down from another angle to the other part of the river.
Oh, and you can't start a fire with the magnifying glass on a Swiss Army Knife. And unless you're Superman you can't dump people out of a raft by lifting up one end. Mere mortals have difficulty lifting an empty, unrigged raft by themselves. There were a lot more of these niggling details.
And check out this dialog. The husband and wife are smooching, and the kid starts yelling for them. Hubby says "I'm going to put him to bed." Wife: "And I will bathe." Huh?? Who talks like that? Not anyone I know, and not Meryl's character anywhere else in the movie.
Now, the whitewater footage in the last third was pretty darn good. Oh, some of it was faked a little clumsily, the raft on too-calm water in the foreground with out-of-scale raging whitewater in the background and a blurry matte line in between. But a lot of it was quite real, and exciting. Should have had more of that and less shoot-em-up and McGyverism.
I saw this at a free sneak preview with a bunch of rafting buddies. Their reaction was much the same. I'm glad, though, that the movie is getting positive reviews from others who were not driven to distraction by the above-noted bugs. If the movie had been a flop, that would have closed the door on rafting movies for five years. Now it looks like they will be a mildly hot topic. Maybe someone will actually make a good one.
---
Jef
Jef Poskanzer jef@netcom.com jef@well.sf.ca.us
file://ftp.netcom.com/pub/jef/web/jef.html
.
The review above was posted to the
rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the
review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright
belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due
to ASCII to HTML conversion.
Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews