RIVER'S EDGE
A film review by Shane R. Burridge
Copyright 1997 Shane R. Burridge
(1986) 99m.
Moody film by director Tim Hunter and scriptwriter Neal Jiminez has an unsettling premise, but is populated with characters that are so dysfunctional they'll have you shaking your head in distanced amusement. But maybe that's the point. Story has serious societal comment interspersed with black comedy: a teenager (Daniel Roebuck) kills his girlfriend and leaves her corpse on the river bank. His high-school friends, including Matt (Keanu Reeves) and Clarissa (Ione Skye Leitch) find out, but their reaction is largely unemotional. Ironically, the only member of the group to get worked up about the incident (Crispin Glover) has sympathies that lie not with their dead schoolmate but with her killer.
RIVER'S EDGE is about failure to communicate at every human level; the dead girl might as well be the toy doll or the blow-up dummy that also serve as friends/lovers and similarly end up pitched into the river. It would appear that Reeves, who at least supports his little sister, is the chosen moral voice of this story, but there's also his high school teacher, who laments the loss of values he remembers as a student himself in the 60s. And then there's the reclusive, paranoid Feck (Dennis Hopper), an unlikely choice for moral spokesperson, who is one of only two characters (the other is Reeves) to make an act of judgment upon the killer. Feck provides a warped contrast between generations - he too once killed a girlfriend, but at least in the 60's it was done for love. It's a generation gap exemplified by Reeves' family, none of whom understand each other, all of whom ignore each other. Suitably, his 12-year old brother - the harbinger of the generation to come - is even more morally void than the teenagers surrounding him.
Hunter's film portrays society breaking down on every scale, whether it is generational, familial, or individual. What it says about its characters can be summed up by a design Reeves wears on his jacket - that of a peace sign superimposed over a skull. It is so arbitrary an icon that one can see how ideally it reflects the inability of Reeves and his friends to recognize choice. When the teenagers speak of hitting the road (just like EASY RIDER) we know they have no intention of doing anything more than talk of it; when Leitch's teacher tells her that progressive times mean that she and her friends are destined to become career girls, she looks as if she'd rather not have any such opportunity handed her. It's not difficult to see these characters still living in their town twenty years in the future. Certainly that's the case for Hopper's Feck, who has spent twenty years isolated inside his own house - it's he and Glover who steal the show and provide the most eccentric moments in the film. Subdued photography by Frederick Elmes and score by Jurgen Knieper maintain a cool, barren, neutral atmosphere. Most disturbing aspect of film is that it was based on a real-life incident in central California.
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