Old Yorker

  • The River

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Jean Renoir (1951)

    Set and shot on location in West Bengal, on the banks of the Ganges, Jean Renoir’s first post-Hollywood and first colour film looks so much better than it sounds.  I’d seen The River once before, about twenty years ago.  Although I couldn’t recall it in detail, I did remember Renoir’s compelling evocation of a culture and rhythm of life far removed from their European (or American) equivalents.  Now that I’ve seen the film again, I’m glad to realise that its strengths rather than its weaknesses stayed in my mind.  The images created by Renoir and his nephew Claude, The River‘s cinematographer, are masterly.  The flow of the narrative is often interrupted, though, when someone speaks.  The acting, especially the delivery of lines, is mostly awkward.  The abundant voiceover narration – comprising extracts from Renoir’s source material, Rumer Godden’s 1946 novel of the same name – now sounds deplorably condescending.

    That may be unfair on Rumer Godden (a prolific novelist though I’ve never read her), who shares the screenplay credit with Renoir.  According to Google’s AI overview, Godden, who spent most of her childhood in colonial India, combined ‘a deep, lifelong emotional attachment’ to the country ‘with a critical, clear-eyed view of British imperialism’.  Yet The River’s retrospective narration, voiced by June Hillman (aka June Tripp), describes the indigenous Indians and the Hindu religion in persistently patronising language and tones.  Without explicitly disparaging the Indians or Hinduism as primitive, the voice gives the impression that life for the natives, including religious life, is an enviably simple matter – something that’s just gone on for centuries without interruption or development – or hardship.  But at least that smooth, belittling voice doesn’t obscure the vibrancy, and sometimes mystery, of what Renoir puts on the screen.  A procession of workers at a jute mill.  Diwali and spring festival rituals.  The local flora, vividly coloured or, in the case of a pipal (sacred fig) tree, extraordinarily shaped.

    The dramatis personae are a different matter.  The narrator is the adult version of The River’s protagonist, early teenage Harriet (Patricia Walters) – the eldest of five children, whose mother (Nora Swinburne) is expecting a sixth child and whose father (Esmond Knight) manages the jute mill.  When American war veteran ‘Captain’ John (Thomas E Breen), comes to stay with his elder cousin, ‘Mr’ John (Arthur Shields), Harriet, who keeps a secret diary and writes poems, experiences the pangs of first love, and a first love rival – poised and self-centred Valerie (Adrienne Corri), the late-teen daughter of the jute mill’s owner.  Members of Harriet’s family’s house staff – the children’s nanny (Suprova Mukerjee), the gateman (Sajjan Singh) – are not the only significant non-white characters.  There’s also Melanie (Radha Burnier), the widowed Mr John’s bi-racial daughter; her wealthy suitor (Trilak Jetley); and Kanu (Nimai Barik), a young Indian boy who is the best friend of Harriet’s only brother, Bogey (Richard R Foster).

    The cast are a mixture of experienced actors – Esmond Knight, Arthur Shields, Nora Swinburne (and June Tripp) – and others with little or no professional experience.  The names of Patricia Walters and Adrienne Corri appear with ‘Introducing …’ tags in the opening titles (although Corri had had a presumably small part in The Romantic Age (1949)).  Thomas E Breen had played a few, mostly uncredited roles in post-war Hollywood films.  Radha Burnier was an Indian classical dancer.  It’s not hard to see why Adrienne Corri went on from The River to a relatively successful screen career, and you can tell who the pros are more generally (though this isn’t in all cases a compliment:  Arthur Shields is very stagy).  Nearly all the less experienced performers, hard as they try, are wooden.  They’re showstoppers in just the wrong way:  each time they start trying to act, they break the film’s rhythm.  It seems no coincidence that one of the most effective contributions is from Nimai Barik, in a virtually non-speaking role, and that Radha Burnier’s dance sequence is such a highlight (a showstopper in the right way).

    At one level, there is a kind of truth in the artless performances.  Patricia Walters seems conscientiously eager to do things well, and her appearance and manner are likeably eccentric:  when Harriet asks her mother ‘Am I beautiful?’, the amusingly kind reply – from a woman who really is (conventionally) beautiful – is, ‘You have an interesting little face, full of character’.  Walters can’t begin to cope, though, with the emotional extremes that Harriet is meant to experience.  It makes a kind of sense that, in this somewhat sealed-off white community, she and Valerie are both smitten with Captain John, never mind that Thomas Breen does not have film-star looks.  Like his character, Breen really did fight in the Second World War and, also like Captain John, lost a leg in action.  (And Harriet’s father is partially sighted, to take account of Esmond Knight’s loss of vision during recent military service.)  In a scene where John slips and is furiously unable to get up without help, Breen conveys a depth of feeling that makes even more salient his unconvincing efforts to register emotion elsewhere in the story.

    If this had been Jean Renoir’s first English-language film, you might think that, as a native French speaker, he just couldn’t ‘hear’ what Patricia Walters, Thomas Breen and others were doing with their lines; since Renoir came to The River after several years and films in Hollywood, this can’t suffice as an explanation.  Still, the inadequate playing of the human characters, though a vexing distraction, doesn’t dominate your thoughts afterwards.  What stays with you is, for example, Renoir’s characterisation of the Ganges, both real and symbolic (‘The river flows, the world spins’, in the words of one of Harriet’s poems), or his handling of the immediate aftermath to Bogey’s death from a cobra bite and the staging of the boy’s funeral.  One of the script’s more incisive lines is another response from Harriet’s mother, when her eldest daughter protests to her parents during an evening meal after her brother’s death that, ‘We go on as if nothing had happened’:  ‘No, we don’t,’ says her mother, ‘all we do is to go on’.

    Bogey’s death is somewhat uncomfortable in that, as a white person’s death, it seems to reinforce the narrator’s assumption that it matters more – that lucky Indians simply take life and death in their stride.  Yet this prioritisation has a more positive side.  It’s a virtue of Renoir’s approach to Rumer Godden’s material, and an expression of his film-making artistry, that, as Pauline Kael wrote, he ‘does not usurp the position of an insider; he sees India with western eyes – eyes so sensitive and highly trained that his vision of India is a mythic poem’.

    20 June 2026

  • Stiller & Meara: Nothing is Lost

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Ben Stiller (2025)

    The title characters met and married in 1953.  They stayed married until Anne Meara’s death in 2015; Jerry Stiller died five years later.  Their son Ben’s marriage, to fellow actor Christine Taylor in 2000, lasted seventeen years before they separated.  In the year his father died, the pair moved back in together, with their two children, as a COVID bubble.  During that time, they reconciled and Stiller began developing this documentary feature.  Stiller & Meara: Nothing is Lost is always absorbing, yet it seems to have been made by and present people who, despite being public performers, have always lived in a bubble.  And although it lovingly commemorates his parents, the film is too much about Ben Stiller himself.

    On this side of the Atlantic at least, Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara are much less famous than their son.  I recognised their names and faces without being able to place them in any cinema film I’d seen (though it turns out I’d seen them in several[1]).  They became best known to American audiences in other contexts, first as a regular comedy duo on The Ed Sullivan Show during the 1960s, when they also worked the clubs circuit.  They went their separate ways professionally at the turn of the decade, but it’s clear from Nothing is Lost that they were still often TV talk-show guests as a couple.  In the 1970s, Anne Meara appeared Off Broadway in John Guare’s The House of Blue Leaves, as well as in TV dramas and sitcoms.  Most British viewers familiar with Jerry Stiller will know him for his 1990s role in Seinfeld (which I never have seen).

    In work and in life Stiller and Meara were a chalk-and-cheese partnership.  He was short, Jewish, vaudeville-based, determined to be funny, always desperate for audience approval.  She was tall, Irish-Catholic, ambitious to be a straight actress yet a more naturally gifted comedian than her husband and more easily able to improvise.  As parents, according to Ben, his father was more tender and better at coping with a crisis than his mother.  While Anne smoked and drank too much, Jerry was obsessed with memorabilia, especially audio recordings.  Although you’re never in doubt that the central couple loved each other devotedly, these tapes are as likely to include marital disputes as happy family memories, and they turn out to be a mixed blessing in the film.  They guarantee that, in conjunction with abundant TV clips, the narrative is fast-paced and revealing.  They’re a potent expression of how a private relationship fed professional comedy routines and personas.  After a while, though, the recordings start to feel like a nearly pathological pas de deux (Anne knew that Jerry was regularly taping their exchanges).

    For this viewer/listener, the endless supply of home movies and conversations was too relentless – even though it’s understandably an endless source of fascination to Ben Stiller and his sister, Amy (herself a successful actor and stand-up, though some way down the celebrity food chain from her brother or their parents).  Most sons and daughters are probably insatiable when it comes to finding out what their parents said when they weren’t there.  Sometimes the kids were there.  At one point in the film, Anne Meara recalls the infant Amy, hearing raised voices and coming anxiously into the room where Anne and Jerry were running lines.  They reassured Amy that ‘Mommy-Daddy rehearsing’.  Not long afterwards, she interrupted another argument and trotted out that phrase; this time, though, the fight was for real. You laugh at this illustration of art imitating life and vice versa in the Stillers’ New York City apartment.  Yet as Nothing is Lost proceeds, its all-in-the-family set-up becomes oppressive.

    This impression could be magnified by how and when the film originated, but the Covid era can only partly explain it (especially since the film wasn’t released until last year).  Apart from people who pop up briefly in TV, cinema and theatre clips, only two talking heads – John Guare and Christopher Walken, who make refreshing contributions – are not members of the Stiller family.  Otherwise, the cast comprises Jerry, Anne, Jerry’s sister, Amy, Ben, his wife Christine and their two children, Ella and Quin.  We hear, as well as Jerry’s recordings, extracts from theatre pieces that Anne wrote, read aloud by Amy and Ben.  (The film takes its subtitle from both sources.  ‘Nothing is lost’, because Jerry has retained or recorded everything, is also a line in Anne’s After Play.)  We learn, too, about psychotherapy sessions – for Jerry and Anne individually and as a couple, and as family outings, with Amy and Ben joining in.  This comes across as a near-parody of a New York Jewish-Catholic showbiz family of the later twentieth century – therapy as routine rather than compelled by a persisting need for help.   It wouldn’t be fair to disparage the film as merely repetitive because it continues to probe deeper into what made Stiller & Meara tick – revealing, for example, that Anne’s mother committed suicide when her daughter was only eleven – but it is narrow.

    I’ve nearly always enjoyed Ben Stiller as a performer.  Here I found him increasingly uncomfortable to watch.  Perhaps the warning signs are there from the self-referential start of Nothing is Lost.  He and Amy are in the family apartment they grew up in, preparing to sort out their father’s stuff before selling the place.  Ben asks Amy – but really himself – how is he going to make this documentary and witters on about cinéma vérité.  A bit later, he recalls missing his parents when they were away working and says he was determined, once his own career took off, not to repeat the mistakes Jerry and Anne made in putting work before family.  He eventually admits he probably did a worse job in this respect yet still doesn’t seem to understand why:  it’s hard to fathom how such a bright, self-critical man can’t seem to grasp that regularly bringing Ella and Quin along to the set of his latest movie, in effect reinforced his order of priorities.

    His daughter and son, both now in their early twenties, are open and likeable, as is Christine Taylor.  It may be that Ben Stiller means to stress how undeservingly lucky he is to have them all, but does he mean to give the impression that he does give, as his wife and children make affectionate criticisms of what he was like when Ella and Quin were growing up?   He nods his head, murmurs assent, never argues with what they say.  Yet he doesn’t really seem to be listening either.  He comes across as someone too familiar with, and going through the motions of, the talking cure.

    15 June 2026

    [1] Jerry Stiller in The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (1974), Airport 1975 (1974) and Hairspray (2007); Anne Meara in Awakenings (1990); both of them in their son’s Zoolander (2001).

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