Curtis Hanson (1994)
Gail Hartman, a Boston teacher who in her youth was an expert white water rafter and a guide on the Salmon River, Idaho, takes her kids back there on an adventure holiday-birthday treat for her son Roarke. Gail’s marriage to tensely unsmiling, workaholic architect Tom is in trouble. When Tom, according to habit, defects from the holiday at the eleventh hour, Gail thinks their marriage may be at an end. She says as much to her mother, who tells her daughter, kindly but firmly, that she doesn’t know what struggling to keep a difficult marriage together means: Gail’s father is deaf and dumb (Gail teaches history to deaf students). Just before Gail and Roarke set off on their river trip – the younger daughter Willa stays home with her grandparents – Tom turns up to join them but this hardly improves the family situation. He arrives dressed in his work clothes and his lack of appetite for adventure ahead is as palpable as the tension between him and Gail – and between Tom and Roarke. The latter is very taken by a relatively affable and exciting young man called Wade, who’s also about to set off down the river, with two companions. It wouldn’t be quite right to say that Wade and his sidekick Terry (the other member of the trio soon disappears mysteriously) turn out to be not what they seem – because they seem like men with a guilty secret from the word go. It turns out they’ve carried out an armed robbery, killing a man, and the rafting holiday – and Gail’s expertise and experience, to guide them through dangerous rapids – are their means of escape. Before long, after a brief flirtation between Wade and Gail, the Hartmans have got very suspicious about their companions. They soon find themselves, and their golden labrador Maggie, being held at gunpoint by Wade and Terry.
The opening titles sequence, with Gail single-sculling in Boston , has a rather fascinating sense of foreboding (and implication of eventual survival) but there’s nothing comparably unusual in what follows. Curtis Hanson keeps the action moderately exciting but the trouble with this kind of picture is that, once the family have become prisoners of the criminals, you don’t suspend disbelief so much as belief in any apparent gleam of hope that they may be about to escape. You know how long the film has to run and that things aren’t going to be sorted out until the last five minutes. And, by the point at which Wade and Terry reveal their true colours, The River Wild is no longer about anything except the Hartmans’ terrifying plight since Gail and Tom seem already (and very easily) to have resolved their marital problems. Needless to say, I’d no idea how plausible or otherwise the Hartmans’ various strategies to escape their captors were but the script, by Denis O’Neill, seemed to be one of those where there’s hardly any detail that doesn’t serve a subsequent plot purpose: Gail and Roarke find their ability to sign coming in handy at a crucial moment; Roarke’s birthday presents from his father (a Swiss army knife) and sister (a waterproof camera) do all that’s expected of them, and more.
The longer The River Wild goes on, the more irrelevant the acting talents of the cast become. The character of Gail is no kind of stretch for Meryl Streep – I assume it’s because the physical requirements were a stretch that she signed up. As tends to happen with her thinly-written roles, she’s evidently hungry for more; she keeps trying out different approaches as she goes along. Still, some of these are highly effective – especially Gail’s moments of quiet hostility to Wade – and Streep’s enthusiastic embrace of an action heroine role is very likeable. (According to Wikipedia, she did most of her own stunts and, nearing the end of one particularly exhausting day’s shooting, ‘ was swept off the raft into the river and was in danger of drowning, before she was rescued’.) As Tom, David Strathairn is made to appear excessively wimpy: he has to wear a pair of spectacles which might as well be a neon sign reading ‘not-a-man-of-action’. (Perhaps the remarkable durability of the glasses – still in one piece after Tom’s been in fights, crashed into rivers and slid down sheer drops – is symbolic.) Strathairn is a good actor, though, and he gives some depth to the character – as does John C Reilly as Terry: he makes you feel the man has a past. Kevin Bacon doesn’t; nor does he have the volatility needed to make Wade scary, although Bacon has a good connection with Streep. Joseph Mazzello does well as Roarke – he’s more emotionally nuanced than might be expected in the role. With Benjamin Bratt as an unlucky ranger, spectacular scenery photographed by Robert Elswit and a plush, over-explanatory score by Jerry Goldsmith. The dog Maggie, zestfully wagging her tail and licking human faces, performs with terrific histrionic flair (especially when she has to act scared at the prospect of jumping from the mountainside down into the river). Meryl Streep must have trained her.
21 May 2010
