Outdoor adventure movies are often a strong suit in the American cinema and “The River Wild” shows why. With its engaging archetypal characters and eye-filling shots of natural Western wonders, it’s a user-friendly family-movie thrill-ride, hard to love but impossible to dislike.
Shot in the rapids and cliff-lined banks of Montana’s spectacular Kootenai River, this tense tale of a one-time river guide (Meryl Streep) battling a failing marriage, outlaws on the run and the churning white-water frenzy of the river sweeps us right into its big cheerful, scary images.
The drama here may be pop psychology, laced with the usual movie-thriller jokes. But, when that wild river roars-carrying along Streep’s dazzlingly competent outdoorswoman, Gail, her bespectacled artist husband, Tom (David Strathairn), their feisty son, Roarke (Joseph Mazzello), their even feistier dog, Maggie, and two mysterious interlopers-we can happily surrender ourselves to the racing current. In the capable hands of thriller specialist and occasional Hitchcock imitator Curtis Hanson (“Bad Influence,” “The Hand That Rocks the Cradle”), we’re zoomed along in the sunlight, river-raft bobbing above whipped spray and jagged rocks.
Part of the pleasure of intense physical activity is that it spares you from thinking-or brooding. And, to a degree, that’s what physically complex, emotionally straight-ahead action movies like “The River Wild” can do. The rapids-running sequences are spectacular, the suspense set-pieces cannily planned. And the villainous interlopers-Kevin Bacon as Wade, a charming psychopath, and John C. Reilly as his disgruntled sidekick, Terry-perform the same amusing and blood-chilling function as in 1940s and ’50s Hitchcock movies. By assaulting the family, they expose its inner tensions. By providing a test, they allow the family to stand and fight together. By not being too invincible, they suggest a way out of the darkness.
Streep-looking wildly fit and doing 90 percent of her own river-rafting-here plays Gail Hartman, whose breathtaking Montana girlhood (blowing down the rapids with her white-water-daring dad) has been sacrificed for a cheerless Boston present with a commercial artist husband. Strathairn’s Tom is so eviscerated by job worries he can’t even show up once a year for his son’s long-planned birthday trips.
This couple initially seems an improbable match. (We may even wonder if Tom’s frequent absences aren’t caused by adultery.) And one of the movie’s big weaknesses is the vast suspension of disbelief required to accept Tom first as an introverted artist uneasy in the outdoors, and then, suddenly, as Superdad, scaling cliffs, leaping like a mountain goat from crag to river and swimming seal-like to the rescue of his family.
But, with Bacon as Wade, there’s at least a motive. Bacon turns himself into a one-man assault on family values; he oozes sexual menace and genial sadism. Meeting the Hartman family at the start of the river trip and gradually insinuating himself into their lives, flirting with Roarke and then Gail-while casually teasing or deprecating Tom-Bacon’s Wade is a grinning, seductive, violent charmer. He’s a cuckold’s worst nightmare: cooly cocky, irresistibly malicious. And though the script (or something) fails him in the last scenes, writer Denis O’Neill (or somebody) does feed him one memorable “heavy” line. When Roarke, disappointed by one of Wade’s outrages, says plaintively, “I thought you were a nice guy,” Wade replies easily: “I am a nice guy. I’m just a different kind of nice guy.”
It may seem strange to find Streep in an unabashed action movie, instead of a prestige action movie, like “The Deer Hunter.” But this one isn’t bloody and car-crashingly preposterous, even in the amiable screwball style of something like “Speed.” The rafting scenes are spectacular, but they’re not really impossible. The idea-which O’Neill culled from an article he wrote on rafting Montana’s Smith River-becomes a nice metaphor. They’re on a no-exit river, a no-exit marriage, a no-exit life.
So the movie isn’t really about any heart of darkness-however devilishly Wade may grin-but, in a way, about the entrapment people may feel, say, about life, marriage and careers. It’s clear that the moviemakers want to set a good modern example: a strong woman, a strong man, a strong and eventually obedient child, even a strong dog.
In that context, casting actors like Streep and Strathairn-who are known primarily for serious or socially conscious dramas-is a kind of masterstroke. Within the story’s obvious limitations, they carry instant credibility. The parts get more depth, more contradictions than they would have normally. Streep gives hers a charming, loose-limbed athleticism and physicality, ripe and rangy as a country queen.
But the actors-and cinematographer Robert Elswit and the stuntpeople-can’t completely redeem “The River Wild,” whose bizarre reversed title may have been caused by the existence of an earlier, and much better, movie, Elia Kazan’s 1960 “Wild River.” (That one was about the Tennessee Valley Authority, not jinxed vacations.) Looking at the ads here, you might imagine a modernized, feminized variation on the 1972 white-water classic “Deliverance,” which director John Boorman and writer James Dickey adapted from Dickey’s novel. But to compare “Deliverance” and this movie is to see how safe and sanitized-how much of a family movie-“River Wild” really is, and how much less truly adventurous movies are today than they were in 1972.
“Deliverance” was a movie filled with wildness, danger and real threat. Its surface was turbulent, its depths icy and dark. “The River Wild’s” plot is closer to a 1950s thriller. And the taunting relationship between narcissist Wade and stiff-backed Tom even suggests the Eisenhower-era tensions between the characters in an Anthony Mann Western: Robert Ryan’s grinning sadist Vandergroat and Jimmy Stewart’s obsessive Kemp in 1953’s “The Naked Spur.” (So, of course do the isolated settings and the climax.)
Perhaps that’s why “The River Wild” is more of a family movie, a thrill-ride where all the crazier dips and turns are straightened out by the ride’s end. Hanson keeps the action clean, the tensions simmering. As a family movie, it’s actually pretty good. Not as delightful an entertainment as the generally liked “Lion King” or the generally ignored “Black Beauty” (the season’s best family film), but pleasing and exciting in a less ambitious way.
The real river may rage, the real rocks may cut, real violence may plunge out of control-and real marriages may respond to somewhat less drastic therapy than we see here. But realism isn’t “River Wild’s” strategy, except on the surface. It’s a nice story with bad guys and moms, dogs and rivers-a raft that won’t tip over. The movie, and the raft, are lucky they have Streep around to keep them right.
”THE RIVER WILD”
(STAR)(STAR)(STAR)
Directed by Curtis Hanson; written by Denis O’Neill; photographed by Robert Elswit; edited by Joe Hutshing and David Brenner; production designed by Bill Kenney; music by Jerry Goldsmith; produced by David Foster and Lawrence Turman. A Universal release; opens Friday at Burnham Plaza, 900 North Michigan, Webster Place and outlying theatres. Running time: 1:48. MPAA rating: PG-13.
THE CAST
Gail Hartman………………………….Meryl Streep
Wade………………………………….Kevin Bacon
Tom Hartman……………………….David Strathairn
Roarke Hartman……………………..Joseph Mazzello
Terry………………………………John C. Reilly
