CR: River’s Edge

As powerful and meaningful now as it was when it debuted at the Sundance Film Festival in 1986, River’s Edge is a dark and disturbing film (and based on actual events) about youth alienation directed by Tim Hunter (The Far Side of Jericho, TV’s “Deadwood”), and staring Keanu Reeves (A Scanner Darkly, The Lake House), Crispin Glover (Willard, Wild at Heart), and Dennis Hopper (Easy Rider, Land of the Dead). Though obviously not screening in competition in 2007, River’s Edge is being screened as part of the Sundance Collection, and also in an effort to promote film preservation – appropriate, because few film age this well.

John (Daniel Roebuck) stands at the edge of a river, howling across the water, the nude body of his girlfriend lying dead at his feet. He’s strangled her. He goes to school and tells two friends, Matt (Reeves) and Lane (Glover) about it. When they don’t believe him, he takes them to the river and shows them. They go back to school and tell the rest of their friends. When no one believes them, John brings a whole group of teenagers out to show them the body. The most disturbing thing about the events that follow are not the way in which the characters react, but the way in which they don’t. The violent murder of a friend inspires little emotional reaction among the group.

I had seen pieces of this film on late night television before catching it in it’s entirety at a screening my second day here at Sundance (with most of the cast, including Dennis Hopper and Crispin Glover, who is here with his own film, It is fine! EVERYTHING IS FINE!, present in the audience). The cast is absolutely brilliant, Reeves giving what could arguably be one of the best performances of his career. Glover steals the movie as speed freak Lane, whose reaction to the murder is the strongest of any of the characters, though morally misguided, and raises the question of which is more human, a weak empathetic reaction, or a strong amoral reaction? There is also the question of whether or not Lane is acting out of his own narcissistic need to be a part of something. But the most affecting scenes in the film are between Roebuck’s John and Hopper’s biker-turned-one-legged-hermit Feck – even to Feck, a criminal and killer himself, John represents a frighteningly disaffected generation without love, without compassion, without a future.