River’s Edge leaves a disquieting feeling
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RIVER’S EDGE
Directed by Tim Hunter Written by Neal Jimenez
From one side of a bridge, a young boy throws a doll into the muddy, fast-flowing river below. On the river’s edge, on the other side of the bridge, sits a teen-age boy forlornly keening be-
sides the naked body of a girl he has killed. About half-way through “River’s Edge” (Metro), the little girl who owned the doll has erected a small cross on a grave in its memory, but down by the river, the corpse still lies slowly putrefying, an object of fascination, as the town’s teen-agers indecisively haggle over what to do.
Such parallels between incidents and characters continue throughout this disquieting tale about the apparent callousness of today’s youth, raising the question of personal responsibility. The girl was strangled by John (Daniel Roebuck), an oversized, inarticulate high school boy, who still can not formulate any meaningful explanation of what happened, nor of what to do about it.
The news spreads throughout the school, with both the boys and girls trekking to the river to find out whether this unthinkable tale is true. It is left up to one of John’s few friends, the hyperactive Layne (Crispin Glover) to organise his defence: nobody tells. Responses to John’s
deed vary, and finally another boy, Matt (Keanu Reeves), decides the responsible thing to do is advise the police. Meanwhile, Layne has hidden John in the ramshackle home of Feck (Dennis Hopper), an eccentric, paranoid former bikie haunted by the memory of a girl he killed 20 years ago. Besides his memories, Feck also lives with an artificial leg and a full-size sex doll,. Miss Elly, which he always addresses with extreme courtesy. The free distributor of drugs to the neighbourhood kids, and carrier of a chrome-plated revolver, who answers any knock on the door with, “The cheque is in the mail,” Feck is one of those great characters who act as the bizarre extreme of all other excesses in the film thereby somehow throwing them into perspective. Since Hopper’s appearance in last year’s “Blue Velvet” as a sex-pervert-junkie, it now seems safe to say that any future American neo-Gothic movie of the aspirations of “River’s Edge” would be feckless without him.
In fact, there has been a surprisingly large number of such off-the-wall, out-of-step comedydramas from the United States in recent years, which have usually proved more popular at art houses, mainly because their subject matter imposes a higher demand on the film viewer. Of the more popular that come to mind are “Raising Arizona,” “Over the Edge,” “Repo Man,” “Blood Simple” and “Something Wild.”
The viewer must be ready to accept unexpected violence, role reversals by the most straightforward of characters, and a peculiar mixture of comedy and drama leaving the audience uncertain whether to laugh or tense up. In “River’s Edge,” the characters are not presented to be likeable — there is hardly a nice person in the whole film — and Tim Hunter, the director, cast most of his actors’ roles contrary to their usual style. Most people will find it difficult to remember Crispin Glover, who plays the high-strung Layne, as the father in “Back to the Future.” One never knows where the next threat may come from, and in the intertwining sub-plots of “River’s Edge,” it soon looks as if the next murder may be committed by Matt’s precocious, 12-year-old brother, who says to his friend: “Go get your numchucks and your
dad’s car. I know where we can get a gun.” Finding bodies in unexpected places, and the farcical efforts to hide them, go way back, even before Alfred Hitchcock’s “The Trouble With Harry,” and last year we had a group of wholesome youngsters looking for a body in the forest in “Stand By Me.” So, why is it that “River’s Edge” leaves such a disquieting feeling? Surely, it is not just the thought of the fundamental moral breakdown of our society, for that problem has been discussed to the point of tedium since the times of the ancient Greeks.
In “River’s Edge,” a high school teacher tells his pupils of the activist days of the 19605, “when there was the civil rights movement, the women’s liberation movement, the stopping of the Vietnam war. There was meaning then.”
Later in the film, the teacher berates the children for being in the classroom at such a time. He says they should have spent a sleepless night thinking about the murder, and even now they should be out hunting John, to “kill him like a dog.”
Surely, such an action would not solve anything, but I think why the audience feels so uneasy is the knowledge that such wanton violence is going on in its own backyard, while it sits on its butt bemoaning how little is being done.
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Bibliographic details
Press, 11 July 1988, Page 17
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812River’s Edge leaves a disquieting feeling Press, 11 July 1988, Page 17
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