55 - Movie Review #9 - River's Edge

River's Edge

River’s Edge (1986)

Directed by Tim Hunter

Staring Crispin Glover, Keanu Reeves, Ione Skye Leitch, Roxana Zal, Joshua Miller and Dennis Hopper

1 hour 39 minutes

Over ten years ago, I saw a movie by Gus Van Sant called My Own Private Idaho and I thought this movie was a bit... weird. I knew Keanu Reeves had stared in this movie that was “out” there, so I when I saw the cover of the DVD for River’s Edge, I was wondering what to expect from this movie.

The DVD jacket of River’s Edge promotes this as “avante-garde cinema”. Maybe it might be viewed as “avante-garde” for rich people that have never integrated with people of “lower lineage”.

Well, the story is about a young teenage boy called Samson ‘John’ Miller who kills his girlfriend because she was “talking shit” about his mother.  John feels no remorse about his actions.

He tells his group of friends about the murder and they react in different ways and it takes them a while to realize that they should probably get in touch with the police. One friend, Layne, tries his best to cover up the whole thing. He believe John is still alive so they just have to “forget” about the body and move on with life.

Mixed into the story is Feck (Dennis Hopper) who is a hermit marijuana dealer with a sex doll as a “friend”. He’s also killed a woman/girl before... but for different reasons because he was in “love”. Feck meet John later in the movie as John is “dropped off” at Feck’s house to hide from the police.

This movie may have been controversial when it was released. I grew up in a cozy part of Vancouver and I didn’t have to come across many disillusioned youth like the ones that appear in this movie in my neighborhood but I’m sure there are lots of kids like this in smaller towns/cities in Canada (and even some neighborhoods of Vancouver).  At times, I found myself laughing at how ignorant these kids are.

The language that’s used in this film can be offensive. I found the little girl (she must be 5 or 6) saying, “I can’t get the damn thing to stand up straight,” a little offensive. Most of the young teenagers in this film insert the f word anywhere in sentence (not too unusual) and words like “dude” and “radical” pop up here and there. I found the student with the mullet telling his high school teacher to “fuck off” constantly to be funny... I can’t ever recall any students in my classes in high school saying this.

All of the main male characters nonchalantly smoke weed in this story (Matt, played by Keanu Reeves, smokes the stuff casually in his home without any care about what his mother thinks). Even, the twelve year old boy, Tim (Joshua John Miller) is always trying to score some.

The director, Tim Hunter, makes certain parts of the film pretty dramatic. The entire opening is well done introducing two characters and the dead body. We can realize that this isn’t going to be a straight-forward movie from the get go.

So, what the point of this film? I suppose it’s mostly an observation of youth in small town America.  The plot bring together two murders of females but they’ve both murdered for different reasons. One was for “love” -- Feck’s situation -- and the other was for “power”. The young kids in this film are all disillusioned with life... and they all have no real ambition to succeed.

I enjoyed this movie as it gives a somewhat realistic point of view of what life was like in the 80’s for some teenagers in America. 4 stars out of 5.

For more about this movie please click here.

© Quigley Mark 2013