* (out of four stars)
Starring Zach Gilford, Amber Heard, Dallas Roberts, Kathleen Quinlan, and William Hurt
Directed by Matthew Leutwyler
Rated PG-13 for some sensuality/partial nudity
Running time: 101 minutes
The River Why is one of those rare films about fishing, an activity that seldom gets dwelled upon in movies. Mostly, it’s a film about the relationship between man and nature, a subject that has been explored by many different artists with many different takes on it. The River Why is a movie that does a couple of things well. Like most movies that take place in nature’s kingdom, the cinematography is lovely, courtesy of Karsten Gopinath. Given that it deals with fishing, it also captures a few moments in a way that seasoned fly-fisherman can relate to, such as unwanted encounters with less-experienced fisherman who inadvertently ruin a local spot by plunking in with their amateur rods and reels. This is roughly all the good stuff The River Why has to offer.
Based on the novel by David James Duncan, the film begins with a troublesome voiceover in which the protagonist, Gus (played by Zach Gilford of Friday Night Lights fame), dumps some factoids on us regarding water that serve as thinly-veiled metaphors, before going into his family’s unhealthy fishing obsession. Gus tells us that he has been a fishing prodigy from an early age, yet his younger brother hates water to the point where he won’t even drink it, and preciously even goes so far as to wear a raincoat and galoshes to avoid touching it. His mother (Kathleen Quinlan) is a rough-and-tumble wilderness type who has no problem killing dogs with a shotgun in a populated neighborhood, and his father (William Hurt) is an pretentious, douchebaggy celebrity fisherman whose initials are HHO. Get it? H2O. If you’re not laughing, I don’t blame you. It’s the sort of rogues’ gallery of cartoon characters that’s so indie-precious, it makes Zooey Deschanel’s body of work look like she’s jockying for a role in an Ingmar Bergman film.
To make a long story short, Gus grows weary of his parents’ endless bickering and moves out to a cabin in the wilderness to live off of his fishing in solitude, as well as “find himself,” the way twentysomethings are wont to do in movies. While out there he meets a group of knuckleheads that are just as annoying to endure as his family, if not more so. One is a self-proclaimed philosopher named Titus (Dallas Roberts), and another is a gal named Eddy (Amber Heard), who is the sort of free-spirit love-interest hottie that only exists in the minds of lovelorn male writers. Titus is the sort of insufferable character that Wes Anderson would create if he were bankrupt of talent. A pipe-smoking fly-fisherman, Titus has conversations with a dog named Descartes that are just as vapid as the ones he engages in with Gus, which is where the film’s themes are discussed into oblivion. Once Eddy shows up, we get on-the-nose banter between Gus and Titus that draw parallels with fishing to wooing women. This is the sort of movie that is really impressed with its painfully obvious metaphors, so much so that it can’t bear the thought of anyone in the audience having a chance of missing them.
Films like this make blowhard hacks like Robert McKee look correct when they say that voiceover nothing more than a lazy screenwriting tool. Absolutely nothing about the protagonist is revealed dramatically in The River Why, nearly everything is fed to us via voiceover in a boring, expository manner, and the actual conversations between characters are just as shallow. Filmmakers like Martin Scorsese and Terrence Malick are pros when it comes to exploring a character via voiceover, but The River Why resorts to simply stating what the audience should discover on their own. Given that this was originally a novel, it seems very little was done to actually adapt the story into something that could be feasibly told in a visual medium. Simply put, I have never seen a film that so neglects showing in favor of merely telling. It leaves the movie to merely die on the screen, like a fish that hopped out of water to explore something grand, only to be out of its element and dead in the dirt within minutes.
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