The River

Mark Rydell’s follow-up to his hit, On Golden Pond, utilizes a familiar David and Goliath template but it rings enough notes of interest to sustain attention.

The David in this instance is Tom Garvey (Mel Gibson) a small-time farmer with a wife, Mae (Sissy Spacek) and two young children who is struggling to survive in the tough economic times of the early 80s and the Goliath is the burgeoning large scale food production industry represented by Joe Wade (Scott Glenn) who wants to buy out all the small farmers so that he can flood the valley in which they live and so provide a reliable source of water to irrigate his vast land-holdings.  

This is, needless to say, familiar territory but Rydell not only endows the material with a lot of genuine empathy for the lot of the small farmer (the film is strongly reminiscent of Richard Pearce’s Country which came out earlier the same year) but with the aid of veteran cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond, packages it attractively (John Williams also provides a mercifully low-key score)

Thus the opening sequence in which it rains and rains and rains and the titular river breaks its banks and  drowns the Garvey’s corn crop potently establishes the plight of the small farmer and the saga to come.Rydell maintains this kind of realism throughout although the film does slow down in its middle section when Tom has to leave the farm to work in a steelworks as a scab, a didactic passage which has its pay-off in the film’s equally overwrought  climax (lack of subtlety aside, this should have been the film’s end but, presumably to augment audience numbers we get a tacked-on and incongruous happy ending).

Whilst Spacek, not long from playing a Coal Miner's Daughter, is effective as s loyal farmer’s wife Gibson, who doesn’t look like he’s long from working on his Beverley Hills tan, is miscast as a man of the land. In the third major role Scott Glenn is, as always, dependable but his character is too ambiguous to be dramatically effective.  Initially he is established as venal businessman pulling strings to ensure the failure of the small farmers.  Then we find out that he was a former beau to Mae and still cares for her. Throughout he appears sometimes to be the villain, sometimes to be one of the boys (in one incongruous scene he's playing pool with the local yokels), one moreover with more sense than the belligerently stubborn Tom. That climactic scene, one which renders him ineffectual, sums up the uneasy duality of his character..

For all its shortcomings The River has genuine heart and is watchable. Its misfortune was to be the third film released that year that had “saving the farm” as its core subject (Places in the  Heart  was the other).

 

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