THE SAME RIVER TWICE (Robb Moss, 2003) 74

Reviewed: September 21st, 2003

A nearly brilliant mess of a documentary, confused and unfocused, the former attribute admirable, the latter an occasional detriment. What's most vexing about The Same River Twice is how little its log line (Moss juxtaposes home movies of his hippyish friends on a 1970s exhibitionist rafting trip with footage of them twenty years later) does the film justice -- and I don't mean that as a compliment, per se. Truthfully, Moss's gambit seems to have been a ploy more than anything else (whether a personal one [= Moss justifying to himself that there's a movie here worth making], or a publicity one [= Moss trying to scrape up whatever three cents in financing he could find], I'm not sure), since the interweaving of the rafting footage is tenuous as best: (a) there ain't much of it, (b) it doesn't illuminate particulars about anyone or anything (meaning the footage could essentially represent anyone's juvenility), (c) almost all the friends no longer communicate with each other (though two used to be married), so the fact they even were friends -- aka who the documentary is focusing on in the first place -- is strikingly arbitrary. Indeed more than anything else the old footage works as an effectively terse (and very comely) visual metaphor Moss can cut to whenever needed, an unruly symbol of freedom and youth tangled up in grainy images of naked bodies communing with nature. Remarkably, what makes The Same River Twice special is its affectingly intimate portrait of the mundane, of random middle-class adults dealing with the bullshit of quotidian existence (there's a harrowing cancer section here that exposes just how offensively glib American Splendor's is, btw) while throwing a quick glance back at their past selves and -- ideally, though not always, since for all of Moss's closeness with his subjects he's not incapable of missing an opportunity to ask rough questions -- wondering if, how, and why they've changed, or more importantly, whether they've changed for the better (there's a silent despair lurking underneath at least half of the subjects' faces). The real gold mine of the bunch is Barry Wasserman, who Moss (wisely) spends the majority of the runtime with and who has an ability to throw out truly profound -- yet simple -- comments. Still, the unbalance is a problem. One friend Moss returned to is barely in the picture and I can't fathom why Moss thought he had to cut his dense movie down to an absurdly scant 78 minutes. But regardless of whatever length was decided upon, The Same River Twice would always be a necessarily enigmatic film, with the question of whether domesticity is a virtue -- a necessary part of aging -- or sometimes regrettable, left lingering long after the end credits scroll.

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