"The River Wild"
                             A film review by
                           Linda Lopez McAlister
                           on "The Women's Show"
                         WMNF-FM (88.5), Tampa, FL
                              October 8, 1994

   I lived in New York City in the late 1960s and early 1970s. A friend of
mine was teaching in the theater department at Vassar College at the time and
he invited me to come to see one of his productions. I went because he was my
friend, I went back to see every play they did for the next few years because
of the magnificent performances by a student actor with the odd name of Meryl
Streep. She was extraordinary then, she's extraordinary now and continues to
add new dimensions to her long list of screen roles. The one role I never
thought I'd see her in is action hero, but, lo and behold, now in her forties,
that's what she is in "The River Wild." And she pulls it off in such style,
with such obvious enjoyment of the physicality and expansiveness of the
character and the surroundings, that it's hard for a feminist not to be drawn
to this woman on the screen.

   Sure the plot is predictable.  And no, this is in no way what I'd call
a feminist film.  But it's something fairly uncommon, in my experience, to see a
action-thriller set in the present where the hero is a mature woman who might
live next door to you. Streep plays Gail, a Boston wife and mother whose
exercise of choice is sculling on the Charles River. She lives in an apartment
with her son, Roarke, her daughter Willa (after Cather??), and her
husband Tom (the ubiqutous David Strathairn), a remote and uncomfortable,
work-obsessed architect who is seldom home and who begs off going on the river
rafting vacation Gail has planned for them to celebrate Roarke's birthday.
Going on without him to Montana where she grew up (and worked as a guide on
whitewater rafting expeditions as a young woman), Gail gets a chance, to talk
with her mother about the problems with her marriage. The traditionally-minded
mother counsels standing by your man no matter what, as she has done (though
to tell the truth, her husband is depicted as an awfully nice guy, all smiles
and signing "I love you" -- he's deaf -- to the family members as they depart,
along with Tom who has had an attack of guilty conscience and shows up for the
trip at the last minute with his briefcase in tow.

    There's another boat setting out on the river, too, with three rather
rough-looking men including a kind of charming one named Wade (Kevin Bacon)
who plays up to Roarke and has the boy dazzled by the time the boats shove
off. It doesn't take long for the adults to start suspecting that these guys
are not on the up and up (especially after one of them disappears), and sure
enough, they go from mere annoyances to real menaces--desperate criminals who
need Gail's expertise as a rafter to help them make their escape. They need
her and to keep her in line they need her son in their control. Expendable are
the dog and the inexperienced and ineffectual husband who, we find out in a
revelatory personal scene, is only working so hard because he feels he needs
to live up to his wife's "high standards."  You can figure out
from that what happens and how it ends. So suspense over the outcome is not
what makes this film work.

   What makes it worth your time and money is the visceral excitement of the
rafting scenes themselves, and the great images of Streep, maternal, loving,
caring toward her son, and capable, possessing essential skills, in control,
pitted against both the river and the killers--giving as good as she gets on
both counts. The fact that Tom, mistakenly left for dead, is able to use his
talents as an architect to good advantage in the final scenes and thus win
back the lost the admiration of his son and wife and his own self-respect
keeps the film from being merely a reversal of male/female
dominant/subordinant positioning.  By the end the predictable reestabli-
shment of the "proper" balance of power in the nuclear family is
achieved.  But sometimes the power of the images on screen out
weighs the ideology of the narrative.  For me, Streep fan that I
am, it's the images of her being powerful and intelligent and heroic
that I carry away with me.

   As in all films of this sort, the special effects
are magnificent as is the scenery (shot in a number of Northwest states). It
moves along at a nice pace and achieves the necessary degree of white knuckle
thrills which don't necessarily diminish just because you know it's going to
work out all right in the end. The casting and acting is all first-rate with,
of course, Meryl Streep leading the way.

Rated PG, this would be a good film to see with your kids, both boys and
girls. They don't see enough strong, good women on the screen.

   For the WMNF Women's Show this has been Linda Lopez McAlister on Women and
Film.

   Linda Lopez McAlister is Professor of Women's Studies and Philosophy at
University of South Florida, Tampa.

    Copyright 1994 by Linda Lopez McAlister. All rights reserved. Please do
not reprint this review without the permission of the author.