In 1982, director Rob Moss released Riverdogs, a short film assembled from footage he took on a 35-day trip with a free-spirited group of close friends down the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon. Twenty years later, he followed it up with 2003’s The Same River Twice, checking in again on those same friends once they’d (mostly) left the wilderness and entered middle age. Now, comes his third check-in with those friends, The Bend in the River. All in their 70’s, Moss and his friends look back on their younger selves and ruminate on what’s changed. The film could easily just be an exercise in nostalgia. Instead, Moss has produced something far more thoughtful, almost elegiac.
The film begins with footage first seen in Riverdogs of the group cavorting naked on the river bank. They cook, they roughhouse, they put on lifejackets and nothing else to ride down the rapids. They seem free and happy. Moss then abruptly cuts to the group in present day, floating down that same river in large rafts, the water flowing lazily in front of their boats as we hear some of the women singing “Down to the River to Pray”. The contrast is both a striking way for Moss to emphasize the passage of time and a brilliant way to suggest that despite the 40-year difference, something essential about them hasn’t changed.
Part of the appeal of Michael Apted’s Up series, which checked in on the same group of British school children every 7 years from ages 7 to 63, was watching how the subjects evolved over time. Some, in middle age, seemed very different from their younger selves only to revert to that core personality they had as children in their later years. Similarly, Moss, with a much wider gap between each film, uses footage from each era to convey how his friends have changed. In that way, he ensures newcomers to this series needn’t feel obligated to seek out previous films (which are airing at select screenings of this film but aren’t currently streaming anywhere) in order to understand this one.
He re-introduces his friends one by one. There’s Jeff Golden and Cathy Shaw, who were madly in love in the first film, on the rocks in the second film thanks to Jeff’s infidelity and, in the present, divorced but still living across the street from each other. There’s Danny Silver, who recognizes herself in the original footage from her bare breast alone. There’s Barry Wasserman, who notes that the last time Moss filmed him, he was married to a different woman named Deborah Anne, who, like his current wife, Deborah 2, grew up in Santa Clara county California with a one-eyed dad named Bill. “No one can believe that,” Barry acknowledges, “it’s ridiculous.”
There and with all the film’s cast of characters, there’s an easy rapport between Moss and his subjects that allows the audience to slip right into the group, as if we too were there with them, climbing naked up the canyon walls. Indeed, much of The Bend in the River has the relaxed, frank quality of a deep conversation with longtime friends. When Barry pokes fun at Moss’s habit of recording them saying something profound while they drive, we just know that he’ll eventually capture Barry doing exactly that.
However, while Barry’s calling out of Moss’s style could undercut the film’s ultimate meaning, the way Moss still manages to pull such brutally honest analyses from his friends on their lives and the way their, “unscheduled, outdoor life,” affected both themselves and the world at large is what makes the film so striking. “We thought we were immortal and the river was eternal,” says a title card in the film’s last act. So, it’s devastating that Moss immediately cuts to the group’s young river guide, Max, in the present day, explaining that the river’s water level has dropped 15 feet in the past 20 years. When Moss inevitably gets his scene of Barry saying something profound, they look out on a hazy landscape seemingly obscured by forrest fire smoke, Barry on the verge of tears as he acknowledges their generation’s culpability in the state of the world. “Alright young people, go fix it. We’re sorry,” Danny says over a Zoom call. “Our legacy…it’s gotta be more than salad bar and Bill Clinton.” Indeed, it’s precisely that clarity and willingness to admit fault that makes The Bend in the River so intimate, so compelling as a portrait of the way we experience time and the narratives of our lives.
When we see Danny in present day talking about how she had to let go of her concept of what her life should look like, it’s satisfying to then see her go from quitting her job in a genetics lab thanks to an overbearing boss 20 years ago to happily working in a restaurant in her 70’s. When she says her manager at the restaurant once reminded her, “you know, you were my hip-hop teacher when I was 7-years-old,” she says it without resentment. Rather, her acceptance of those versions of herself conveys the understanding that she’s lived a full life.
Indeed, that is the ultimate point of The Bend in the River. Moss and his friends don’t necessarily judge who they are or could have been. With age has come peace and it’s frankly a refreshing perspective to see in a culture that can be so obsessed with youth and projecting perfection. As Barry and Deborah discuss when looking at a picture of young Barry, despite their age, they still contain all the feelings and experiences of the young, beautiful, vibrant young people they used to be. “Don’t get fooled by this last, fragile incarnation,” Barry says.
