River's Edge
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DVD Cover Information
Actor: Crispin Glover, Daniel Roebuck, Dennis Hopper, Ione Skye, Keanu ReevesBrand: TWENTIETH CENTURY FOX HOME ENT
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Unknown), Dolby Digital 2.0; Spanish (Subtitled); French (Subtitled); English (Original Language), Dolby Digital 2.0
Format: Anamorphic, Closed-captioned, Color, DVD, NTSC, Widescreen
Picture Format: 1.85:1
Running Time: 99 minutes
Published: 2001-01-01
DVD Release Date: 2001-01-23
Audience Rating: R (Restricted)
Studio: MGM (Video & DVD)
Movie Reviews of River's Edge
Movie Review: A Negative Image of the Good
Summary: 5 Stars
A quarter of the way through watching River's Edge, I was having trouble putting my finger on the right adjective for the film or the way it was making me feel. "Discomforting/uncomfortable", "appalling/appalled", "disturbing/disturbed" all floated around in my head but were insufficient to describe the sense I had of a horrific...absence of something. I mentioned this to the friend who had been responsible for our movie choice of the evening, and he summed it up: "it's a negative image of the good". That was it. Or to put it in the words that came to mind shortly thereafter, as two degenerate 12-year-olds shoot crabs in a bucket for mild entertainment, "All wrong." Everything--everything--was just all wrong.
At first, this might seem appropriate, even inevitable, given the film's subject matter. River's Edge begins with a dead body; Samson, a high school Neanderthal pothead played convincingly by Daniel Roebuck, has killed a female classmate of his--for essentially no reason--and then tells his friends about the crime. The rest of the film follows the aftermath as hyperbolic Layne (Crispin Glover) makes it his (and their) mission to protect Samson, while Matt (Keanu Reves) and Clarissa (Ione Skye Leitch) act indecisively on a vague discomfort with this course of action.
But few films dealing with murder intentionally omit any internal viewpoint of morality or justice in the way that River's Edge does, and this is what makes it compelling and thought-provoking as well as deeply unsettling. On the back of the box, Matt is described as "struggling with guilt" over the decision not to turn Samson in, and indeed he does go to the police fairly early in the plot. Ah-ha, you might say, here is our standard of judgment. But numerous clues throughout undermine Matt's claim to moral objectivity, any strong sense of rightness that could shed light on the other characters' nihilistic apathy and dissoluteness.
Indeed the lack of deep feeling is a running theme throughout the film. Several of the adults accuse the kids of the crime of apathy--and yet we and they are presented with no appropriate example of feeling, no appropriate object for it. Clarissa's high school teacher idealizes the accomplishments of his generation ("We stopped a war, man"), Feck--the kids' drug dealer--accuses Samson of not loving the girl he murdered...like Feck had loved the woman he had killed many years ago. Every passion in the film, it seems, is misdirected, whether toward the trivial (more than once is rage expressed over beer) or the perverse. Samson's explanation of his crime--that he did it to "show everyone who's boss", that it made him feel "alive"--is chilling enough to shake the beliefs of the most devout Nietzschean. All in all, an exceptional film and well worth watching.
Summary of River's Edge
This disturbing little film is even more unsettling when you think about the fact that it's based on an actual case. Troubled teen Samson murders his girlfriend Jamie for no particular reason, leaves her nude body by the river's edge, then brings his friends to see the corpse to prove he did it. They look at her, prod her, and talk about her, but no one seems to manage to feel anything. "River's Edge" is ultimately a study of kids who are so numbed by drugs, casual parenting, and the ever present threat of nuclear war that not even death can get a rise out of them. A young Keanu Reeves is surprisingly poised as Matt, the one character with a few shreds of empathy left. His quiet performance is powerful enough to hold the audience's interest even with Crispin Glover and Dennis Hopper both being as crazy as they can be. Glover steals much of the movie with his whacked-out performance as Layne, the group's leader. He undercuts his teen alpha-male power with a nervous giggle, and the spin he puts on much of his dialogue manages to be scary and funny at the same time--after hiding Jamie's body for Samson, he complains: "You'd think I'd at least rate a Michelob!" "River's Edge" is not necessarily a pleasant movie, but it is certainly a compelling one. "--Ali Davis"Similar DVD Movies
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