The best scenes in the film are those that move outside its range of cultural thinking - the ones in which Dennis Hopper lives. Why then, at the end of "River's Edge," does something of the movie stay with you? Partly because, however ineptly, it manages to touch on something - on a sort of deadening of the soul - that's threateningly real and that these teens symbolize. What the filmmakers don't seem to realize is that a numbed response to anything as monumental as death is a natural one. The film raises questions - about our reactions to death, about the ramifications of change in the culture - and then makes a muddle of them. Matt's answer is always the same: "I don't know." And the filmmakers want us to hear the rumbling of the apocalypse in his words. In one scene, a cop bears down on the Matt (Keanu Reeves), the boy who "narcs" on John, screaming, "What did you feel when you saw her? Were you shocked? Angered? Excited? Or didn't you feel anything?" The movie's point of view is essentially that of alarmed parents. It's like "Rebel Without a Cause," but only the bad parts - the scenes between James Dean and Jim Backus. "River's Edge" looks at its troubled teen-agers in the same way that the youth movies of the '50s and '60s did. They want to blame somebody.īut the movie's thinking is hackneyed and sloppy. It wants to find out why these kids, who have grown up in splintered, lower-middle-class homes, are like they are. The film has a hectoring, hysterical tone. Jimenez and Hunter use the characters' lack of affect as an indictment. When Layne asks him to help bury the body, he answers over his shoulder, "She's heavy."Īt its worst, "River's Edge" is crackpot sociology. From his point of view - which, though it makes sense, is hard to embrace, simply because Glover is so bad - John's act is a test of their loyalty and friendship, and he tries to encourage his mates to come to his aid. Layne, a rag-mop speed freak, is not only the gang chief, he's their moral center. And, in practical terms, it's the wrong one. Only Layne, the group's de facto leader, seems to have an emotional response. They're blanked out, voidoids, and their emotions have been so worn away that they can't even react to the loss of their friend. They are completely unsophisticated and, in the area of sex, not very advanced. They smoke and drink beer and hang out at the arcades. The movie, which is Hunter's second feature - his first was "Tex" - focuses on a group of dopers and heavy-metal freaks who have known each other since kindergarten. One member of the gang, Layne (Crispin Glover), pokes her with a stick to see if she's real. Looking at her stone-dead corpse, they still can't believe it. He's panicked, and when they don't believe him, he takes them in small groups down to the river bank. After grabbing a couple of brews, John (Daniel Roebuck) goes to school and tells his friends, not so much indulging in locker room braggadocio as looking for help. Neil Jimenez, who wrote the screenplay, and Hunter have loosely based their story on a similar 1981 case in Milpitas, Calif., in which a heavy-metal teen throttled his girlfriend, raped her and then walked away, leaving her nude body behind. The image of that dead girl's body at the begining of Tim Hunter's new film, "River's Edge," is a potent one, and it's at the mixed-up heart of this movie. Death, he thinks to himself, changes everything. Sitting at her feet, the boy stares into space, rocking gently back and forth, clutching the girl's clothes. Only a short time has passed, but already her lips have turned a grape-juicy purple, and, lying against the bright green of the grass, her skin has an unearthly alabaster hue. Beside him lies the nude body of his girlfriend, whom he's just strangled to death. It's a gray northern California morning, and by the edge of the muddy waters of a river at flood-tide, a big, lumpish teen-age boy lets out a couple of loud, spirited whoops.
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