The River Why

For all The River Why's ponderous grasps for the meaning of life, nobody can accuse the movie of trying to be too universal. Not after the hero, a young man named Augustine Orviston (Zach Gilford of NBC's Friday Night Lights), explains his crisis in voiceover: "What can you say after you've spontaneously cremated your parents' prize fish in the fireplace?" This is a highly specific dilemma, and I could not begin to guess what I would say—So long, and thanks for that one fish?—but our hero decides to leave Mom and Pop Orviston (Kathleen Quinlan and William Hurt) and go angling in the Coast Range, living in a creekside cabin with his tackle and fly lures. Augustine trades in the City of Man for the City of Trout.

It is a cherished belief of mine that a fishing scene can improve any movie; The River Why challenges that theory, since if you took away the fishing scenes, you would have no movie. The problem is not that these scenes are boring—actually, several of them are somewhat affecting, and all of them are soothing, with cinematography by someone billed as Crash who makes sure that the mountain streams look as limpid as mountain streams. The problem is that fishing is a pastime that gives a person a lot of time alone with thoughts about what fishing means, and The River Why is compelled to voice all of them. This movie contains a character who introduces himself with "I'm a philosopher" and talks in arcane diction about God while smoking a cigar. This movie also contains a drowned corpse which inspires questions about mortality. Unfortunately, they are not the same man.

I probably wouldn't feel compelled to say anything at length about The River Why, except that it was filmed along Tillamook's steelhead-rich Wilson River, with a scene or two in Portland's World Forestry Institute. Although technically part of the Portland indie-movie bloom, the movie actually feels like a holdout from an older version of the state: It's based on a novel by David James Duncan epitomizing a pokey Northwestern transcendentalism that also sprouted Tom Robbins and especially Norman Maclean. Directed by journeyman Matthew Leutwyler, the adaptation is an admirable effort to make a movie without any plot whatsoever. (There's a girl, Amber Heard, and it is no spoiler to reveal that the movie's emotional climax is Augustine fishing, then making love to the girl, then going fishing again.) But it would take a filmmaker of Terrence Malick's nature-contemplation gifts to make The River Why widely interesting—and even Malick runs into trouble when he's just contemplating nature. Leutwyler gets the pristine river and the eyes of William Hurt (damn, but are they also limpid!) and wants nothing else.

60 SEE IT. The River Why opens Friday at the Hollywood Theatre. William Hurt and Zach Gilford will attend the premiere at 7 pm Friday, Sept. 9.

WWeek 2015