What ultimately makes up a movie? Is it just the still images being put together at 24 frames per second or does it need to have a story, a purpose or characters? Those are just a few of the questions running through my head since watching “River,” a movie that neither has a narrative, nor is informative enough to really be considered a documentary. Still, it’s almost impossible to take your eyes away from it.
Narrated by the great Willem Dafoe and with a script by Nobel Prize shortlisted nature writer Robert Macfarlane, “River” is less of a movie and more of a plea to humanity to keep rivers wild and free. The footage from director Jennifer Peedom is gorgeous, spending the first half of the brief 75-minute runtime luxuriating in the god-like majesty of bodies of water across six continents before morphing into a lofty, anti-dam finger wag (not that humanity doesn’t deserve it).
What really makes the “movie” work is the music, starting with Richard Tognetti and the Australian Chamber Orchestra and then eventually moving into compositions by my favorite guitar player, Jonny Greenwood, British composer and pianist Thomas Adès, a dash of film composer (and Devo frontman) Mark Mothersbaugh, and the Radiohead piece, “Harry Patch (In Memory Of).” The powerful nature imagery, blended with the almost omnipresent music, keeps “River” feeling like a tool for transcendental meditation designed to hypnotize its viewer.
If you’ve seen 2017’s “Mountain,” you’ll know exactly what you’re in for with “River.” Also directed by Peedom, narrated by Dafoe and mostly scored by the Australian Chamber Orchestra, “Mountain” focused on the relationship between humanity and mountains, mostly by featuring adventure sports people such as Jimmy Chin, Conrad Anker and Alex Honnold.
I’m not sure that “River” works like “Mountain” does because “River” doesn’t educate as well as it could. As gorgeous as the footage in “River ” is, the filmmaker makes a strange and disappointing choice not to highlight where any of what we’re looking at takes place. We’re shown dams stifling rivers and being destroyed; rivers dried to nothing and also running free through un-touched wilderness, but are left with no clue of the locations. That’s why I hesitate to label “River” a documentary because it isn’t interested in teaching us anything. It exists for Willem Dafoe’s comforting voice to read us a conservation poem across an hour and 15 minutes of footage of anonymous rivers.
I get that it’s called “River” and not “A River” or “The River,” but by leaving the audience without any specific information about the footage they’re looking at in a nature documentary, the film can’t play as a call to action. “Koyaanisquatsi” came out in 1982, so we’re already well versed in non-narrative tone poems set to haunting music, but Dafoe’s voiceover isn’t subtle and hurts the entire vibe of the piece. He’s telling every viewer (by reading Robert Macfarlane’s poem/script) to save the world by respecting our rivers in ways we fail at daily by being members of the human race. Solid message, but it barely carries any weight when the filmmakers can’t be bothered to share with the viewer what they’re looking at (and what, specifically, they can do to help).
“River” is a beautifully meditative experience that would work better without Macfarlane’s obvious script and Dafoe’s melodramatic voiceover. The music and cinematography are so powerful that it would have been a lovely choice from Peedom to just let the audience infer her themes instead of literally narrating them without nuance or subtlety. There is nothing the simplistic metaphors get across that the music and imagery hasn’t already touched upon. This is supposed to be a movie, isn’t it? Show, don’t tell.
Still, those fundamental issues aside, if you just want amazing nature photography across a backdrop of gorgeous classical and contemporary music, then you could do worse than “River.” It’s always beautiful to look at and will probably help countless people with guided meditation, but the writing needed to elevate the film past looking like a smart TV home screen. Even though I’m not sure “River” is really a movie, the sumptuous melding of music and images is enough to recommend it. I’m ready for more Radiohead guided tours of nature, though.
This article appears in Source Weekly May 25, 2023.
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