RIVER'S EDGE

dMYD DVD
Starring Keanu Reeves

Y

Who cares? There’s a body by the river and its eyes have turned white, it’s naked and dead and it’s one of your friends. Want a beer?
Generation X didn’t give a fuck about you and it certainly didn’t give a fuck about not caring. Bill and Ted didn’t care about history, John Bender didn’t care about his Saturdays and the kids down by the stream don’t care that one of their friends has been stripped and strangled by their buddy John, then left on the River’s Edge to rot. There’s laid back and there’s stone dead, the line blurring slowly through the film as the tone slowly shifts from bemused satire to horrifying reality. They really don’t care? They really feel nothing? No, they don’t, and no one understands. Your film has a problem when a blitzed-out, one-legged, blow-up doll dancing Dennis Hopper is the pivot of your moral compass, but boy he’s sympathetic, a relic from another time when anything meant something, when reacting against the man gave a reason to be. But this is 1986 and the hippies are dead.
The film is laconically stringent at projecting a glazed, frosted over view of American life, grey lenses and minimal music accentuating the nothingness of the town and its inhabitants. The performances of the teenagers are suitably understated and empty, sometimes evoking the callous dumb-bastardy of Heathers but more often showing off a frightening, more realistic void that’s entirely believable, even when sloped out of the open mouth of Admiral Whoah, the human Bonsai. And then there’s Crispin Glover. The professional genius/ waxwork scarecrow here gives a performance of such breathtaking toddler-screaming and monkey-flailing that it’s a wonder he got cast at all, and nearly serves to throw the whole thing out of whack with his scrawny Brando aping tantrum disco of distraction. You were told never to come in here, McFly. It’s the film’s one jarring piece of rubbish but then again, who cares? Overall it’s a great work of art about nothing, a portrait of a generation born to a world where everything’s possible but pointless, a frightening fable of what could happen if really, genuinely, no one cared.
It’s based on a true story.