The Same River Twice (2003)

The man stands before the river, shimmering naked in the sun. It’s a moment long vanished, one that feels farther away than even the 20 or so years that have passed since the image was captured. It’s the Colorado River, 1978. People are rafting naked, swimming naked, walking naked. The pictures are grainy, shot in 16mm film. A home movie Harrad Experiment.

“I didn’t know what I was doing,” Robb Moss says now of the footage he shot then, as a young man on a month-long rafting trip in the Grand Canyon. The documentarian was filming his first work, Riverdogs, which, as Moss wryly says in his DVD commentary, very few people have seen. But, he adds, “Even then as I was filming this material, I was aware that this part of my life was passing.”

The passage of time is central to The Same River Twice, a modest documentary that endeavors to find the narrative arc bridging moments decades apart. With its more recent sections shot on videotape, it retains a sly, affecting power. It might rock you a bit, regardless of whether you are 25 or 45, and compel you to revisit the fundamental choices you have made. Moss originally filmed a trip of 17 people during what might be labeled a final gasp of freedom. Then, in the late 1990s, he decided to document the lives of five people from that initial trip, not knowing what form the new story would assume. (Originally, there were six, but like Kevin Costner in The Big Chill, he wound up on the cutting room floor.)

We meet the first, Barry, right away, as the images of naked men and women yields to a pedestrian bathroom. Barry, balding and in his late 40s, is looking through his medicine cabinet, ticking off the expired pill bottles. Moss’ point is clear: drugs, or love, or sex, or adventure — which fueled the wild trip of 1978 — remain part of the participants’ lives, but are now deeply sublimated. Pragmatism rules. Barry flosses his teeth. He does so, he says, because he no longer feels invulnerable.

Barry is married, living in small town in California, with three children and a slightly haggard wife. He’s the mayor, facing an uphill battle for re-election, running on what appears to be a Green platform. There’s a hapless, nebbishy quality about him, and Moss’ decision to feature Barry first (and in fact, Barry seems to dominate the film) in the cast of characters may be due to Barry’s underwhelming presence. He appears to be as far removed from the naked days of his youth as Isaac Mizrahi is from Austropithicus Man. Barry notes sadly that co-workers are often surprised to see him wearing shorts, as if he popped from the womb in Dockers.

Barry’s seeming polar opposite is Jim, who was the river guide for the 1970s trip. Heavily bearded and eternally amused, Jim has never left the river (“Except for the six months he tried to become a dentist,” the film tells us. You’re not sure if Moss is joking). Jim is framed as an eternal man-child, standing spread-legged on a raft and playing a fiddle as he floats down a canyon river.

But Moss, in his DVD commentary, also frets over his choices involving Jim. “He was more complex than I made him,” the filmmaker says. (For balance, we’re supplied with a shot of a Chomsky paperback in Jim’s cluttered one-room trailer.) It’s a defect that Moss can’t fix. When Jim appears to take years even to pour the foundation for the small house he is building in the wild, he seems more comically inertial rather than a man who cherishes the slower groove he has found.

For other subjects, love has predictably gone rocky. Young lovers in ’78, Oregon marrieds Cathy and Jeff have divorced and have reached a sort of melancholy détente (he lives across the street). Cathy is also the mayor of her town, a fact that Moss found inspiring. The liberal values of the ’60s and ’70s weren’t only about hedonism, he says, but about ideals, about “making a difference.” Even Jeff is a former county commissioner. Now he hosts a radio show and writes novels about the environment. Cathy, however, seems to have found some sort of inner peace while Jeff appears consistently uncomfortable and isolated, surrounded by a thoroughly 21st century air of unmet expectations. Cathy’s goal, on the other hand, was to be mayor and drive a school bus. Now she says she would rather be a waitress.

Still another idealist, Danny radiates a Santa Fe sunniness. A New Mexico aerobics teacher and mother, she’s the kind of perpetually smiling woman who plays acoustic guitar for kindergartners. (Try not to picture Donal Logue in The Tao of Steve.) Like Cathy, Danny had an “important” job as a genetics counselor but chucked it. Moss intercuts scenes of 48-year-old Danny in her adobe house with pictures of her nude, younger self. While driving her minivan, Danny confesses that she cannot possibly tell her daughter the truth about her own past, the drugs and the experimentation. She “would lose all credibility,” she says.

Self-importance is a theme throughout the film, with Barry’s struggles providing its spine. Barry faces Election Day, a mother with a suicide wish, and a health crisis with equal diffidence. But in the end, he evinces a sort of bruised pride that grows endearing. It’s clear, perhaps, that Moss likes him more than many. Cathy rolls her eyes when Barry is mentioned. And Barry’s wife has startling thoughts on her husband’s mayoral candidacy.

All the while, grainy images of the rafting trip haunt the present. Moss explains that his film is, at heart, about the capacity of the now to change the then. Memories take on different meanings as our lives twist and transform. We’re never as carefree as we are in our simplest, wildest moments, just as we are never quite as earthbound as our mature, responsible selves make us feel. But like the river, our experiences can seem inevitable. A husband becomes a stranger. A career fades. The warm embrace of the sun gives way to the cold clutch of a surgeon’s table. “We had nothing but time,” Danny says wistfully, watching her younger, freer self on film. We still do. There’s just less and less of it.