The River Wild (1994)

Three decades on, Curtis Hanson's whitewater thriller plays like a well-preserved artifact from a less self-conscious era of studio filmmaking. Meryl Streep is Gail, a Boston history teacher and former river guide, hauling her workaholic architect husband and their son down the Salmon River in a last attempt at marital repair. The scenery is handsome, the rapids are loud, and the marriage is failing in the ordinary way marriages fail in 1994 movies: too many late nights at the drafting table.

Then Kevin Bacon appears in a wet suit, and the vacation becomes a hostage negotiation conducted at oar point. Bacon's Wade is a charming armed robber, which remains the film's most durable invention. The social content on offer is modest and mostly structural. Gail is competent, decisive, and ultimately the one who pulls the trigger, a female-action-hero arrangement that critics noticed at the time and that the American Film Institute later nominated for its heroes list. A Latino park ranger, played by Benjamin Bratt, drifts through a few scenes and is shot for his trouble, with no remark made about his heritage. Deafness sits in the margins through sign language, handled as a practical detail of character. None of this is pressed into service as argument. The villains want money, not a reckoning with systems.

The result is a taut, faintly recycled thriller that never lectures. It wants to frighten us on the water and reunite a family by the final reel, and it does both with professional calm. For viewers accustomed to the modern habit of stapling a thesis to every raft, the film's silence on matters of identity and politics reads as almost quaint. A reimagining followed in 2023, which presumably found something to say. This one simply runs the Gauntlet.