James Y. Lee
Robb Moss has always had a sense of how things end. In 1978, the then-aspiring filmmaker took a Bolex camera with him on a trip down the Colorado River, where he was accompanied by five of his friends—an assemblage of hipsters with a propensity for nudism—over the course of thirty-five days. A short documentary materialized from the footage he shot then, called Riverdogs. The express aim of the film was to acknowledge the fading of the era that Moss and his friends existed in; an attempt to capture both them and the nature that surrounded them during that fateful, oddly defining month. Later, in 2003, Moss released The Same River Twice, which would become the beginning of a series that would capture how that same ensemble of hipsters shifted over time, all while observing their younger selves encased in celluloid amber from decades ago. Over two more decades later, a third film has now been released by Moss (with the help of Joel Coen and Frances McDormand as executive producers). It’s called The Bend in the River—no longer a repetition, but rather an omen of further changes to come, an acknowledgement that paths are now diverging.
The Bend in the River was bound to be the film from Moss that focuses the most on aging—inevitable for a series with gaps between installments nearly triple the length of time between Michael Apted’s Seven Up! films. Where The Same River Twice might have been an examination of aging by focusing on growth into adulthood, The Bend is now about what it means for life to have completely passed you by, without having to speculate on what it means, and now having to face what it is. Footage from Riverdogs emerges again here, as expected, but now scaffolded by footage from The Same River Twice, as well as an early intertitle: “We used to be river guides.” Life has since become more complicated, and more modest for everyone involved. Whatever ideals they’ve possessed in their younger adulthoods have been sublimated for the sake of finding whatever kind of stability in older age to compensate for the exhaustion of time. Among Moss’s friends, five of them have become his subjects once more: Jim, Cathy, Jeff, Danny, and Barry.
The film’s individual episodes are a mix of two primary things—observations of Moss’s friends as they navigate old age, and filmed footage of another trip a few of the friends take down the same river. Jim lives alone as a hermit in the woods in a profoundly disorganized van, in close enough proximity to an inadvertently symbolic unfinished house he tried to build, bound to be one with nature regardless of where life was set to take him. Cathy and Jeff underwent a turbulent marriage and divorce, marked by Jeff’s infidelity, but the amusingly fickle nature of their relationship has somehow left them good friends, and even collaborators, as Cathy is supporting Jeff’s political campaign for state senate. Danny has been in motion forever—literally, in the sense that she took up dance, aerobics, and percussive music over the years and decades, keeping her body in robust condition. Barry is staring down the looming horizon of retirement, a “less engaged” time that he’s been doing what he can to appreciate, especially in the wake of a cancer diagnosis from back when The Same River Twice was being filmed, which he fortunately managed to survive.
Moss and his friends ensure that their individual paths, no matter how divergent they are, never feel as though they exist in a vacuum. Everyone is always talking about each other in some form; in particular, Jim’s reputation precedes him now among the group in spiritual and monk-like terms. And Moss has found a potent collaborator in the form of editor Jeff Maimberg, whose sense for timing allows the film to flow between its own footage and that of the previous two installments to potent effect. At once, the film looks forward with just about the same frequency as it looks back, making good use of the treasure trove of footage at its disposal from all three of Moss’s films. Its cuts display with forceful clarity how consistent these people have remained, but also how much weight now exists on the changes that have since emerged—either in the way these people look, or what they’ve since surrounded themselves with. Granted, with the exception of a few well-composed shots, much of Moss’s footage visually seems like the formally glib contents of a home video across generations, but the people he captures are fascinating enough to mostly compensate for its compositional casualness.
The Bend, for a time, is a casual and unassuming look into these people’s lives, before a midway intertitle—“We believed we were immortal and the river was eternal.”—starts to clarify what it wants to aspire to. Among the film’s potent symbolic discoveries is the knowledge that the river these friends sought refuge in is drying up as a result of climate change, which segues into a moment of profound heartbreak from Barry about the harrowingly declining condition of modern society. We also grow to understand this ensemble as the stewards of the next generation, especially when watching Sarah—Jeff and Cathy’s daughter—stand as an example of their adult children growing into the world they want to belong in. There are also moments of amusing modernized resonance about Moss’s filmic act of preservation: footage from The Same River Twice discussing Jeff’s infidelity against Cathy suddenly becomes publicized by a political rival as an odd, cancel-culture sized threat to the momentum of his campaign. All the while, Jim is coming to terms with steadily declining health, the closest this film comes to mourning one of its subjects, as both acknowledge that this may be the final time he could be seen in front of Moss’s camera.
Moss has made a modest, patiently meditative film here, at points perhaps close to structurally inert with a number of its weaker vignettes, but never truly dull at any point. What keeps the momentum of The Bend in the River going is—like the trip that defined Riverdogs—a kind of casually earnest curiosity about the flow of these people’s lives, willing to stomach rougher patches of current in order to reach an arbitrary yet meaningful destination. Among the film’s greatest moments of power is when a young baby—Lucas, Barry’s first grandchild—looks up in entranced awe at Moss’s camera, before knocking it over to reveal Moss himself, immediately turning him from documentarian observer into active participant, and inadvertently bringing into symbolic clarity some of Moss’s hope for what may come in the next generation.
The generation Moss and his friends exist in are about to leave a world that is worse than they left it, and there is little at this point they can do now to fix it for their children. They lack the energy to uplift freedom and upheaval the way they did when they were young; they lack the time needed for proper remedy. But Moss’s act of preservation is a hopeful one—in that maybe by encasing his friends on celluloid, tape, and digital, he can provide a model for what is to come. Younger generations are plagued with a debilitating sense of impatience and speed, with the clock running out by the minute in a world that is impatient to accelerate, all to the detriment of its people. But life is long, Moss says in The Bend in the River; terribly long, boringly long, encouragingly long, sadly long, long in the way that life should be. If only the world around us were willing to slow down to acknowledge this natural truth—if only the world might not end tomorrow, so we could stop living as if it will.
