The River King (2005)

October 21, 2005, release date

Directed by Nick Willing

Screenplay by David Kane

Based on the novel The River King by Alice Hoffman

Music by Simon Boswell

Edited by Jon Gregory

Cinematography by Paul Sarossy

Edward Burns as Abel (“Abe”) Grey

Jennifer Ehle as Betsy Chase

Thomas Gibson as August “Gus” Pierce

Rachel Lefèvre as Carlin Leander

John Kapelos as Joey Tosh

David Christoffel as Matt Farris

Jamie Thomas King as Harry McKenna

Julian Rhind-Tutt as Eric Herman

Jonathan Malen as Nathaniel (“Nate”) Glass

Sean McCann as Ernest Grey

Distributed by Kismet Film Company

Produced by imX Communications, River King Productions, Spice Factory Productions

Are you thinking that you never heard of The River King? I thought the same thing the first time I learned that Alice Hoffman’s novel was the basis of this film starring Edward Burns. It is a Canadian and United Kingdom production that apparently was never released to theaters in the United States. Instead it went straight to DVD.

Alice Hoffman is one of my favorite writers, although I have not read The River King. I fell in love with another of her novels, Turtle Moon, the first time I read it. Turtle Moon won the Hammett Prize for crime writing in 1992. I always say that I am not very fond of categories, but I just couldn’t imagine why Turtle Moon would be put in the category of crime writing, even though it has a murder investigation and plenty of mystery. I guess I should really ask myself why I keep insisting on seeing it mostly as a love story. But learning that Turtle Moon won the Hammett prize and that The River King was also about a murder investigation prompted me to see the film. (Ed Burns in the starring role of Abe Grey also figured into my decision, I must confess.)

The Hammett Prize is awarded annually by the International Association of Crime Writers, North American Branch (IACW/NA). Click here to learn more from Wikipedia about the Hammett Prize and past winners.

The film is based on Hoffman’s novel of the same name. The body of a student from the local private school, the Haddan School, is found frozen in the river, and Officer Abe Grey and his partner Joey Tosh are given the task of investigating the circumstances of the boy’s death. Some people at the school and in the police department assume that the student, Gus Pierce, killed himself because he had trouble fitting in, but Abe becomes suspicious because he and Joey find a mysterious red substance (which may or may not be blood) under the boy’s shirt. Abe’s investigation of Gus’s death parallels his decision to confront the circumstances of his brother’s death many years ago. In both instances, he has to learn to face the truth.

(This blog post about The River King contains spoilers.)

I was really disappointed the first time that I saw The River King on DVD. Here are some of the questions that I thought the film didn’t answer satisfactorily:

◊ What was the significance of the dripping water on the pan in Abe’s kitchen sink (the noise he hears in a dream one night) and the clicking of a metal pull tab of the shade against the train window when Abe is riding on the train?

◊ What is the significance of the train that Abe is riding late in the film? Viewers see the view out the back of a moving train at the start of the film and again near the end, but what is the significance of these shots? What do they mean for Abe?

◊ How does this view out of the train tie in with Abe remembering what happened to his brother Frank?

I decided to see the film a second time; I thought maybe I could patch together some answers to my questions. A second viewing was a good decision. I discovered that I missed several important details and that the film is actually a bit more complicated than I originally thought. Most of the answers are in the narrative. On my initial viewing, I had trouble making sense of the plot, but not because the plot was full of holes. Details were much easier to spot on a second viewing.

Behind the opening credits and music, music that is both somber and unnerving, The River King starts with several shots of seemingly random and unconnected items. Here are some examples:

◊ Out-of-focus reflections on water

◊ Time lapse photography of sun, snow, and woods

◊ A group of boys or teenagers meeting at night in the woods

◊ Two young boys running through snowy woods

◊ A cube decorated with Chinese characters (the red and gold Chinese box)

◊ Shot out the rear of a moving train showing a winter landscape

◊ Photo of team/girls in bathing suits (a school swim team?)

◊ Abe Grey driving along a road flanked by snowbanks

◊ The two young boys now carrying hockey sticks and running through the woods

After my second viewing, I could see that these shots and the focus on the various items are explained later in the film.

A second viewing also allowed me to appreciate other fine details about the narrative and the film. I realized that conversations in the present continue as voice-overs leading into the past, into flashbacks. The technique works really well, but viewers have to pay close attention or risk getting confused. The way the flashbacks are handled leaves Abe and viewers wondering about their significance in the present, and only slowly is their significance in the past revealed—both to viewers and to Abe. Abe keeps seeing flashbacks from his own childhood, his own memories of a traumatic event. For example, during his initial inquiry into Gus Pierce’s death on the campus of the Haddan School, Abe follows a young boy into a bathroom at Chalk House, where Gus Pierce lived; it’s where Gus is dunked in a toilet by fellow students sometime before he died. Viewers see Abe in the same bathroom, and they hear the louder and louder dripping of water, but does Abe hear the dripping, too? And does it really matter whether he does or not? Probably not, but I certainly wondered about it the first time that I saw the film. Viewers learn later that the young boy is an image from Abe’s past. It’s one of the examples of Abe and viewers being led into the past without any obvious transition or cut.

Abe’s insistence on pursuing his line of investigation into Gus Pierce’s death leads to him resigning from the police department. What he gains from continuing his investigation is on a personal level because the similarities between the circumstances of Gus’s death and his brother’s death years ago force him to come to terms finally with his past. This plot thread is brought to a conclusion, but viewers must pay careful attention throughout the film because many interconnected details are important.

To my credit, some details are emphasized for no apparent reason. One example is the teacher Betsy Chase taking the photograph of Gus Pierce’s bed in his room after his death. It seems to be a link to an odd image of possibly a face in the photograph she develops later in the film, but she seems to be the only one who sees it. One of Abe’s colleagues in the police department examining the photo thinks Betsy Chase just made a mistake. Another example is the tiny fish that Carlin finds in the pocket of Gus’s overcoat, which Gus’s father gives to Carlin as a memento of her friendship with Gus. Does Carlin see the fish as an incarnation of Gus? As simply a connection to Gus? Maybe these points are clarified in Hoffman’s book, but viewers of the film shouldn’t have to read the book to find answers to their questions.

Most of the filming was done in Canada in winter, and it could be argued that the landscape and the weather are like characters themselves. The snow and the cold figure prominently: snow falling; ice forming over the river, even with its currents; snow banked deep along the streets of the town and in the woods. The characters are dressed for the cold: Abe Grey often wears thick boots and a fur-lined cap. The cold, the snow, and shots of quiet woods emphasize Abe’s loneliness and his desire to come to terms with past events. They also emphasize the mood of the film, which is a story filled with uncertainty and restrained class hostility.

One of the underlying themes in the film is how much people hold back to protect others from truths they might not be able to handle. This theme is carried over from Abe’s investigation into his personal life. Everyone has secrets, and several characters keep secrets in order to protect others. The film lets viewers decide if this is a good way to approach others in one’s life, which is a very satisfying way to conclude The River King.