The Bend in the River, director Robb Moss’ third installment in his running chronicle of his friends’ lives (following The Same River Twice in 2003 and Riverdogs in the late ’70s ), is a gentle, effective documentary that can often feel like looking in a mirror. It’s very personal and revealing without doing much at all. To paraphrase the impossibly good tagline from the 1968 masterpiece The Swimmer: When you watch The Bend in the River, will you think about yourself? Over 40 years ago, Moss captured a weeks-long river trip of a small group of young counterculture types and the relationships among them. More than two decades later, he revisited five of those friends (Danny Silver, Jim Tickenor, Cathy Shaw, Jeff Golden, and Barry Wasserman) as they sunk into middle age. Jim held steadfast to a life outside of convention, but struggled to make ends meet; Jeff and Cathy had married and divorced in-between Riverdogs and The Same River Twice; Barry settled down into a suburban family life, then was rocked with a cancer scare which he survived; and Danny lived well enough in New Mexico, though in a job she did not like.
Now it’s two more decades gone, and everybody has grown old. At one point, in his kitchen cooking, Jeff asks Moss: “Didn’t we have a scene kind of like this twenty years ago?” The answer is: yes, but also no. The motivations have changed. There’s another bittersweet moment where Danny recalls all who once lived in her house (husband, children, pets) that have now gone away: “It was a full house… and now it’s me.” Jim looks worse for wear, and his unfinished house emerges as an obvious, striking metaphor for Bend in the River‘s back half. All five have become quieter and a bit slower, as is to be expected. But when Moss and editor Jeff Malmberg place these modern images up against frames from the first two films, the fragility of time comes into harsh, sharp focus.
“We were 28, and now we’re 70,” one of them says later on in the picture. Even the river they’re riding on with their young tour guide is less than it was. Climate change has ravaged the rumbling waters that once were. Danny opines that their legacy must be more than “Bill Clinton and salad bars.” Maybe, maybe not.
The Bend in the River sneaks up on you. It’s all so modest and slight until it’s something far more poignant. That well-placed juxtaposition of young, free twenty-somethings against stressed-out forty-somethings against resigned, regretful-yet-resilient seventy-somethings hits like a sledgehammer. There’s still hope, but how much?
Moss loves these people––his camera makes that abundantly clear. There are surprising successes and sad failures that suggest epilogues. Perhaps most affecting are the interstitial moments of our friends traveling down-river, singing. We see them singing when they’re young, the whole world in front of them, everything possible. Now their songs are nostalgic and serve as a reminder of a life well-lived, but perhaps not much more.
The Bend in the River premiered at the 2025 Telluride Film Festival.