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A young man is found dead (accident? suicide? murder?) in a river in Haddan, Massachusetts, by two young boys – the dead are always discovered by children, aren’t they? – and by the time the authorities have been properly alerted, and those authorities show up in their bumbling splendor, the winter has entombed the boy under a sheet of ice. One of the policemen, Abel Grey (Ed Burns), while trying to decide if he should take some polaroids or go get his feet wet, sees not only the frozen boy in the river, but a small child, who scurries along the river bank but is not noticed by anyone else. Is this mysterious young boy a ghost? A demon, of sorts (as most horror movies seem to have pre-teen demons)? A hallucination? We don’t get a quick answer, and from here the film travels mostly along the lines of whodunit, as the two cops take the case and begin to conduct a woefully inept small-town investigation, but bit by bit we learn that there might be something very wrong with Mr. Abel Grey.

Some ways upstream is the all-too-uppity, all-too-ominous, Haddan Boarding School, where the deceased boy, August Pierce, unhappily spent his adolescence. Teaching there is the concerned Betsy (played by Jennifer Ehle), who happens to be engaged to the Dean, and (naturally) during the course of the investigation, happens to get involved with Abel – plotting the points of the movie’s first love triangle.

But that’s later. First, she proves her talent as a photographer and first-class Meryl Streep impersonator, and shows a somewhat nervous affection for her husband-to-be, who may just have some ulterior motives. A female student, Carlin (Rachelle Lafevre), who was friends with the dead “Gus”, is part of the film’s second, younger, love triangle: she is dating one of the private school’s more naughty offerings, Harry, whom she (funnily enough) doesn’t much care for. Whether or not Gus and Carlin were sleeping together or not is irrelevant, but it plays towards the possible jealousy-motive of Harry, a boy who heads the hazing committee of the school’s goofy secret society – an organization which behaves more like the Dead Poet's Society than what it actually contains: a rowdy bunch of frat boy wannabes.

So, Abel continues the investigation, continues the attempted romance, and yet is thwarted in both respects, by that same crusty Dean. It seems the private school has so much economic clout in the small town, that the local police chief would rather discontinue the investigation into the boy’s death than create a possible town scandal by uncovering any hint of foul play. However, this rather important plot contrivance is quite forced, and it's hard to buy the complete blanket of police corruption, but it's the cello playing Dean that is the most ridiculous: his stamp of “pure evil” could only have been more obvious if he’d been played by Vincent Price.

But the film gets past the obviously clunky plot points, mainly due to the impressive performance by Ed Burns, an actor I’ve always thought should be a much bigger star than he is. He seems to have the whole package (looks-wise) for being the next Marvel Comics tights-filler, but, for whatever reason, he hasn’t wanted or hasn’t had the opportunity to shoot to A-list status. And yet, maybe that’s what makes me like him that much more as an actor. He’s like a thinking man’s Ben Affleck; someone I can believe as a real person, not as some glossy tabloid cutout with brilliantine hair and ivory teeth. He’s able to convey a lot of feeling in silence, as well as in confrontation, and is given the opportunity to showcase both thanks to the deft touch of director Nick Willing.

Willing sells his story – through ghosts, flashbacks, and some more slightly unbelievable story points – with a very assured cinematic design. Without giving away some major twists near the end of the movie, I will say that the only reason these “surprises” work at all is because of Willing’s talented handling of the subjective technique, which allows us to see through Ed Burns’ eyes things we couldn’t have grasped otherwise. His style allows for a larger amount of silence than is normal for modern movies, letting us react with and judge against Burns’ character simultaneously, which ends up being the key to understanding the movie. In the film’s final revelations, we are able to be able to consider what is real, what is imagined, how we in the audience have been misinformed or have misjudged, and then are able to weigh these things in conjunction with Burns’ Abel.

The movie is laden with some indiscreet Biblical allegory, which may or may not have added up to more in the novel (which I haven’t yet read), but it doesn’t necessarily have to be taken as such – unless, of course, you write the movie off as a cheap whodunit (which it shouldn’t). Yes, young Gus has an untimely end after being branded a “faker” by a crowd of folks who don’t like outsiders, and yes, the investigating officer’s name is Abel, and has some sort of guilt over the death of his brother (the only reason his name isn’t Cain, I’m assuming, is because you just don’t see that many New Englander’s named Cain… hey wait a minute, you don’t see many New Englander’s named Abel either… hmmm, funny), but none of these Biblical references make much difference to the movie unless you really want to see them. The film’s greatest success is its high level of sustained interest, and allowed me – even through some awkward treatment of ghosts and magic – to keep my opinion of the movie running continuously high.

Technically, the film is brilliant. The film’s cinematographer Paul Sorossy has had plenty of experience shooting in snow-blanketed small towns – he lensed both The Sweet Hereafter and Affliction, to name but two – and his work here confirms he knows what to do when the white stuff is around. He includes one particularly memorable shot that made me think of the late cinematographer Conrad Hall, in which Abel, after a particularly harrowing turn of events, takes a cleansing shower. Sorrosy's camera moves slowly in towards Burns as the water cascades from the ridge of his eyebrows, with eerie similarity to Hall's famous sequence in In Cold Blood, where rainwater on a windowpane did the crying for Robert Blake. Also worth noting is a really neat mandolin score by Simon Boswell, which adds perfect atmosphere to a bizarre movie.

The River King has interesting things to say about guilt, and less interesting things to say about ghosts, but it's a really different film in a time when so many mainstream movies look like links from the same sausage press. It’s by no means great, but see it before you see something you’ll truly regret, like oh, say, The Fog.

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originally posted: 10/22/05 15:33:19
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