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A River Runs Through
It
This is a Horton
Foote script from a novel about a Presbyterian
minister and his two sons living in Montana in the early twentieth
century. Foote also wrote "Tender Mercies"
and "A Trip to Bountiful," two films praised in Christian
circles for their sympathetic treatment of Christian convictions (a
rare commodity in recent movies). Here, too, the religious family is
viewed with sympathy. But in this film the father is a rather liberal
pastor, or so his sermons would indicate. Although the pastor spoke with
some eloquence about human life, I heard nothing in his preaching or
elsewhere that reminded me of the biblical gospel. We should remember the
argument of J. Gresham Machen that liberalism
and Christianity are two different and antithetical religions.
At any rate, the pastor is also an
expert fly fisherman, and, we are told in the introduction, in their
family it was hard to draw the line between theology and fishing. He was a
home schooler too. We see him telling his boys
the nuances of writing. ("Now try it again, but make it half as
long.") And he taught them to fish.
The older son went to college and
eventually became a professor of English. The younger stayed at home and
become a newspaper reporter. As the current birth-order literature
would lead you to believe, the younger son is somewhat
less "responsible" than the older one. (I write as a first
sibling.) He gets drunk a lot, gambles, goes out with a woman of the
wrong race, eventually gets himself killed.
But shortly before his death, he
goes fishing again, with his Dad and his older brother. As the older ones
look on, in astonishment, he plays a fish with a skill that elicits from
the script the language of divine inspiration. For the three, it is
a moment of inexplicable beauty and wonder.
The mysticism of the moment stays
with the older son, and at the end of the film, after many years have
passed, he stands by the river and looks back on those times. He sees all
the people, all the times and places coming together in a single flow,
"and a river runs through it."
The theology of the film, therefore,
reveals itself as monistic: all is one. The brother is dead, but he is
alive in memory. In his moment of glory, he ascended to a higher level
of being, and in time all of us will be part of him and he part
of us. The boy's dissipation and death, in the final analysis, are of
no consequence.
Well, that's what many people would like to believe today. It is very far from Christianity; in fact it is the very nemesis of Christianity, which maintains distinctions between God and man, between one human being and another, between good and evil, between fishing and theology, between death and life. Do we really want to believe that a life of dissipation can be atoned for by a skillful fishing performance? I realize that question rather trivializes the film which is in many ways beautiful and thoughtful. But let us not simply accept the mesmerizing effect which this film seeks to work on us. Let us ask what it is that we are being taught, and hear it, not as part of the "flow," but with a Christian thoughtfulness which is not afraid to question such a seductive drama as this.