River redux The Same, but different at Newport BY JOHNETTE RODRIGUEZ

Seventeen friends who had been river guides together during the ’70s took a 35-day trip down the Colorado River in 1978. One of them brought along a 16mm camera and an enthusiasm for image-driven filmmaking. The result was Robb Moss’s 1982 Riverdogs, a paean to the natural beauty sweeping past and around them and to that moment in the lives of these late-twentysomethings/early thirtysomethings when they still felt the luscious freedom of youth and the intense joy of living in the present.

Fifteen years later, on another river trip, Moss began to reflect on the passage of time in all of their lives and on the ways in which each of them had moved forward into the commitments of adulthood. He contacted five of those 17 and began to film them (on digital video) in their everyday lives, still intent on capturing moments that define people and their relationships rather than setting up a list of question-and-answer interviews. Moss worked on it for five years before taking his film, as a work-in-progress, to a DocuClub screening last June at the Newport International Film Festival. He completed The Same River Twice in September, and it has now been shown at several film festivals, including Sundance. Moss and the final version of his film return to Newport during the 2003 NIFF (June 10-15) for two screenings: June 11 at 6 p.m. and June 13 at 2 p.m.

The Same River Twice is an engrossing film on many levels, from the undeniable aural/visual tug of river rapids and canyon walls (plus the tanned, naked bodies of the "riverdogs") to the careful storytelling and deft characterizations of Moss’s present-day subjects: Barry (and wife Deb), Danny (and husband Peter), Jeff and Cathy (who used to be married), and Jim (who used to be Danny’s summer lover). The scenes between current and past footage are intercut in ways that invite river-to-life metaphors — its turbulent currents rushing toward the camera, the capsizing kayaks that keep coming back up, its meditative tranquillity — and past-to-present comparisons — taking a vote to spend one more day in the canyon vs. making decisions about tossing out-of-date medications from Barry and Deb’s bathroom cabinet.

But these contrasts and symbols are never jarring or over-obvious. In a phone conversation from his home in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts, Moss explained that in Riverdogs he was trying to create images that weren’t pinned down by dialogue or narration. He was less interested in making a documentary per se than in treating the trip as an emblem of his youthful days on the river. Similarly, when he set out to make The Same River Twice, he was reflecting on the "shape of the intervening years" in his life.

"I had left the river to find work that sustained me, to follow love and establish a family, and essentially fill the girders of my grown-up life," Moss observed. "So I saw the enactment of our grown-up lives as the focus for the new film. I chose people I thought would make a robust portrait."

Moss half-expected the juxtaposition of the two filmings (’78 and late ’90s) to have political overtones, because he recognized that the sense of community on the river and many of the values held by the "riverdogs" had carried over into their adult lives. Two of the five had become mayors (Barry and Cathy), one had written a book about the environment (Jeff), one held onto a sense of fulfillment through physical exercise (Danny), and one stayed on the river (Jim).

"It turned out that the old footage was more a statement of youth, about being young," Moss noted, "and the new is about not being young. It’s about much more than being a believer in some political ideal. It’s more a film about time than politics."

Thus we see the demands of fatherhood and family on Barry, his dedication to visiting his elderly mother, his coping with an election loss, and then with serious illness. We witness the pain for both Cathy and Jeff of their break-up and divorce (so poignantly intercut with scenes of them in ’78, snuggling in a sleeping bag alongside the river), and we see their comfortable, caring parenting of their teenagers. We experience the happiness Danny has found in building an aerobics studio and raising two young daughters. And, most telling of all, we journey with Jim, back along the river where he still leads trips and around the edges of his California property, where "procrastination is underrated," acres of weeds grow between his rosemary and lavender bushes, and he worries that the three-room house he plans to build might be too big.

"These people had a kind of unbearable trust in me," Moss emphasized. "I mean, I’m making a movie, and they’re my friends. They’re trusting me to make a film that’s true to them, and I took that very seriously.

"One of the things I learned in making the film," he added, "is that people’s lives are never summed up. I am trying to describe something, but I don’t mean to speak definitively about who they are, for any of the characters. I meant to look at what kinds of choices pushed people in certain directions and where they ended up."

Moss accomplishes this without sentimentality or artsiness. He maintains our interest in these people precisely because he shows them in their everyday lives. He skillfully creates suspense within small scenes — will Barry’s toddler drop one of the beer bottles she continues to bring her dad across the concrete patio? Will Jim get his foundation poured? Will Cathy re-marry? — that carries us through the larger story.

Moss has taught filmmaking at Harvard for the past 15 years and has shot films around the world, on topics as diverse as famine, genocide and the structure of the universe (his next film will be with scientist Peter Galison). But he credits his invitation to the 2002 DocuClub screening at NIFF with giving him the impetus to finish a film with such an autobiographical undercurrent as The Same River Twice.

"I felt this pressure to make something showable within three weeks," Moss recalled. "We just did it [with editor Karen Schmeer and associate producer Linda Morgenstern], because we had to do it — for a roomful of 50 strangers. The things they said just galvanized us.

"The Newport Festival has a wonderful belief in their audiences," he remarked. "One guy got up and said, ‘This was absolutely not my past, not my community. I came to this thinking I was going to hate it, but I didn’t.’ That was unbelievably re-assuring to me that I wasn’t so ideologically strict and the film wasn’t exclusive or diminishing."

Certainly there are universal chords throughout the film, particularly when, toward the end, Barry speaks eloquently about his children and himself: "It’s their turn to be young and, if they’re lucky, they’ll have a turn to be middle-aged. If I’m lucky, I’ll live to be old — we all just get one turn each."

For complete information on the Newport International Film Festival, call (401) 619-1126, or go to www.newportfilmfestival.com.