The Same River Twice is a journey that really didn't have to be made the first time.
A tiresome vanity project, it documents the lives of several couples who go from being free-spirited, live-for-the-moment hippies to absolutely ordinary people. Two become mayors of their small towns, one becomes a small-time author and even smaller-time radio host, another becomes a community center aerobics instructor, two others get divorced but continue to live across the street from one another, and one winds up living alone in the woods, sleeping on the ground because his broken-down trailer is too full of trash.
There are attempts at poignancy and feeble grasps for meaning, but like many of the baby boomer lives they are meant to be representing, it all comes across as shallow, self-serving naval-gazing. It's not like these people were kids, either, when they spent their days rafting along the Colorado River, usually while naked. They were in their late 20s and early 30s. Not on the cusp of adulthood, but full-fledged grown-ups, ingesting every drug they could, communing with Mother Nature by rock climbing while starkers, and doing all they could to stay disengaged from the world.
Now, as they all near or pass the half-century mark of their lives, they look back on arthritic film footage shot by one of their own, as producer-director-cameraman (it would be an insult to call him a cinematography) Robb Moss feebly tries to stitch together something, anything, resembling a cultural time line. But the threads keep breaking and the fabric is too thin to hold together.
Only Jim, the quasi-father figure from their rafting days, is of any interest, with his dirty, hermit lifestyle. But as we watch years pass (and believe me, Moss is certainly talented at transmitting that agonizing sensation on to the audience) and all Jim has managed to accomplish is to have the foundation poured for his "radical" house, and that in spite of his loafing, even that interest fades away.
Though it obviously escaped Moss, an instructor at that renowned film school, Harvard (not!), and the rest of his friends, the movie's true theme surfaces halfway through, when one of the men, Barry Wasserman, is making his bid for reelection in Placerville, California. His platform is one of anti-growth; his goal, to keep his little corner of the world frozen in time. He is soundly trounced, finishing a distant third. Even his peers recognize that the times, they aren't just a'changin', they a'changed years ago. It's a shame neither he nor Moss and the rest of the merry band have that same grasp of the obvious.