Robb Moss is sitting in the lobby of a theater in Columbia, Missouri, and fondly recounting the time he filmed his best friends while being completely stark naked.
To be fair, all of his companions on the river trip that he was shooting were equally bare-ass,
basking in the Arizona sun and the bloom of their hippie youth. The year was 1978, though looking at the grainy footage he shot — and the lack of self-consciousness on display — you’d have initially carbon-dated it closer to 1969. The vibe is very Woodstock-era, got-to-get-back-to-the-garden innocence, a sentiment that has the filmmaker, now in his mid-seventies, nodding in agreement. “They don’t even know they’re quite naked,” Moss says, referring to the then-twentysomething versions of his fellow river guides. “They haven’t yet taken a bite from their adulthood.”
The documentarian had met his buddies Danny, Cathy, Jeff, Barry, and Jim after graduating from U.C. Berkeley in 1972 and wandering through Europe, and he began been working the river together with the group for years. They were all essentially vagabonds, experimenting with the new freedoms that was characteristic of a communal Sixties ideology they still held on to. Now, the quintet was planning on taking one final rafting trip before embarking on less countercultural, more career-driven pursuits. Moss had been gravitating toward filmmaking, so brought along a 16mm Bolex to capture this last go-round for posterity. “I was about to stop being a ‘river guy,'” he recalls. “Bringing a camera sort of helped me make the transition from my old life to my new life.”
The result turned into Riverdogs, a 1978 short that was partially a home movie and partially a testament to the bond all of these post-college friends had forged on the “lifeline of the Southwest.” It played a few festivals, and helped kickstart Moss’s trajectory toward a career in nonfiction filmmaking after he moved east. He’d always wished that more people had seen it, however, and when he began taking river-rafting trips again with his old crew in the late 1990s, Moss brought along his camera once more.
Life had changed drastically for all of them, naturally — there were now dealing with mortgages, children, marital strife, health issues, and your run-of-the-mill middle-age malaise. But once Moss began cutting the snippets of the short in the new footage he’d shot between 1996 and 2000, he found that the juxtaposition of the two timelines offered a stunning contrast between the carefree, frequently clothesless hippies who his friends once were and the fortysomething professionals who they had become. The result, The Same River Twice (2003), played in competition at Sundance and became a modest indie hit, playing in several theaters for months. When it eventually ended up on Netflix, this real-life Big Chill exponentially expanded its fanbase and became something of a nonfiction cult classic. Folks began to recognize the doc’s subjects on the street. When one of the participants went to her chiropractor in Santa Fe, he adjusted her back and then asked whether her charismatic River costar Jim ever finished building the house he talked about in the movie.
“It’s funny, when the documentary premiered at Sundance, someone in the audience was already asking if there would be a third film down the line,” Moss says. “You know, ‘What about The Same River Thrice?’ I joked, ‘How about The Naked and the Dead?’ Which was funny then, and is now too close to home. But the idea of a third film had been on my mind over the years. And eventually, it made sense to go back to the river and see where everyone was at this point in their lives.”
The Bend in the River picks up nearly a quarter of a century after the previous movie, with Moss and his four longtime friends reuniting for another rafting trip down the Colorado shortly after the pandemic. It’s as much a chance for viewers to catch up with Twice‘s boomers navigating life at the beginning of the 21st century as it for the filmmaker. Barry has now married his second wife, who coincidentally shares the same name as his first wife (“from Deborah No. 1 to Deborah No. 2”), survived cancer, and retired from directing a mental health facility. Former couple Cathy and Jeff have split, but she is still helping her politically minded ex run a campaign for State Senator in Oregon. Danny, a longtime dance instructor, now teaches Pilates. And Jim… well, we’ll get to Jim in a second. (The movie opens at New York’s Film Forum this weekend before starting a run at select theaters nationwide.)
The particulars of what’s happened to the group are less important, however, than capturing how the world looks to them on the other side of their seventies. They are no longer the tanned Me Decade youngsters splashing around in the nude, or the urban professionals raising families and starting to grow paunches at the turn of the century. Yet the way Moss intersperses what he calls “the middle past and the deep past” with intimate, contemporary conversations and footage of their recent run down the river — so similar to their earlier excursions, yet so different — creates an incredible mosaic effect. He’s not ticking off a checklist of their collective accomplishments. He’s painting a portrait of enduring friendships over the passage of time.
“Aging is a complicated thing to film,” Moss admits. “I think we started with a biographical bent when we began editing the second one. But then we quickly realized it wasn’t about ‘They did this, then they did that.’ It was more about their humanity, who they are as people, the more intimate moments that happen along the way — and how those things bump up against all those relationships and markers in your life. You have that moment in Bend where my friend Barry sees old footage of him with his kids from the 1990s, and he starts to weep. He didn’t have that image of them in his mind anymore, because they’re now grown up. We forget — but the camera remembers.”
“They’re very layered, very complex documentaries, especially this one,” notes Joel Coen, speaking over the phone several months later. “So many contemporary documentaries… they’re about one thing, really. This is metaphorical, it’s poetic, and it’s also a great example of a sort of classic cinema vérité.” Coen and his wife, the Oscar-winning actor Frances McDormand, are executive producers on The Bend in the River, though to hear Joel tell it, “we’re basically cheerleaders. Really, really loud cheerleaders.”
“We’ve known Rob and his partner Davia Nelson for years,” McDormand says, chiming in. “She was on that original boat trip, actually — she’s off-camera, naked and holding the boom mic! I wish I’d been on that trip. But we saw The Same River Twice when it first played at Film Forum, and have been friends with them for years. It’s amazing to see what he’s done with this film, where you see the nostalgia for that period in your life when you have nothing but time, you think you’re immortal, then you get older — but he’s not cynical about it. He’s not cynical about anything. He’s the least cynical person you could ever meet. And you really see that with Jim.”
If there’s one story within The Bend of the River that sticks out among the others, it’s the one concerning Rob’s friend Jim Tickenor. He was the alpha dog of Riverdogs, the handsome and strapping guide who was the most natural outdoorsman of the bunch. Everyone admired Jim. He and Danny dated for a while. To quote Mrs. McDormand, Jim was the resident “river god.” In The Same River Twice, we learn that he briefly studied dentistry before ditching it to live a more back-to-the-land existence. Jim still takes the occasional river job, and is happy to live a simple life in the house that he’s in the middle of building out in the middle of nowhere. By the time we catch up with him in Bend, he’s in full cackling-hermit mode and gone completely off the grid, living in the shadow of his unfinished domicile. You could see how some documentarians might view him as a cautionary tale.
Not Moss. The sense of concern, yet complete lack of judgement the movie shows Jim, attests to both their decades of friendship and a deep reservoir of empathy that exists on the other side camera. “Everybody else is living a pretty middle-class existence,” he says. “You can find scenes in their everyday life. Jim does not live in scenes or sequences. He has his own clock. When I’m there, I’m taking up 100-percent of his attention. But it was through filming him that I was able to maintain a bond with him, and I would never have become that close to him or to see things in his life if I hadn’t kept making these movies.
“I mean, of course I worry about Jim,” Moss adds. “But I know he’s lived the life that he means to have. He wanted this life, and he has it, even if it has drawbacks. He’s made no effort to age in a way that protects him from aging. He’s completely exposed. He has no indoors. It’s an extreme example of living on your own terms. But it’s also an example of committing to living on your own terms no matter what.”
As The Bend in the River has slowly made its way around the festival circuit over the past year — when I met up with Moss in Columbia, he was in town to show the movie at the longstanding True/False documentary film festival — it’s sparked renewed interest in the other two films. (A screening of The Same River Twice at Film Forum, scheduled right before the new film’s theatrical release, immediately sold out.) Seen together, the trilogy charts both a personal coming-of-age and a generational coming-to-grips with aging that, even when compared against similar serialized documentary experiments like Michael Apted’s 7 Up installments, feels wholly unique.
“There’s an idea that all documentaries are about life,” notes Robert Greene, the filmmaker-in-residence at Missouri’s School of Journalism who’s known Moss for a while. “But most documentarians are only interested in a slice of it. Robb’s doing something different when he’s showing up and filming his friends over all this time. He’s giving you something that is actually set to the rhythm of life as opposed to the rhythm of a story, and you can feel that when you watch them. When I first saw Bend, I found myself thinking about Robb’s friendship with the people onscreen, and then I started thinking about all the friendships I had with the people sitting around me, watching it with me. And those things are happening at the same time for you as a viewer, which is why I think these movies strike such a strong chord for so many people.”
“They are designed to let you enter the film where you at your timeline,” Moss says. “And with this one, for me… I got to have the opportunity to age with my friends and to watch their aging, and it’s a way to watch my own aging at the same time. But I also get to stay close to them in this period in which we’re changing and getting a bit smaller, heading in whatever direction we’re headed in together. I suppose that’s the bend in the river out there somewhere — the place that we’re all going towards.”
Then Moss laughs. “Really, the big, underlying principle here,” he adds, “is stay friends with your friends. For all kinds of reasons you can’t anticipate.”
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