The River Wild Made Meryl Streep an Action Hero

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Was Speed the best action movie of 1994? Probably. Nevertheless, It had some stiff competition, with True Lies, Leon, Clear and Present Danger, and The Crow also making it a banner year for the genre. And there was another contender nipping (or splashing…) at their heels, rarely even granted a place in the conversation. Starring the formidable line-up of Meryl Streep, David Strathairn, Kevin Bacon and John C. Reilly, directed by Curtis Hanson just before L.A. Confidential, and full of thrilling action sequences (one of which almost killed its leading lady), The River Wild deserves a spot high in that list.

Gail (Streep) and Tom (Strathairn) are on the verge of ending their long marriage, but she manages to persuade him to accompany her and their son Roarke (Joseph Mazzello) on a rafting trip to Idaho for Roarke’s tenth birthday. Despite some awkwardness between the couple, all starts fairly well. They soon make friends with Wade (Bacon) and Frank (Reilly), two younger men they keep running into along the river.

As the trip progresses though, Wade exhibits some unnerving behavior, giving Roarke way too much money as a birthday present, then watching Gail as she bathes. It all comes to a head with the revelation that he and Frank are on the run after killing a man during a robbery. Having heard that Gail was a guide on the river during her youth, the criminals take the family hostage, knowing that they will need her help to get them past the deadly rapids named “The Gauntlet.”

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The River Wild is unusual for many reasons, foremost among them its dedication to centering its thrills and spills on the marriage between two middle-aged people.

While Keanu Reeves and Sandra Bullock were spritely young 30-year-olds when they fell in love on that death bus, Meryl Streep and David Strathairn were both closing in on 50. Neither Streep nor Strathairn had played action hero before, and neither would again (or haven’t to date, at least!). The gravitas they brought with them, and their unfamiliarity with the genre, lent an inherent credibility to their performances.

An unusually grown-up portrait of a marriage for a late-summer studio actioner, The River Wild focuses on drawing the diverging paths of Gail and Tom towards each other once more. It takes a while. At first, Gail is charmed by the younger, flirtatious Wade, and indulges in his advances, even with Tom looking on unhappily from the sidelines. Gail has been assuming Tom’s late nights in the office mean he’s no longer interested in her, and is quite happy to show him what he’s been missing.

But as the weird behavior mounts up, husband and wife start communicating. After a late-night heart to heart, just before the shit hits the fan, Tom divulges that he’s actually daunted by the standards Gail sets for herself and those around her—that’s why he’s been avoiding her. It’s not that he’s lost interest—it’s that he doesn’t feel worthy. She’s touched by his confession, and slowly, the two begin to draw back together. Unlike in many action movies, where the scenes between the setpieces can seem like little more than filler, the weighty talents of Strathairn and Streep make these quieter moments just as, if not more, engaging than diving headfirst into the rapids.

On these dangerous waters, everyone knows that Gail holds all the cards. That was another thing that made The River Wild a bit of an oddity in the sweaty, masculine land of ‘90s action cinema: a steady, competent, middle-aged woman is at the center of it all.

Tom is in awe of his wife and, as we soon learn, so is Wade. Though he spends most of the movie holding her hostage, it’s ever-clear that Wade respects Gail, and is very attracted to her (his desire to humiliate Tom at every turn underlines their heated, psycho-sexual rivalry). And she in turn, knows that she is indispensable to him, and how that gives her the upper hand. That she’s older also provides an advantage; she’s met his type before, and can see straight through his bluster. Which is not to say she’s unafraid—she still has to keep her boys safe—but of everyone involved in this expedition, she knows she’s the one thinking the clearest.

Streep is excellent as a woman called upon to be an action hero when she thought she was just going to have a nice vacation with her family. Like the other main cast, she performed most of the stunts herself—nearly drowning during one of them when Hanson encouraged her to attempt it while she was too tired. Unsurprisingly, the emotional authenticity was not a problem for her, and having spent four months learning how to whitewater raft in preparation for the role, she had the physical authenticity too. She makes Gail utterly convincing in both her normalness and her capacity to propel herself safely through fatal rapids as she dispatches the bad guys.

As soon as Tom confesses he feels intimidated by Gail, amidst the hyper-macho environment of the era, where Arnie, Sylvester Stallone and Steven Segal were all kicking ass and taking names, it seems like we’re ultimately being primed to see her step back and let her husband save the day.

What makes The River Wild so great, and so refreshing, is that that doesn’t happen. The two get separated, yet Gail remains quite literally the one steering the boat, fending off attacks from a psychotic Kevin Bacon. Tom, meanwhile, is running backup, skittering around the ledges on the side of the rapids, getting ahead of the boat so he can help lay a trap when they catch up to him. (Roger Ebert had qualms with the logistics, but even the most intelligent action movie is owed some suspension of disbelief!) Over the course of the film, gradually and authentically, we have watched the couple become a team once again.

From both a financial and a critical perspective, The River Wild performed solidly, but not spectacularly. It left little discernible cultural impact (unless you count last year’s straight-to-streaming putative remake/sequel, stocked with faces from beloved teen TV shows of the noughties).

To call it forgotten would be extreme, but it hasn’t lingered in the memory in the way of the era’s other big genre movies. Perhaps it was an unforgivable lack of punchy catchphrases for an actioner of that time, perhaps it was the maturity of its stars—for whatever reason, it never quite entered the canon. Which is both a pity and an injustice. For those who like their early-‘90s Hollywood action adventures to involve genuine emotional weight and a killer cast, there are few options that truly match up to The River Wild.

Chloe Walker is a writer based in the UK. You can read her work at Culturefly, the BFI, Podcast Review, and Paste.