Instead of an argument, however, what Moss has produced is a testimony on the effects of time. This testimony is written on the faces and the bodies of the characters; the film is about time written in flesh.
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In 1978, Robb Moss and his friends, most of whom were river rafting guides, went on a rafting trip in the Grand Canyon. The mid-20-somethings spent about a month out on the river riding the rapids, communing with nature and, apparently more than anything else, hanging around stark naked. Moss brought a 16mm camera along for the trip and recorded his friends for a never-released documentary called "Riverdogs." Twenty years later, he picked up a digital videocamera and decided to start filming five of these former rafting companions, now in their late 40s. 2003´s "The Same River Twice" is the product of the marriage of these two different sources.
Though there were 17 people on the original trip, Moss only chooses to catch up with five of them. When we first encounter him, the present-day Barry Wasserman is currently running for reelection as mayor of a small town in California. He´s a grass roots kind of guy who likes to wrestle with the nitty-grittiest issues he can find. Danny Silver, still an absolute knockout at 48 years old, teaches aerobics and dotes over her seven year old daughter. When we meet Jeff Golden and Cathy Shaw on the river, they are a young couple desperately in love with each other. Today, they´ve gone their separate ways; Cathy is also a small-town mayor (what was with these guys?) and Jeff is a published author.
And then there´s Jim Tichener. The others simply smile then they think of Jim. Jim was "a river deity" to them; they were all "Jim-ists" of a sort. To Danny, Jim was "the best summer boyfriend" you could ever ask for. Unlike the others, Jim seems oblivious to the passage of time. Jim lives in a trailer in the woods where he likes to fiddle or just hike. He´s actually still a river guide, a job he´s held for his entire adult life. With a scraggly beard and piercing eyes, he looks either like a guru or a budding Charles Manson.
The film cuts back and forth between the five characters in the present and also between the present and the past. In the present footage, the characters talk about their lives, loves, and fears though not in any particularly directed manner. In the past, they just… exist. Moss doesn´t rely on direct interviews or fixed questions; instead, he followed his cast around off and on for four years stitching together a think strand of narrative in the latter stages of the process.
Some critics saw this as a weakness, suggesting that the film was shallow and didn´t delve in-depth into specific issues or come up with any grand purpose out of all this footage. For me, this is really the film´s strength. Moss had the sense not to construct the film, like most documentaries, as an investigation or argument. If he had, the project could quickly have degenerated into just another exercise in middle-aged male navel gazing. Moss clearly had something specific in mind; he did not select the footage from the past of present randomly. He suggests there was something special about this moment from 1978, a certain kind of energy or spirit that bonded these people (call it a last gasp of "flower power" if you will.) The present day footage is an attempt to learn what happened to this energy. But even if that's what Moss had in mind, he's careful not to impose his own conclusions on the film; he doesn't connect the dots for us. Instead of an argument, what Moss has produced is a testimony on the effects of time. This testimony is written on the faces and the bodies of the characters; the film is about time written in flesh.
It´s easy to overlook the formal qualities of this deceptively simple movie, but that would be a mistake. The 16mm film footage from 1978 is grainy with super-saturated bright colors, giving not a real but a hyper-real look. The effect gives these ghostly figures from the past an earthy, tangible quality. The contrast with the flatter, cooler tones of the present day footage is sharp and Moss takes full advantage of it, cutting back and forth between past and present shots that are simultaneously similar yet markedly different. Some of the most powerful shots in the film are simply shots of the characters watching themselves in the past footage; the wistful, bittersweet looks on their faces speak volumes. You get a sense that, at least to some degree, they all miss being "Jim-ists."
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