‘The River Wild’ on Netflix: For One Shining Moment, Meryl Streep Was An Action Hero

Picture it: September, 1994. The midterm elections are about to turn the still-new Bill Clinton presidency on its head. The Chicago Bulls are in the middle of enduring Michael Jordan’s two-year retirement so he could play baseball. Boyz II Men’s “I’ll Make Love to You” is in its 5th week of a 14-week run atop the Billboard charts. And a little movie called The River Wild was about to push out into the choppy waters of the American box office.

A good old-fashioned thriller that followed the formula “What if a person who was really good at [X] were placed into a high-stakes clash with criminals?” The River Wild wasn’t quite “Die Hard on a White-Water Rafting Trip,” but it was damned close. Director Curtis Hanson was coming off of the success of the lurid and terrifically tense The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, and after enjoying such a tour-de-force from Rebecca DeMornay in that film, he set out to make another movie with a strong female lead. Enter the then-two-time Oscar winner Meryl Streep (at this point in her career, she’d only been nominated a measly 9 times!). Streep was in the closest she’d ever come to a career slump in 1994. Since her Oscar nod for Postcards from the Edge in 1990, she’d only made three movies: the underrated comedy Defending Your Life, the broad comedy Death Becomes Her (which we think of as a success today after decades of repetition on cable, but back then barely made back its budget on its domestic box-office take), and the prestige bomb The House of the Spirits. Back then, Streep was still riding on her 1980s reputation, which was that she was great at the Oscar-bait stuff (all those accents!) but couldn’t be relied on to score with comedy, much less any other genre. Certainly not an action thriller where she’d have to be the Bruce Willis!

The plot of The River Wild is simple: marriage on the rocks (Streep and David Strathairn) go on a camping trip with their son (Joseph Mazzello, fresh off of Jurassic Park) and golden lab to try to make one last go of the family thing. No pressure, right? Also, the fact that Streep’s character is a world-class river-rafter makes Strathairn feel even more emasculated than he is. Enter into this thorny dynamic Kevin Bacon and John C. Reilly as a pair of thieves trying to make off with a bag full of cash. They encounter Streep and her family and intend to use them as hostages to get down the dangerous river and make their escape. Only Streep knows how to navigate the river; if she can’t, her family is dead.

Streep and Bacon make for a phenomenal face-off as they engage in a battle of wills. It’s a great twist on the action genre, which usually — no matter how clever the premise — ends up boiling down to a brawl where our action hero overpowers the villain. Curtis Hanson couldn’t rely on that trope with Streep has his lead, though, so he had to rely on where her real brawn was: her incomparable screen presence. There’s a point in the movie where Streep is no longer fucking around and essentially dares Bacon to cross her. She’ll die, maybe, but so will he. She stares him down — laughs in his face, even — and up against sheer movie-star superiority, he blinks.

There’s a bit of an annoying tack-on at the end of the movie, a straining need to make the Strathairn character more of a hero, for no other reason that to assuage his male ego enough that he could reunite with the wife who just fully saved their family coming down that river. It’s the kind of patch-job that would never have been necessary had the gender roles been reversed. My recommendation is to ignore that as best as you can and push past to the part where Meryl Streep was just an action star for 111 minutes and delivered for every one of them. By the next year, she’d be Oscar-nominated for The Bridges of Madison County and back to her usual Streep thing. But for one shining moment there, Meryl Streep showed she could be an action star too. That was the thrill ride we all needed.

Stream The River Wild on Netflix