Critic Reviews

In The Bend in the River, a lot of simple observations and moments add up to something profound. Its wisdom sneaks up on you, just like age.

A melancholy sense of powerlessness runs through these films, tempering and complicating the lyricism. The earth changes; the river changes; people change; and as much as these characters might have thought they had some control over the world, they now realize that they didn’t. And perhaps the reason why Moss keeps cutting to all that older footage is because our conception of our earlier lives changes the more we live. The future remains unwritten, but weirdly, so too does the past.

For all its gentleness, Robb Moss’s documentary doesn’t shy away from thorny terrain.

The Bend in the River sneaks up on you. It’s all so modest and slight until it’s something far more poignant. That well-placed juxtaposition of young, free twenty-somethings against stressed-out forty-somethings against resigned, regretful-yet-resilient seventy-somethings hits like a sledgehammer.

Even if you haven’t seen the prior films in the trilogy, The Bend in the River is worth seeking out as an anthropological exercise. There’s enough footage from the prior films to get you up to speed quickly, and none of the individual story arcs matter nearly as much as the larger sense that each season of human life is worthy of its own naturalistic exploration.

The Bend in the River is admirable for its dedication to truth but nearly unbearable as an experience. It is a film that lingers, but one most viewers will never want to revisit.