Rachel River

Did You Know?

• The film's score was composed by the distinctive New Age composer Arvo Pärt.
• The film won the Excellence in Cinematography Award Dramatic for Paul Elliott and a Special Jury Prize for Acting for Viveca Lindfors at the 1988 Sundance Film Festival.

Plot

In the small Scandinavian community of Rachel River, Minnesota, Mary Graving works for a weekly radio show and raises her children alone. She worries about supporting them and fends off advances from her ex-husband Cordell, funeral director Jack, and deputy sheriff Marlyn. Farmer’s wife Harriet White stoically faces her husband’s approaching death. A developmentally disabled man named Momo may know the truth about rumors that a hoard of cash was hidden on the property of recently deceased townswoman Svea Estava.

Production

The film was a longtime passion project for Sandy Smolan. He first got the idea in 1983 after moving to Moose Lake, Minnesota from New York for a job and wanting to do a feature about the community where he lived. For a few years, he could not envision what the story would be about until he remembered he was given Letters From the Country, a short story collection by Carol Bly set in the Moose Lake area, shortly before leaving New York. He decided to adapt it and got Judith Guest, author of Ordinary People and a Minnesotan, to write the script.

Financing involved grants from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and PBS's American Playhouse. In 1984 and 1985, Smolan was invited to present his concept at the Sundance Institute. The film received the first ever Sundance/Panavision Filmmaker Grant, which provided a Panaflex camera that permitted filming in temperatures of 20 below zero. Filming took place over 30 days in November 1986 in Sandstone, Minnesota, with post-production completed in August 1987. The budget was $1.2 million.

Release

The film had its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival on September 17, 1987. Thereafter, it played the film festival circuit, including the 1988 Sundance Film Festival, Berlin Film Festival, and the Seattle International Film Festival. A year after its Toronto premiere, the film secured a distribution deal with Taurus Entertainment Company, a specialty unit of United Artists. It was given a limited theatrical release on January 20, 1989. The film was broadcast on American Playhouse in June 1989.

Critical reception

The film received mixed reviews. Kevin Thomas of the Los Angeles Times gave a positive review, praising the performances of Lindfors and Reed. He concluded that what distinguishes Rachel River from most other independent American films is not only its ensemble portrayals under the spare and rigorous direction of Sandy Smolan, a documentary filmmaker in his feature debut, but also its appropriately austere images captured by cinematographer Paul Elliott and its exceptionally rich and evocative score composed by Arvo Pärt.

The San Francisco Bay Guardian called it well-acted, low-keyed, beautifully photographed and well-written with a unique, understated flow. The Motion Picture Guide praised the performances as wonderful, albeit small-scaled, and called the cinematography and music a knockout in two areas, with specific praise for Paul Elliott's Nykvist-rich lenswork and Arvo Pärt's piercingly evocative score. The New Leader gave a negative review, with critic John Morrone describing it as airless, stagnant, and criticizing the filmmakers for turning the material into deep freeze cinema. Spirituality & Practice praised the film, writing that Rachel River is a magical movie about the emotional education of adults in a world of mysteries which have no name and of little things that people are reluctant to talk about, such as vague longings, roving fears, and unfulfilled dreams.