Once Upon a River movie review (2020)

Rose’s feature-length directorial debut “Once Upon a River” is adapted from Bonnie Jo Campbell’s same-named novel, which was released to widespread positive reviews in 2011. Although the novel served as a prequel for Campbell’s “Q Road,” Rose has crafted the film version of “Once Upon a River” as a standalone piece—certain plot elements are tweaked, and entire subplots and characters removed. The film begins in rural Murrayville, Michigan, in 1977, where 15-year-old Margo Crane (Kenadi DelaCerna) lives on the shore of Stark River with her father, Bernard (Tatanka Means). Her mother, Luanne (Lindsay Pulsipher), left them a year before and hasn’t contacted her daughter since. In Luanne’s absence, Bernard teaches Margo how to shoot, fish, and live off the land, skills passed down to him by indigenous forebears. With Annie Oakley as her hero, Margo is an exemplary shot—catching the eye of her uncle, Cal (Coburn Goss), her father’s half-brother, whose white family basically runs the town.

While Bernard works more to make ends meet, Margo begins to spend more time with Cal, setting off a series of events that leaves one person dead, another injured, and Margo on the run. With her rifle in hand, Margo sets off on the river to try and find her mother. Along the way, she meets a number of men, and the film falls into a pattern of depicting Margo’s reliance on men without interrogating what that dependence means for the character. A friend of her father’s who had told Margo she was his “dream girl” and “I just can’t get enough of a girl who don’t talk” helps hide her from police. Later on, a graduate student, Will (Ajuawak Kapashesit), shares a meal with Margo, gives her a ride, and causes her to think more about her indigenous heritage by sharing details of his own ancestry: “I’m Cherokee from Oklahoma. People who came to this country and took over, they never intended for us to survive.” And in the longest chunk of “Once Upon a River,” Margo saves the life of Smoke (John Ashton), an older man with emphysema who is irritated by his daughters’ insistence that he move into an assisted-living facility.   

“Why does anybody help anybody?,” Smoke replies when Margo wonders about his motivations, and the bald empathy of that statement suggests the movie “Once Upon a River” wants to be. There are scenes that argue for an openhearted treatment of those in need—as evidenced by how often we see Margo get into a dire situation that only an older man can help her out of—but that repetition only underscores how little is clear about what Margo herself wants or desires. She is an excellent shot, but we have no understanding of how she feels about killing or being the cause of death. She misses her mother, mentioning that Luanne smelled of “cocoa butter and white wine,” but offers no further observations about what her parents’ marriage was like, or how they ended up together. She was othered by her white relatives her whole life, but when Will asks about her tribe, she is utterly uncurious. The film begins with Margo’s narration, using her first-person voice to deliver exposition about her mother’s abandonment and her father’s tense relationship with his half-brother before dropping out after the first 15 or so minutes. But “Once Upon a River” would have benefited from committing to that cinematic device as a way to provide a peek into Margo’s inner thoughts; without them, she is mostly a cypher, and her most momentous decisions—in particular one she makes after reconnecting with Luanne—lack clarity.

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