The River Rat

The only feature film directed by screenwriter Thomas Rickman, who was Oscar-nominated for Coal Miner's Daughter and also penned Hooper, Everybody's All-American, Truman, and the television film Tuesdays with Morrie, is notable mainly for its cast. It was the first lead role for Martha Plimpton, the terrific young actress who would quickly become one of the best and most distinctive teen movie stars of the 1980s, working with many of the best directors of that decade—Richard Donner (The Goonies), Peter Weir (The Mosquito Coast), Andrei Konchalovsky (Shy People), Sidney Lumet (Running on Empty), Woody Allen (Another Woman), and Ron Howard (Parenthood). Plimpton plays a 13-year-old girl being raised by her grandmother on the banks of the Mississippi while her father is in prison. She meets her dad (Tommy Lee Jones) for the first time when he's unexpectedly paroled from serving a life sentence for murder. The two slowly forge an uneasy relationship as they work to rebuild a boat named The River Rat and then embark on a trip down the Mississippi to Memphis, pursued by a sinister prison doctor (Brian Dennehy).

All three leads are great. Dennehy is always such a marvelous villain, and Jones brings his rugged, plainspoken humanity to the role of an innocent man who got caught up in a bad situation that ruined his life. But the picture belongs to Plimpton. She plays a smart, capable kid who sees her world for what it is and has few illusions about how things work, though she rightly hopes that she and her father will eventually become a family. The mostly unknown supporting cast also shines, especially Shawn Smith as the little neighbor boy Wexel, who stows away aboard the River Rat.

The independently financed project was one of the first to go through The Sundance Institute. It was produced by British filmmaker Michael Apted and features cinematography by Jan Kiesser (who would also shoot this same year's Choose Me for Alan Rudolph and go on to photograph films like Fright Night, Some Kind of Wonderful, Clean and Sober, and Georgia). The script, tone, and direction are all over the place. Sometimes, this feels like a TV movie, complete with its Mike Post soundtrack; other times, we're treated to some inventive shots and point-acting moments. The story and setting feel timeless, but this is unmistakably an '80s picture, as only in the 1980s do you get films sold as "family movies" that have this much violence. The film features multiple fatal and near-fatal fistfights, lots of gunplay, two dead bodies, mentions of rape and incest, and Dennehy's character practically transforming into a monster out of a horror movie by the third act.