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A River Runs Through It

I am taking a day at home, since I had a sore throat when I woke up and I was generally exhausted, so I am working on a paper about Love based on the dialog in Plato’s “Symposium” and watching the movie “A River Runs Through It.” I don’t know exactly what it is about this movie, but for some reason it seems to touch me in a personal way. Maybe because it is a movie about two preachers kids that are brothers, maybe because it is a movie about fishing, or maybe it is because it takes place in some of the most beautiful and untamed lands in America, but something gets to me whenever I watch this movie. I’m also generally amused by the preacher jokes, such as “they were Methodists, a denomination my father always refers to as baptists who can read.” I love movies that remind me of what my family is like, movies that remind me of the beautiful places I’ve been, and movies that remind me of what it was like growing up. I bought a copy of this movie on DVD for my family when I was in California, I got it at Fry’s Electronics. I have no idea why I remember something like that, but I do. I saw the movie for the first time with my family in the theater, I liked it then, but not as much as I like it now. I didn’t see it again for years after that, but all I could really remember about the movie is that I liked it, it was about preachers kids and fly fishing, and that joke about methodists. But here I am watching it again for the third time in the last couple of years and I absolutely love this movie. It is so simple, yet that is where its charm lies. I can’t help but think about how much that is like my life in many ways. Nothing really great in my life is complex, most of the best stuff is simple. Like people, family, nature, and sleep. All simple, yet all important, and all wonderful. I even think of how simple it is in the movie when his Brad Pitt’s character dies. A part of me just wishes I could go back to being young and live when all of life was simple. But the best thing I can take from this movie is the end, when the father says in a sermon “you don’t have to completely understand someone to completely love them.” So simple, yet that is a truth in all of our lives.

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5 Comments

  1. -K says

    I too like that movie more the more I watch it. One thing I’ve always wondered about it that scene where his father is in his study reading aloud, and the brother who lives walks in and starts reciting along what his dad is reading. The best I can figure, it goes:

    Thanks be to the human heart, by which we live
    Thanks to its glories, its fears
    To me, the meanest flower that grows (the door is still partly closed, so we can’t really hear what the dad is saying up to that point, but I’m pretty sure about this last stuff)
    It is these thoughts that do often lie
    Too deep for tears

    What on earth are they reciting? It seems to me to be the most real, most passionate poem about the fragility of human life ever, but I can’t find it anywhere. I’ve been searching for years and years (I haven’t even seen the move in at least 5 years, and I still remember all that – that’s how deep an impression it made on me). Do you know?

  2. Siberian says

    I’m glad you like that movie. It means that God will continue to give you hope for your family. Don’t quit.

    BTW, the Methodist joke was pretty amusing.

  3. BigCat says

    I can’t say that I know what the poem is, but now I am intrigued and wonder what it is, so maybe I’ll do some nosing around for it.

  4. BigCat says

    I found it!!!!
    The poem is called
    Ode: Immitations of Immortality From Recollections of Early Childhood
    by William Wordworth

    It is a long poem, but a good one, the part quoted in the movie is the end of it.

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