‘A River Runs Through It’ Runs...

It’s easy to see why parents are sending their children to see this movie.

Ninteenth-Century family values ooze from every frame. No child portrayed in this film ever says, “Does the word duh mean anything to you?” No one asks for a Super Nintendo or $150 sneakers. The over-indulgers get their comeuppance.

It is perhaps as far away from the MainPlace mall in Santa Ana as you can get. Yet, here we are with Laurisa, 17, her sister Jillian, 10, and her friend Katie, 10, and all three loved it.

Katie had even seen it the day before. There were so many people in the theater then that she had to sit in the front row “like this,” she says, lifting her chin toward the ceiling. But even though she knows the plot by heart, she’d see it again, she says.

“It teaches you, like, lessons, like, alcohol, and, like, what the consequences are,” says Katie, who has been impressed by the Just Say No volunteer at school. “Like, he (the journalist brother) got beaten up. He was probably drinking or something.”

“Can you think of any other lessons in the movie?” I ask. “I think they said it a couple of times: The people who need help the most won’t take it. What about that?”

“You can’t help people who don’t want it,” Laurisa says. “Some of my friends, you say (to them), ‘You shouldn’t do this or that,’ but if they don’t want help, there’s nothing you can do.”

Jillian and Katie think maybe they’d try anyway. If Jillian had a friend who drank alcohol or took drugs, she would “tell my mom and try to get her to stop.”

The girls enjoyed the scenery. They say they have fished at Mammoth Lakes, but the sport doesn’t seem to hold the spiritual values for them as for the movie’s narrator (“In our family there was no clear division between religion and fly-fishing.”)

“I caught this big fish, but it was so slippery my dad lost it,” Jillian says.

What Katie remembers most is the scene of the boys riding a dangerous rapid in a frail wooden boat. Jillian likes the fishing scene “where he caught the really big fish and (nearly) drowned and stuff.” Still, they aren’t sure they would prefer growing up in a place like Montana.

“Either place you’re missing something,” Laurisa says. “If you grow up here, you miss the trees and the river and you’re not as close to nature. But if you grow up there, you don’t have the street smarts you need to grow up in the world. You’re kind of a country bumpkin. Most of the world is big cities. You don’t have the attitude you need to survive.”

What about the way the boys allowed their parents to set the rules without challenge? Did that seem old-fashioned?

“This was set in 1920, and people didn’t talk back to their parents,” Laurisa says. She figures her parents know best most of the time, but if she feels strongly about something, she speaks up.

The girls say word-of-mouth has contributed to the movie’s popularity.

Maybe one reason people like it, Laurisa speculates, is that “it’s a break from what else is out there, the sex and violence and that stuff.”