Adrift in aimless whitewater tale

A basic promise underlies every movie: The people in the film should be more interesting than you and me. Or at least, more fascinating than the neighbors. “Riversense,” a documentary about a handful of whitewater kayakers, violates that fundamental contract. The lives chronicled in “Riversense” are simply boring.

The tedium isn’t inevitable. When Kate Geis began her three-year project to “discover the meaning of life through river-running,” she focused on four lives: a well-known illustrator of kayaking guides, a 15-year-old leaving home for the first time, a kayaking couple and an extreme boater who broke his back on a 50-foot waterfall. The beautifully shot film hints at interesting possibilities: One tearfully returns home; the illustrator, according to news reports, killed himself after filming concluded.

But little of that pathos makes it into the film. Instead, the audience is assaulted with mindless philosophical ramblings about the similarities between rivers and life. Like a rudderless boat, no narrative guides travelers through this film. Anyone who has tried to describe the magic of an adventure knows that telling it and doing it are very different things. “Riversense” tells us that the rich are different from you and me, instead of showing how river trips can transcend these differences through the full-on experience of living.

-- Charles Duhigg