Silent Tongue

River Phoenix made a few interesting films after the precious and precocious "Stand By Me," including Savoca's "Dogfight," Lumet's "Running on Empty," and Bogdanovich's "The Thing Called Love." Released after his death but filmed three years earlier, "Silent Tongue" might never have seen the light of day were it not for the added marketing appeal of being River's "last film." This dark, difficult work surely shocked a few swooning teenagers eager for one last peek at their favourite heartthrob. The film's opening scene finds our young hero shooting a vulture, tearing off it's wings and placing them on his dead wife's rotting corpse--which he has bound tightly in rope and hidden in the branches of an old tree. Jimmy Reardon was kinda strange, but this behaviour is downright loopy.

The plot goes something like this: dad (Richard Harris) buys his son (Phoenix) a wife. Wife is the daughter of a drunken Irish carny (Alan Bates) and sister of a moralistic Irish carny (Dermot Mulroney). Wife dies, son goes insane. Dad decides that the only way to save his son from the depths of madness is to get him another wife. Dad returns to drunken Irish carny and asks him for his other daughter. Drunken Irish carny needs time to think, but Dad doesn't have time. Dad steals the other daughter and takes her to his son. All the while, the dead wife's spirit haunts each character, threatening their lives, seeking vengence for her mother who was raped by the drunken Irish carny.

Needless to say, this is not a traditional narrative. This is a story about the relationship between the dead and the living, the exploiter and the exploited, and at its core, guilt and innocence. The bizarre plot is almost incedental to its themes, attempting to place the horror that is genocide in some kind of tangible, recognizable form.

The acting is tremendous, particularly Harris and Phoenix who share only one scene together but seem inseparable--the glue that binds them also holds the fragmented film intact. Any movie dealing with things that nobody wants or can bear to think about is difficult to watch, and "Silent Tongue" is no exception. Everything is ugly. The characters bark at each other and it is clear very early on that there will be no "winners" here, no heroic action. Desperation has taken over the souls of these people and they behave with accordingly little grace.

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