Supermom Shoots the Rapids

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

It has taken a while to personify her perfectly on film, but here she is at last -- the ideal woman of feminist song, story and legend. Her name is Gail, she is played -- make that attractively humanized -- by the admirable Meryl Streep in The River Wild, and if men have any sense left, they will add a few bass notes to the trilling chorus of approval that is soon likely to rise from the soprano section when this otherwise rather routine movie opens.

Gail teaches at a school for the deaf. She is a firm but good-humored mom. Her tolerance for the workaholic ways of her husband Tom (David Strathairn) is wearing thin, but she's laboring earnestly on the marriage. She is also an expert whitewater rafter, and has arranged a trip down a challenging, unnamed western river with Tom, their son Roarke (Joseph Mazzello) and the family dog (boy and dog are also estranged from Tom). The family that gets sprayed together stays together -- or so Gail hopes.

Shoving off, they encounter a suspiciously charming fellow named Wade (Kevin Bacon) and his suspiciously charmless pal, Terry (John C. Reilly), also eager to shoot a few rapids. Wade is flirtatious with Gail, self-consciously chummy with Roarke.

You can guess the rest before it happens, since Denis O'Neill's script is rudimentary. Wade soon proves to be a great deal less than he seems (he and Terry are grand larcenists on the wilderness lam). They need Gail's skill and bravery to get them through the Gauntlet (hushed tones whenever it's mentioned) -- a nasty set of falls, rapids and whirlpools. Tom takes a little ) more time to prove that he is a great deal more than he seems, a tenacious defender of (shall we say) family values.

The passage through the Gauntlet is a skillful blend of stunt and special- effects work, nicely orchestrated by the director, Curtis Hanson. He is less skillful at building suspense around the campsites, possibly because the screenplay is not very tightly or eccentrically wound, possibly because Bacon takes his best line too literally. "I am a nice guy," he says at one point. "I'm just a different kind of nice guy." As a result, Bacon doesn't hone Wade's menace as sharply as he might. He needs to become more erratic, more dangerous, as they paddle farther and farther from civilization, but he doesn't make it all the way to psychopathy.

It is Streep who rivets our attention and holds the picture together. Under Supermom's omnicompetence, there lurks the spirit of the larky girl who indeed ran the Gauntlet when she was old enough to know better and young enough not to give a damn. You can see that spunky, heedless young woman in her affectionate banter with her kids, in the sexiness of her response to Wade's come-ons, in the exultation with which she confronts the river's perils. This is smart and subtle acting and a gift that is above and beyond this movie's routine call to duty.