Big River Man

Big River Man

110 Minutes








Making up for some motivational vagueness with a healthy dose of bizarre humor, Big River Man follows a world-record attempt without any of the standard gravity, turning this grueling pursuit into a peculiar celebration of absurd behavior. It's an interesting take on the "impossible goal" genre, where a self-appointed hero takes on overwhelming odds; others wonder why, even as the film's own existence answers those questions. For this type of movie to work, it needs a strong anchor, one whom can sustain a singular focus, withstanding the inevitable irritation that comes with watching someone attempt something dangerously stupid for 90 minutes.

Martin Strel is certainly one of those people, a towering Slovenian madman who drinks two bottles of wine a day...while swimming the length of the world's longest rivers (it's sprayed into his mouth from a water bottle). He has defeated the Mississippi and the impossibly polluted Yangtze, and here takes on the Amazon, the biggest (and of course most dangerous) of them all. This is done in the name of drawing attention to the environment, a muddled goal that the film places at a distant second to his overpowering personality. "Slovenians like to do a lot of things at once," Strel's son Borut notes, "for my father that means driving drunk, at 110 mph, practicing power breathing while learning English."

Most filmmakers would salivate over the chance to document this type of character, and Strel does not disappoint, only growing weirder as the trip wears on, at one point clamping a car battery to his head to fight exhaustion. Director John Maringouin grants the project even more verve than it might have demanded, using spry cinematography of the rainforest, its creatures and people, to spice up an already stirring adventure. One strange scene features Isis-style metal blasting as the camera flies upside down over the jungle, slowly rotating, a twisted off-kilter shot that suggests a level of eccentricity akin to Strel's.

Despite the freak show atmosphere and the sideline environmental focus, Big River Man is clearly Strel's movie. It's apparent from the first scenes, where he trains and aims for oneness with nature by standing for long hours in a cave. But most of the film's humor comes from the way the other characters react to him. Borut, his manager and public mouthpiece, serves as the film's narrator and deadpan comedian, sprinkling the soundtrack with half-intentional sounding bon mots. One such involves Matthew Mohlke, the flame-haired amateur navigator and one-man cult following, who's fresh off a job pushing carts at Wal-Mart. Borut describes him as having "worked for the Sam Walton family."

Mohlke's digression into spaced-out mania, mangling Greek myths and driving the rest of the crew insane, is another ingredient that helps make this funnier than most comedies. It's a tone which makes it easy to forget that we're witnessing what amounts to an act of extreme desperation, a broken man battling his suffering through extreme behavior. Strel, who has done time as a flamenco guitar teacher, beauty pageant host and fast-food pitchman, is a national celebrity, but cannot quell his self-destructive impulses. All of his earnings from the previous expeditions have been gambled away. In one scene that perfectly mixes comedy and desperation, Strel chats up a US ambassador at a fancy gala, feigning wealth while sending his son to steal the breadbasket.

Borut claims his father's obsession with Herculean labors grew out of abuse he suffered as a child, from his domineering alcoholic father. Late in the film he relates a story where Martin jumped in an icy river to escape a beating. As his father followed along the bank, he kept swimming, puttering along the man grew tired and went home. As we see in Big River Man, Strel's demons may have transformed, but he has never really stopped.

by Jesse Cataldo