Cue the Tanker

Peter Callahan’s Against the Current

by Jay Blotcher, August 31, 2009

In the 1968 film The Swimmer, co-directed by Frank Perry and Sydney Pollack, a Connecticut blueblood named Neddy Merrill confronts his midlife crisis by slipping into the drink. That is, he decides to swim across the county via a network of neighboring pools. In Peter Callahan’s narrative film Against the Current, a foundering financial writer named Paul Thompson opts for a more grandiose goal for similar reasons: swimming the Hudson River from Albany to New York City. While Perry and Pollack’s film depicted the surreal aspects of Neddy’s quest, the Hastings-on-Hudson-based Callahan accentuates the lyrical components of Paul’s mission—even though both films end unsettlingly.

Callahan, whose first film Last Ball appeared in 2000, began Against the Current soon afterwards. (While a documentary titled Swim the River concerned the same Hudson-spanning feat—albeit to raise pollution awareness rather than as an outlet for personal grief—Callahan only learned of environmentalist Christopher Swain’s film after he’d completed his own screenplay.) Callahan insists this film is not autobiographical; while he did swim the Hudson once like his protagonist, the director’s preferred route was the brief distance between eastern and western shores. The premise of his film made it a tough sell, but Callahan—a high school drop-out who drove taxis before returning to school—had a secret weapon: Mary Tyler Moore.

The iconic actress—whose sunny turn as Mary Richards has eclipsed several gritty acting roles in film and onstage—was on Callahan’s list of “dream characters” for the film and Moore “was at the top of that list.” Going for broke, the director sent a copy of his screenplay to the actress, asking her to consider the role of an wealthy eccentric who inhabits a Rhinebeck mansion. Moore said yes. Moreover, when the film failed to find financing the first time around, the actress stood by the project and was available when the funds were raised. Callahan describes her role as “a cross between her character in Flirting with Disaster and Ordinary People.”

Moore’s quirky turn is not the sole gem in this film, which veers vertiginously between romantic comedy, adventure film and tragedy. The attractive trio at the center of Against the Current—Fiennes, Justin Kirk as his best friend Jeff and Elizabeth Reaser as their traveling companion Liz—exude a vitality that surmounts the occasional bump in the screenplay. Callahan gives the actors points for their lack of star ego and explains that the organic rapport the three demonstrate was deepened by working together “on a very difficult, challenging film shoot in a very short period of time.” (It was a 22-day shoot.) Most of that time, they were together on a whaler boat in the Hudson—when Fiennes was not paddling through the water in a wetsuit.