Mending the Line, now streaming on Netflix, is a quiet story about two decidedly different veterans, each recovering from the scars of war, who form an unexpected and initially reluctant friendship over fly-fishing.
The Gist: John Colter (Sinqua Walls) and Ike Fletcher (Brian Cox) share a doctor at the VA hospital. Colter is a young-ish Marine home from a last-day-of-tour injury sustained in Afghanistan, while Ike, his fellow (and much older) Marine, is struggling with an initially unnamed diagnosis that can only be managed, not treated. Colter wants to get well enough to redeploy; Ike just wants to be able to continue his fly-fishing hobby (which becomes dangerous when you’re prone to passing out alone at the river). So Dr. Burke (Patricia Heaton) assigns the younger man to help the older one, thinking it’ll be good for Colter’s mental health and Ike’s physical safety. Colter also meets Lucy (Perry Mattfeld), a local librarian and former photographer, who is dealing with her own grief. Fly-fishing ensues – though Ike always releases the animals, because he’s seen enough killing; apparently just torturing the fish provides enough tranquility.
What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: The wounded veteran desperate to get back on active duty rather than deal with his mental trauma is almost exactly the character Jennifer Lawrence plays in the lovely, low-key drama Causeway from a couple of years ago, and of course it’s hard for any movie to include fly-fishing sequences without bringing to mind Robert Redford’s A River Runs Through It. Those two movies diverge in style, but they’re united in being more immediately compelling than Mending the Line.
Performance Worth Watching: Wes Studi, a character actor who you’ll recognize from movies like The Last of the Mohicans, Heat, Mystery Men, and Hostiles, is typically sturdy and quietly magnetic in a relatively thankless supporting role as Ike’s pal who owns a fly-fishing shop.
Memorable Dialogue: In one unintentionally funny moment, Colter fails to understand a metaphor about salmon swimming upstream.
Sex and Skin: None. The search for a truly sexy fly-fishing movie continues.
Our Take: It feels a little churlish to complain that a movie that’s at least in part about the patience and gentle care required by the sport of fly-fishing is too slow. On the other hand, this is a movie about an older guy teaching a younger guy to fly-fish where their first fly-fishing scene together doesn’t happen for a full hour into the movie. At first, it seems admirable that director Joshua Caldwell (last seen addressing decidedly different subject matter in the Bella Thorne vehicle Infamous) is willing to take his time establishing Colter and Ike separately – including a surprisingly lengthy opening battle sequence in Afghanistan – before forcing them together. But both of their characters are simply too familiar to bear this approach without provoking some impatience – especially when the movie spends so much of its time delaying the release of basic information. This is true even once the wheels of the modest plot are set in motion; the exact specifics of Colter’s injury, the details of Ike’s diagnosis and the reasons for his reticence to talk about his war experiences, and the reason Lucy gave up her photography career trickle out slowly over the course of the movie’s second hour.
Mending the Line makes some worthwhile observations about the psychological wounds so many veterans must carry with them,and gives Brian Cox a powerful little monologue where he counsels his new friend on the perils of soldiers treating military experiences as their “whole story.” But the aforementioned Causeway handles similar material less predictably; Mending the Line can’t figure out a way to dramatize this stuff beyond earnest conversations. Even the fly-fishing, a photogenic sport if there ever was one, looks kind of flat and staid – one sweeping shot has Cox and Walls just standing around on the landscape, as if they’re afraid of spoiling nature by interacting with it. Over and over, the decision to repeatedly linger in the moment feels like it’s being made out of caution rather than actual effectiveness.
Our Call: Mending the Line is the kind of sensitive and well-intentioned small-scale drama that rarely gets an extensive theatrical release, so its accessibility on Netflix is welcome. That doesn’t, however, make it a particularly good example of the healing-veteran subgenre. Viewers are safe to SKIP IT.
