R.I.P. Robert Redford

As we continue our trip through Europe -- I'm currently on a train between an Italian town in Tuscany called Arezzo and Rome -- I don't really feel equipped to memoralize Robert Redford.

However, I also don't feel I can call myself a movie blog if I don't stop for a moment to acknowledge the passing of one of the greats.

It wasn't just what Redford brought to the screen as a matinee idol and acting icon. It was what he fostered as a champion of independent cinema through his long association with the Sundance Film Festival, named after his most iconic character. The fact that he was also a strong proponent of my cherished progressive causes is also really resonating for me, especially this month.

But because I'm not currently in a position to do a deep dive into IMDB and give a granular consideration of a career that started in 1960 with a role on the TV show Maverick, I'm just going to pay my respects to Redford with a little free associating today.

The first thing I thought when I heard Redford had died in his sleep at age 89 was "Robert Redford was 89?" Even though it would make sense that he would be, Redford always projected boyish good looks that belied his age, even when he was in his announced final role in The Old Man and the Gun in 2018. (Which, incidentally, was the second to last film I saw with my mother, and the last while she was compos mentis.) Given how there Redford clearly still was for this film -- maybe not looking a day over 68 -- it seemed strange that this would be his final film. (He did have a few bits of voiceover work after this, as well as one Marvel cameo.)

Because he did add a youthful vigor to whatever he did, the fact that he lived nearly nine decades does seem strange. But when you go back and look at the titles, well, you remember what a part of the cinematic landscape he was for six of those nine decades.

If we are talking about his role in my own personal viewing history, consider also that Redford was in the first movie I ever saw on video with my wife. That may seem like a strange milestone to honor -- our first movie together was in the theater, The Aviator, which played at the bar after our wedding per our request -- but I do remember that we watched Redford's The Clearing in her apartment in our first month of dating. Redford would have been something special to me even if I weren't a cinephile. 

The listing of his classic titles is not something I'm going to do here. The internet is filled to the brim with Redford appreciations right now. You know the titles. Me proving I can also list them does not do anything for you.

To illustrate these two personal examples, however, gives you a little something different. It suggests Redford's cinematic everpresence, even in films from the twlight of his career. He was solid, he was reliable, he was charming as hell, and he made many a person swoon with his beauty. It's all we want and need from a movie star. 

Yet Redford also had a career as a producer, director and film festival impresario, cementing his status as one of the more titanic cinematic figures of the second half of the 20th century, and even the first quarter of the 21st century. He poured his all into his love of cinema, and we were the beneficiaries.

Rest in peace, Sundance. 

"Prison breaking" into retirement

When I saw posters up in the cinema for The Great Escaper, starring Michael Caine and Glenda Jackson, I thought "Another movie about old British people that I can skip." There are a lot of those.

More recently I realized that I should probably not skip it, since it appears to be Caine's last film.

News broke last year? was it? that Caine, now 91, intended to stop acting in films and formally retire. It was a sad but inevitable day. He doesn't want to have to be wheeled on set to stumble through lines he can't remember. Caine is the kind of dignified performer who deserves to go out with as many of his lifelong skills intact as possible.

My next thought, though, was that from the title alone, it reminded me of another retirement film from one of his peers, which was Robert Redford's The Old Man & the Gun from 2018, a little side diversion for the otherwise visionary David Lowery.

Sure enough, I checked the plot synopsis of The Great Escaper and it has to do with an 89-year-old World War II vet who "broke out" of his retirement home in order to attend a 2014 70th anniversary remembrance of D-Day. It's based on a true story. 

What is it with screen legends who want to sign off on their careers with prison break movies?

The Old Man & the Gun, you will recall, featured Redford as a character who held up banks with three other geriatrics who were slightly younger than him. This was also based on a real person, and that real person would routinely get caught and then break out of prison. I'm not looking up the details now, but I think he escaped prison something like 30 times, which just sounds made up. At what point do they just throw away the key?

Redford chose this as his "last" project -- more on that in a moment -- and now Caine has done the same. And in this case the title has additional metaphorical significance, as Caine is also "escaping" the career that probably did not feel very much like a prison to him, although who knows.

The thing is, I just checked on IMDB to see if Redford was as good as his word, and of course he has not been. I say "of course" maybe because Redford is still only 87 now, and probably realized he was still capable of working if he wanted to work, and he obviously did. Perhaps he was contractually obliged to reprise his MCU role in Avengers: Endgame, though they certainly could have worked around that -- maybe he was only in the big final funeral scene, I don't really remember. That doesn't explain his vocal work in the 2020 film Omniboat: A Fast Boat Fantasia (huh? what the hell is that?), though at least he didn't appear on screen, and maybe the movie sat on the shelf for a couple years.

I'll miss Caine, but these guys should never say never. Maybe that's why Clint Eastwood, now 93 with his film Juror #2 in post-production, never does.

Is the better story always the better movie?

Bill Bryson has been around long enough that it's surprising it's taken this long for his work to appear as a movie. And lucky him, the first time it does, he appears as a character in it.

It's sort of a strange Bryson story to be adapted, though, for a reason I'll tell you in just a minute.

But first ... even though A Walk in the Woods is not the type of movie where you'd usually issue a spoiler warning, I'm going to do so anyway, out of a general courtesy to both you and to Mr. Bryson (who has given me the pleasure of reading two of his stories, A Short History of Nearly Everything and Down Under).

It's certainly a less strange story to adapt than, say, the aforementioned A Short History of Nearly Everything, which delves into nothing less than the creation of the planet Earth and its subsequent millions of millennia of geological, ecological and cultural development. A Walk in the Woods is a story of two old codgers -- aged about 30 years so that Robert Redford, who optioned the material back in the 20th century, could play one of them -- trying to walk the entire 2,200-mile Appalachian Trial, so it does have a certain cinematic quality that makes it logical for adaptation. It was written in 1998.

The reason it's a strange story to adapt is because they don't make it. In fact, they don't even make it halfway.

Spoiler alert! Wait, I already said that.

What I'm trying to determine today is whether the fact that they didn't make it makes it a better or worse movie.

It would certainly have been a better story if Bryson and his hiking companion, Stephen Katz (Nick Nolte), had made it all the way. But would it have been a better movie?

I'm leaning towards "no," but with reservations.

The only reason we're even having this conversation in the first place, though, is that usually, the story wouldn't even get adapted unless they did make it.

Bryson is a travel writer, which kind of means that he writes about his experiences whether anything actually happens or not. I haven't read A Walk in the Woods, but ultimately, the conclusion is kind of that "nothing" is what actually happened. Oh sure, they were beset by small adventures, the types of things you would definitely recount to your wife or to a friend once you returned from the trip. But nothing really happened that in and of itself would have made a great story, assuming that Rick Kerb and Bill Holderman's script does hew fairly closely to the actual details of the story. (I'll pause to acknowledge a few ways that it notably does not, however. As Bryson is only just now 63 years old, that means he wrote it when he was 46, a full 33 years younger than Redford is right now. Then there's the uncertainty of what time period the film exists in, exemplified by Kristen Schaal's character singing the Pharrell/Daft Punk song "Get Lucky" from 2013, but also by the contradicting fact that no one in the film uses a cell phone, when that kind of thing would obviously benefit someone hiking the Appalachian Trail.)

So obviously, Redford's reasons for optioning it had to do with trying to say something about testing personal limits, getting out of comfort zones, and reacquainting with long-lost friends, which are all themes of the film that resulted. (What's more, he envisioned this as his third film with Paul Newman, but Newman was too sick to make the film and died in 2008.) Those are perhaps better things to give us in a film than the standard "overcoming steep odds to prove everybody wrong" story, which has been done a million times and has basically ceased to be interesting.

The thing is, the only reason most stories are worth telling in the first place is because somebody overcame steep odds and because somebody proved everybody wrong. Otherwise, no one would have even recorded the story for posterity.

Because Bryson recorded everything he did for posterity as part of his job description, and thrived through his gift for spinning entertaining reading out of potentially banal activities, the conditions were created where Redford could adapt a story in which people failed at what they set out to do, and in which nothing very earth-shattering happened in the process of them failing.

Unless you consider the minute appreciations gained of life's fragility and the durability of friendship to be earth-shattering, and in the hands of a good writer, I suppose they are.