NEW YORK (AP) — Born throughout the Nice Despair with sun-kissed California seems to be, Robert Redford by no means didn’t epitomize one thing quintessential and hopeful concerning the American character.
Redford, who died Tuesday on the age of 89, left a film path etched into land. He appeared to reside as a lot throughout the American panorama as he did on film screens. He was within the Rocky Mountains of “Jeremiah Johnson,” the Wyoming grasslands of “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” the Washington, D.C., alleyways of “All the President’s Men” and the Montana streams of “A River Runs Through It.”
“From the time I was just a kid, I was always trying to break free of the bounds that I was stuck with, and always wanted to go outside,” Redford advised The Related Press in 2018.
Redford, a movie-star paragon, was absolutely savvy with how he performed with and used his all-American picture. Nobody who starred within the baseball drama “The Natural” (1984) and gave Bernard Malamud’s novel a storybook ending could not have some sense of self-mythology. Nevertheless it was one among Redford’s biggest feats that, regardless of his fame, he remained innately linked to some aspirational American excellent. Redford, an open-air actor of simple, rugged attraction, evoked the type of common man decency that stars like Jimmy Stewart did earlier than him — solely Redford did it by means of an period of mistrust and disillusionment.
“He was to me a throwback to the actors that I was nuts about when I was growing up and going to movies: real, classical, traditional, old-fashioned movie stars who were very, very redolent of some kind of American essence,” mentioned Sydney Pollack, who directed Redford in “Jeremiah Johnson,” “The Way We Were” and “Three Days of the Condor,” in 1993. “They were very much a part of the American landscape and they were heroic in a kind of understated way.”
Underscoring ‘independence’
That was most true, maybe, in Utah. Wanting to flee paved-over Los Angeles, Redford first started shopping for land there early in his profession. In Utah, he would battle to guard each untrampled wilderness and a spirit of moviemaking that had grown more and more troublesome in Hollywood. As a longtime trustee of the Pure Assets Protection Council, a nonprofit environmental advocacy group, Redford was an outspoken environmentalist. Within the Nineteen Seventies, he efficiently opposed a pair of rural Utah proposals: a six-lane freeway and coal-fired energy plant.
Within the Utah mountains, Redford additionally launched the Sundance Institute. Past Sundance’s annual pageant for impartial movie, the institute has been a lifeblood younger filmmakers. Its year-round laboratory — the a part of Sundance that Redford was most happy with — has helped nurture a few of the most important voices in American cinema for many years.
“For me, the word to be underscored is ‘independence,’” Redford as soon as mentioned of his legacy. “I’ve always believed in that word. That’s what led to me eventually wanting to create a category that supported independent artists who weren’t given a chance to be heard. The industry was pretty well controlled by the mainstream, which I was a part of. But I saw other stories out there that weren’t having a chance to be told.”
That spirit of independence usually infused his movies, too. When Redford wished to make “All the President’s Men,” the seminal 1976 movie directed by Alan Pakula about Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s Watergate investigation, few within the movie business thought there was a lot drama to be present in a narrative that was then a number of years previous.
“Nixon had already resigned, and the held opinion (in Hollywood) was ‘No one cares. No one wants to hear about this,’” Redford, who additionally co-produced the movie, mentioned in 2006. “And I said, ‘No, it’s not about Nixon. It’s about something else. It’s about investigative journalism and hard work.’”
If “All the President’s Men,” one of many biggest newspaper motion pictures, detailed the hard-earned revelations of Watergate, “Three Days of the Condor” — one of many biggest political thrillers — captured the paranoia and disillusionment that adopted. If anybody was fully unfamiliar with why Redford was so good, “Three Days of the Condor” could be a great place to start out.
As a bookish CIA worker code-named Condor, he returns from lunch to his workplace to search out, as he quickly experiences, “Everybody is dead.” Condor, untrained for such deadly spy actions, is left dangling within the wind.
“Will you bring me in, please?” he pleads by cellphone to his superiors. “I’m not a field agent. I just read books.”
Not so totally different from his Woodward of “All the President’s Men,” Redford is a fresh-faced novice thrown right into a high-stakes scheme the place few, together with these within the authorities, could be trusted. Nobody has ever been higher at taking part in the common man attempting to assume quick on his toes, and make sense of an ever-darker world.
A politician solely on display
Although some known as for him to, Redford by no means entered politics, himself. He remained outspoken — he is ultimately the mannequin for the fashionable Hollywood activist — on a variety of points, together with Indigenous and LGBTQ+ rights. The closest he got here to working for workplace was Michael Ritchie’s 1972 satire “The Candidate,” through which Redford performed an idealistic lawyer enlisted to problem a extremely favored incumbent Republican senator. Redford’s candidate finally wins, however not with out sacrificing his ideas and seeing a lot of what he stands for diluted.
Redford’s place, as an alternative, was exterior politics. The proper bookend to his ’70s motion pictures is “Sneakers,” Phil Alden Robinson’s absurdly underrated 1992 caper starring Redford as a former ’60s radical now residing beneath a false moniker and main a band of safety specialists. They stumble into possession of a pc gadget that brings the eye of the NSA, CIA, FBI and lots of others, forcing Redford to, but once more, strive to determine what’s ethical in a harmful (and now newly digital) America.
The world that Redford’s movies usually presciently depicted appeared to push him additional into the wilderness, on display and off. He largely retreated into retirement during the last decade. When Redford died, he was at his residence within the Utah mountains, exterior Provo. One in every of his final movies was 2015’s “A Walk in the Woods,” taking part in Invoice Bryson ambling alongside the Appalachian Path.
Probably the most becoming and elegiac swan music, although was J.C. Chandor’s “All Is Lost,” a near-wordless 2013 drama about an previous man at sea. Redford performs a solo mariner whose sailboat collides with a delivery container. Although terse, the film reverberates with financial and ecological metaphor. A visibly older and weathered Redford — now not the golden, freckled face of his youth — suffers by means of more and more tough and stormy seas, improvising his survival.
For an actor who had coated a lot floor, “All Is Lost” was one final frontier. Redford’s unnamed character was credited solely as “Our Man.”
