A Walk in the Woods is one of two movies starring Robert Redford, left, that will be released in September. Nick Nolte also stars in the film.
His face today is every bit as lived-in as the shoe that was the primary residence of a certain old woman in a certain nursery rhyme. And it's fabulous.
If one of the marvels of movie fandom is the ability to watch a face morph and flutter over a span of years, or even decades, Robert Redford's mug is a plain of majestic depths. A prototypical pretty boy – one who always wore his heart not on his sleeve, but underneath his lapel, with a countable aloofness – he still retains a quota of handsomeness, though it leans now more toward Mount Rushmore.
His face has been his passport – watch him make CIA conspiracy look hot in Three Days of the Condor, or turn shampooing Meryl Streep's hair into the most erotic of arts in Out of Africa – and also something that's undermined him, in that it frequently caused people to underrate the craft behind the glow. Consider legendary critic Pauline Kael, who once remarked that Redford "has turned almost alarmingly blond – he's gone past platinum, he must be into plutonium; his hair is co-ordinated with his teeth." It's his blue-eyed presence, too, that's also managed to overwhelm plot. The ending of Indecent Proposal, for instance, remains among the least credible in celluloid-land: As if Demi Moore is going to pick Woody Harrelson over Redford.
Right on the cliff of octogenarianism – the actor turned 79 the other week – he returns this September in not one, but two, films. Shabby: not. In the first, he comes face-to-lived-in-face with bears, raging rivers and a rather corpulent Nick Nolte. The project, A Walk in the Woods, is based on a memoir by distinguished travel writer Bill Bryson about hiking the famed Appalachian Trail. Think of it as Wild meets The Bucket List – an effective delivery system for hearing two old dudes banter about aging, nature and what's-it-all-about-isms. But because one of them is Redford – the thing about watching a movie star over a long horizon is that their past performances inevitably feed into a meta-patchwork onscreen – we've all been here before.
There are echoes of Redford having traded in his ski poles (eons ago, he produced and starred in Downhill Racer, a film essentially about looking hot in aviators) for big-sky hiking. There is also the connected-to-the-land Redford – the man who was a student of environmental issues way before it was au courant, and whose initial two acres in Utah (long ago purchased for a mere $500) billowed into so much more, and soon enough became a platform for the game-changing Sundance Film Festival, which he founded.
The second film – a more pedantic effort called Truth – connects the dots, fourth-estate- speaking. Four decades after Redford starred in All the President's Men – bringing to life the busting of Richard Nixon, and along the way inflating the ranks and egos of journalism majors everywhere – he's back playing another real-life reporter in a movie about the 2004 scandal at CBS when documents used by 60 Minutes showing that George W. Bush's National Guard service was a sham turned out to be forgeries. Where Redford once played Bob Woodward as a newsprint-smudged superhero, here, by all accounts, he's playing news anchor Dan Rather as a cog in the media machine. The think pieces just write themselves – and likely will when the film has its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival.
Over the years – before Redford took things into own his hands, and nabbed an Oscar not for acting, but for directing Ordinary People – he's been accused of playing second banana to the women in his movies. Jane Fonda, for instance, forcefully yins to his yang in the sixties-era Barefoot in the Park (he also starred in the Broadway production of the play). Streep, as we mentioned, graciously carried him along in Out of Africa (about which Redford once said his character in that film felt like "a symbol, not a self"). And in the wistful The Way We Were, he's run around in circles by Barbra Streisand in what is a classic goy-meets-girl story.
And yet … and yet … that face. Because he so often plays wryly contained and/or bankably beautiful, the rope he offers these actresses has been undervalued. He is the classic foil. Just think of the parting end shot in The Way We Were: Redford is looking at Streisand and, in that moment, he shows us that he thinks she is beautiful. And that's all we need to know. It's the power of the close-up, the grandest soul-window the movies ever gave us.
In a more recent film – 2013's out-to-sea All Is Lost – Redford had no other actors to play off, even if he wanted to, and virtually no dialogue. And he gives an Oscar-be-damned tour de force performance. As Owen Gleiberman mused in Entertaiment Weekly, "writer-director J.C. Chandor has conceived the movie to tap into the mythology of Robert Redford, into who he always was as a screen star. In this movie, he's portrayed, almost literally, as the last WASP, a golden old man stuck on a sailboat, isolated and self-sufficient, so much so that he is now cut off from civilization."
Whether it's triumphs such as The Sting, one of many movies Redford buddied up on with his comrade Paul Newman, or genre fare such as Up Close and Personal or The Horse Whisperer, it isn't the individual roles so much as it is the sum of his parts. "The mark of an old-fashioned movie star," as another Hollywood decoder, Anne Helen Petersen, put it, is that "you don't remember the plot as much as you remember the feel." It's where aura meets face.