Not counting The Avengers , where he played the villain in an almost unprecedented way, the last time we saw Robert Redford in action was in The Old Man and the Gun. David Lowery's 2018 film was not only a delicate, funny, and intelligent film, but also an admirable and very elegant farewell. The French way, no doubt. Sans adieu, as they say on the other side of the Pyrenees. Robert Redford, who announced he was leaving the cinema on August 6 of that same year, now says goodbye with all the consequences. He's leaving and letting his space be engraved in the retina .
The news states that he passed away at the age of 89 in his home in Utah, without any information about the cause of his death. The news says that he leaves with an Oscar for his work as a director in Ordinary People (not as an actor, a category in which he was nominated for The Sting ) and another honorary award for his entire career. But the news hardly does justice to the stature and commitment of the legend. The last approved image of a perfect Hollywood has passed away, perfect in the memory of any viewer, perfect in his sense of civic duty, of responsibility as an artist, of democracy itself.
The Old Man and the Gun,to start at the end, told the story of a bank robber already at the end of his tether. The film was based on the true story of one Forrest Tucker, an incorrigible man who, apparently, in 1981, at the ripe old age of 76, completed an endless series (close to 80) of small bank robberies. One after the other. Now retired from everything and with his life either resolved or about to be resolved without help, it was hard to come up with a reasonable motive for so much activity. He probably did it for the same reason Redford has been making films all this time: because neither of them knew how to do anything else. If we also take into account that the man, throughout his life as an outlaw, escaped from prison up to 18 times, there are few farewells as opportune for a filmmaker with a rare facility for escaping any definition. Just when we were all convinced he was the best and blondest actor of all time, it turns out he was a director with ten notable films, at least three of them memorable. And when the latter became clear with films like the aforementioned Ordinary People (1980), A River Runs Through It (1992), or Quiz Show (1994), it turns out he was also a cultural promoter, creator of the Sundance Film Festival and, by the way, the ethical and aesthetic conscience, through sheer handsomeness, of an entire country.
In truth, it's hard to pinpoint who Robert Redford was because there's no way to find a measuring stick. The closest thing to Robert Redford that life has ever given us, all of it, is Robert Redford himself. It seems obvious, but it isn't. Hollywood is full of charming guys on screen who, as soon as they show up at the first neighborhood meeting, refuse to pay the elevator appraisal. This is not the case with Redford. He, let's face it, is (or was) perfect. In and out of movie theaters. If in one of his first films he was capable of anything, even walking barefoot through the park in the middle of winter for his girlfriend (Jane Fonda), in one of his last, All Is Lost, he is left alone and adrift on a boat. And he is saved. He was always safe.
Committed to the cause
From The Pack (1966) to All the President's Men (1976) via Butcher Blockhead (1969), The Candidate (1972), Jeremiah Johnson (1972), The Way We Were (1973), The Sting (1973), The Great Gatsby (1974), Three Days of the Condor (1975), Brubaker (1980), Out of Africa (1985) or whatever films you're thinking of, he, besides being handsome, sensitive and a good person, is unfailingly a guy committed to the cause. To the democratic cause, of course. We won't say anything about his bangs, we'll get excited.
His full name at birth was Charles Robert Redford. He was born in 1936. He grew up in Los Angeles and showed promise from the very beginning. After being expelled from the University of Colorado, he studied acting at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. His physique and his charisma at first glance made him stand out from the early 60s and he was even nominated for an Emmy for best supporting actor in 1962 for his role in The Voice of Charlie Pont. Shortly after, he landed the lead role in Neil Simon's Broadway production and later made the film Barefoot in the Park. In 1965, he made his big film debut in The Rebel, by Robert Mulligan, alongside Natalie Wood.
And here's an aside. Not so long ago, in Venice, Redford and Jane Fonda reunited . The two, old against the evidence of old age, appeared together because of the film Our Souls at Night (2017). A lifetime had passed since they worked together for the first time in The Pack in 1966. A year later they would do it again, this time in love with love, in the aforementioned Barefoot in the Park and there was no remedy. Half a century since then, they walked hand in hand again to each receive an Honorary Lion and, while they were at it, present their fourth film side by side. In the middle is The Electric Horseman , signed by Sydney Pollack in 1979.
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What followed his meteoric rise to fame put him in the exact same place he never moved from. Opposite Paul Newman in George Roy Hill's Butcher and the Sundance Kid (1969), the image of the angelic blond, half-cheater, half-hopeless con man, but always morally impeccable, reserved him a place of honor at the box office in the 1970s, where he reigned without a shadow of a doubt, without competition, always perfect. Redford starred in Fugitive Valley, the first directorial credit in over 20 years for former blacklister Abraham Polonsky. That gesture defined him and much of the career that followed. The two-paragraph movie list above from The Candidate (1972) or The Descent of Death to Brubaker (1980) opens and closes a decade close to the miracle.
The reinvention of the myth as a director
What came next was the reinvention of the myth as a director. Ordinary People (1981), an adaptation of the novel by Judith Guest, earned him four Oscars. Among them were Best Director and Best Film, but not, as has already been said, Best Actor. The following two decades, the 80s and 90s, served to consolidate the great figure forged in the turbulent 70s. Perhaps more conservative in terms of his choices of characters, his roles in The Best (1984) or alongside Meryl Streep in Out of Africa (1985), always supported by his favorite director Sydney Pollack, definitely made him a piece of, precisely, everyone's memory.
Meanwhile, he continued directing, and films like A Place Called Miracle (1988) and A River Runs Through It (1992) made him an atypical filmmaker in search of perhaps the humanism hidden in the deepest, most rural part of the United States, which had nothing to do with the Bonfire of the Vanities stirred up by the Reaganite conservatism of the time. Quiz Show (1994) and The Horse Whisperer (1998) somehow insisted on the same idea of an immaculate principle of honesty behind the noise of evident triumph.
It was then that he created the Sundance Film Festival, not in a big city but in the heart of the Rocky Mountains. The festival soon became a showcase for a different way of understanding the industry and Hollywood. Figures like Steven Soderbergh, Quentin Tarantino, Robert Rodriguez, and Kevin Smith sparked a new revolution that, in their own way and despite the differences, carried on the legacy of the creators who gave rise to New Hollywood decades earlier. And that legacy remains, inextricably linked to his figure.
At the turn of the new millennium, the Redford who emerges halfway between the legendary actor, the prestigious director and the liberal patron, is a committed individual who is not afraid to enter into political debate just as his old films did alongside directors like Pollack or Alan J. Pakula. Spy Game (2001), about the CIA and its dealings, Lions for Lambs (2007) about the Afghan war, the mediocre thriller The Pact of Silence (2012) or the tremendous and superb survival metaphor All Is Lost (2013) are all undoubtedly ideological efforts to maintain a way of understanding cinema, politics and life itself. And then there is his somewhat incomprehensible foray into the Marvel world.
There's an almost miraculous moment in The Old Man and the Gun. The film gives us a scene from The Hunted Man, by Arthur Penn, with Redford himself transformed into himself and into a myth of himself. Yes, he wants the director and the actor himself to be aware that the character is the actor. And vice versa. But he also wants the viewer to identify not so much with Redford or with his character, the outlaw and always on the run Tucker, but with themselves, with the wounds of their own gaze. He wants each of us not only to see the film but to see ourselves in the cinema in the company of the best-coiffed fringe in history. Of course, an outlaw and an actor are one and the same.
